When I was in high school, my coach despised fast courses. I remember him always looking at results after races that were known to be fast, and discounting all of the runners who had just earned their new personal best by 20 seconds in a 5k. We did, later on in the season, do a few faster courses, like Portage Invite (I'm from Michigan) which was fast mostly because of the impressive competition and not the course, per se, but we never ran fast courses early season. I guess he had a pretty good point too. If you run fast courses early on in the season you may just be lying to yourself about how fast you are (and have a shock at championship meets) or you also may set a PR that you'll never be able to attain again all season, which would kind of be depressing mentally. What do you guys think? Was it wise for him to stay away from notoriously fast courses but miss a little bit of some big competition (a lot of the fast courses usually had pretty big fields too) early in the season? Or is it more important to have a feel for what those big meets feel like before they become more important later on?