It seemed like optimal conditions:
cool, relatively flat, great competition etc.
but not a single competitor (160) ran a seasonal best despite being in the best shape of their season.
Was the course long?
It seemed like optimal conditions:
cool, relatively flat, great competition etc.
but not a single competitor (160) ran a seasonal best despite being in the best shape of their season.
Was the course long?
Who cares? PRs in cross country are immensely overvalued unless it's course specific. It's all about who you beat and by how much.
BTW congrats to all who qualified and competed today!
pretty cool, low 40s at best. Lots of turns in this course too.
Course was longer than the usual 4,387m length, supposed to be 5k. I don't think many see it as a chance to PR and very few take it as a serious race, more of just a fun time and great opportunity. The old course had quite a few turms and a bit of up and downs, so it is probably similar in that regard.
The course itself is slow. Believe me, i run it almost daily. Soft wood chip trails. Good for recovery runs, bad for fast times.
There is construction all over campus so they had to alter the course this year. As others said, it's usually pretty slow, and many athletes are either training through as they get ready for NXN or FL or haven't trained enough since they qualified at State several weeks ago. It usually ends up being a fun, post season junket rather than a championship vibe.
Borderclash is a joke. Its just a chance for Nike to build some hype before NXN in a few weeks. It wasn't even livestreamed this year (probably due to the lack of actual talent). Last year the race was actually fun and there was even some drama involved (Dressel being a douche as usual). The race is more like a "post season fun run" for those who did well during their actual season.
Not gonna lie though, I got a little hard when I saw the singlets...
Kahuna wrote:
The course itself is slow. Believe me, i run it almost daily. Soft wood chip trails. Good for recovery runs, bad for fast times.
This. And it isn't just an inch or two of wood chips over hard ground. It is about 6 inches deep or more. Very slow.
Fast course it is Nike and Nike makes fast spikes
I know this is a little after the fact, but I ran there and the slow times can probably be attributed to the surface, as others mentioned, and a considerable amount of frost on the course. Everyone was wearing flats or spikes with blanks in due to significant stretches of concrete/asphalt on. I felt a pretty big lack of traction on the uphills, which slowed things down. Most of the people I talked to took the race seriously except for one dude who got the flu (he just got in the lead at the start for the cameras). One girl from my conference matched her season's best but I heard she had problems with anemia up until the race.
Also a few of the front runners didn't go too hard and just tried to get top 10 for one of those headless trophies.