Aisling Cuffe Hurt again, Elise Cranny hurt again, wtf is Stanford doing???

Jabe

I think the same thing happens at Duke. Academic pressure, pretty good year round weather and type A personalities, especially, in the longer distance specialists.

Also, I actually saw Aisling Cuffe running at a good clip a few days ago. She may not be racing but she does seem to be able to run.

The Stanford campus and surrounding area has miles of dirt trails and even a wood chip loop as well as soccer-rugby-lacrosse-baseball-football fields galore.....and yet I see the runners on the roads which makes no sense at all. Not sure if this is one of the contributing factors but there is zero reason to run on the roads unless you are training for a marathon.

insider info wrote:

I'm acquainted with a number of runners who used to be on the Stanford team. For a lot of the people who quit, coaching has been the biggest factor - there were problems with the coach/athlete student dynamic that is what eventually has led to a lot of them quitting the team.

It's well known inside and outside of those circles that the former athletes suffered from what is technically known as "being giant pu$$ies" who didn't adapt between Dunn & Miltenberg's no BS, intense peddle to the metal approach. Some kids can't handle that.

They probably don't get much sleep due to the academic demands, social life, running, and whatever else.

intense peddle to the metal approach. Some kids can't handle that.[/quote]

Definitely not a Stanford grad. Probably rojo.

Petal to the meddle?

duke women wrote:

I think the same thing happens at Duke. Academic pressure, pretty good year round weather and type A personalities, especially, in the longer distance specialists.

Probably true. What might be a more interesting comparison is to other sports, though. Stanford does well in a whole bunch of sports. Do they have similar problems? The football team seems to be doing all right, and I don't believe they're getting better recruits than Alabama/Ohio State/whomever. But I could very well believe that they might recruit far and away better than anyone else at sports like tennis, or water polo, or whatever, and might have the same meat grinder thing going on.

(This also raises the related question of exactly how many admissions spots at a top-of-the-line academic university are going to people who are pretty good students and outstanding athletes, rather than outstanding students... the undergraduate population isn't all that big...)

Also, trust me on this - it's definitely possible to coast at Stanford if you so desire. I imagine people generally don't so desire (they want good grades, for which you may actually have to work sometimes).

Wonderlandlake wrote:

...was not what I should of done...I should of just ran by myself...

The expression you want is "should have" or the contraction "should've"

I'm an alum from the Brooks Johnson days (and am therefore old). Though I appreciate your comments as a whole, I'm always mystified by any suggestion that the xc/track program would have some universal issue regardless of the coach. It's all about the coach. No one complained about Stanford underachieving or having injury issues when Lananna was there. There were tons of injuries when Brooks was coach because Brooks was incompetent as a distance coach. It only took Lananna a few years to become a national powerhouse after something like 15 years of Brooks' disasters. (Yes, I know he had some good women's teams earlier on and seem good individuals).I'm not particularly well-connected to the current program, but I've heard some grumbling about Milt. From a distance, though, nothing that seems too troubling or is new to LRC: he's intense, mainly looks after those that are running well (where isn't that true?), etc. I certainly haven't heard anything that would make me avoid Stanford if I were making a decision now. Quite the opposite: it seems like he has put the program back in the national championship picture where it should be after some down years (by Stanford distance standards) with a surprising amount of coaching turnover.To respond to some of the other comments, there might be something to the great weather making it easier to hammer all year long. But that's still a coaching issue. And with all that said, I'm not convinced that Stanford is having injury issues any more than any other top programs. Wetmore's teams seem to deal with just as many injuries. I think it's the nature of the sport and of driven athletes.

TrackCoach wrote:

Stanford has a history of injuries that go back to Brooks Johnson. Two problems, great training weather all year round, you don't have periods where you miss or scale back training because of weather, which can sometimes be a good thing. In track & field, it is better to be 10% undertrained than 1% overtrained. Stanford competes for conference and national titles in all three seasons, you are expected to compete at high level all year round.

Also, the school and the Palo Alto area has a lot to offer in terms of a social life, recreation and culture. Combine that with the academic workload, Stanford does not have any weak majors, even a secondary education teaching degree is challenging. This causes some athletes to rush workouts, rush recovery and is not a good fit for the moderately talented, too much type A personality or injury prone athlete.

Alright alright...hastily posted that "peddle" from my smartphone & didn't proof read. I sound like a dumba$$..."haha." Back to the topic...so which of the women from the class of 2016 are going to "make it?" I'm calling Aragon & Donaghu...Fiona will be injured within the year running herself into the ground trying to compete with the rest on the team and never heard from again and DeBalsi is just going get by as a XC depth girl until she gets tired of it if she's not already toast by the time she gets there. Donaghu seems as though she has more upside and strikes me as more athletic and durable...and Aragon is just an athletic beast with great genes & has actually spent much of her athletic development on pursuits other than running. Don't know much about Walker but seems like she'll get chewed up and left behind by the other studs on the squad. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Also, good point Farm Alum...as strongly as Vin is disliked by most who come across him...he did demonstrate that "it can be done at Stanford."

For very obvious reasons, you can't compare a team sport to running.

TrackCoach wrote:

For very obvious reasons, you can't compare a team sport to running.

What obvious reasons are those?

"Maybe if these athletes actually did some frequent race efforts they wouldn't smash themselves into the ground in training."

POD?

broken arrow wrote:

The Stanford campus and surrounding area has miles of dirt trails and even a wood chip loop as well as soccer-rugby-lacrosse-baseball-football fields galore.....and yet I see the runners on the roads which makes no sense at all. Not sure if this is one of the contributing factors but there is zero reason to run on the roads unless you are training for a marathon.

Agreed! I have spent about 100 nights over the past 3 years at the Sheraton across from Stanford's campus. I could leave the hotel, cross El Camino and 80%+ of a run (4-6 miles) on soft surface around campus.

[quote]Farm Alum... wrote:

"No one complained about Stanford underachieving or having injury issues when Lananna was there."

Huh?

As HAL said in 2001, "Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it."

Maybe you weren't reading the Dyestat.com or RunGroteSchief.com message boards back in those days.

Vin was getting hammered nearly every day for his xc teams underachieving whenever they didn't win, much less make the podium.

Especially regarding the women.

There were always injuries & gals quitting the sport. Nothing has changed in that regard.

Suggest you do a search for Julie Stamps, arguably the greatest hs distance gal of her era and likely Vin's most heralded female distance recruit while at Stanford. Read up on all the problems she had.

This difference today is that the Stanford women's xc teams have been coming in 14th and not reaching the podium as regularly as they were with Vin. And, they certainly have been no where near as good as the Ari Lambie-led teams coached by Peter Tegan a decade back which won NCAA xc champions all 4 years Lambie was running.

Miltenberg's "petal to the medal" (hah!) all-in approach did cause a huge roster turnover throughout his first 3 years at Stanford. Something like 25% t&f roster turnover a couple years back which included all events, not just women distance runners.

His Jim Harbaugh-like approach -- you better value your athletics just as highly as your academics . . . and, show an enthusiasm for your event unequaled in human experience -- did cause many high-profile athletes to move on. Amy Weissenbach & Cayla Hatton come to mind.

However, Miltenberg's now well into his 4th year at Stanford. Everyone is now aware of his MO. Recruits know what they're getting into.

There have been no defections from the team this year. Indeed, Amy's hs teammate Cami Chapus, who dropped off when Amy did, has returned along with 5th-year seniors Cuffe, the Rosas, McNamara, and Leibold who could have chosen not to use their redshirt eligibility and quit the sport or possibly turn professional.

In short, everything has changed since the Floreal/Dunn coaching era. Miltenberg & his staff are now recruiting as well or better than Vin ever did, and over all t&f events (e.g., Harrison Williams, Olivia Baker, Duvio brothers, Valerie Allman, Claudia Saunders). Miltenberg, at this juncture, appears to have put in place a coaching staff that's 2nd to none.

So, ample response to the OP's original question, "wtf is Stanford doing??"

There is also a 1K loop on very nice grass over by the hospital facility on campus, the grass is so good you can run barefoot with no problems.

Is that by Welch Rd?