Should there be a distance race in high school track?

Championship meets and big invitationals do have the 5000. Look at Texas Relays and New Balance Nationals.

Atavist wrote:

Championship meets and big invitationals do have the 5000. Look at Texas Relays and New Balance Nationals.

I meant championship races within the high school system, like districts and states. Actual scored meets.

Do you think the guy that wins the 3200m wouldn't also win the 5000m?

Queen4DaDey wrote:

Do you think the guy that wins the 3200m wouldn't also win the 5000m?

In a lot of cases, no. Every year there are kids who crush it in XC, but don't have the same success in the 3200/3k. That extra 1.1 miles makes a big difference.

distance race wrote:

Atavist wrote:

Championship meets and big invitationals do have the 5000. Look at Texas Relays and New Balance Nationals.

I meant championship races within the high school system, like districts and states. Actual scored meets.

If I was a high school coach hoping my team would do well at a district or state meet I wouldn't want my distance runners needing to score at a distance they hadn't run previously.

HRE wrote:

distance race wrote:

I meant championship races within the high school system, like districts and states. Actual scored meets.

If I was a high school coach hoping my team would do well at a district or state meet I wouldn't want my distance runners needing to score at a distance they hadn't run previously.

You don't think that in-season invitationals would run the 5000m if it was added to the state championship?

I suspect this would also reduce the ability of some athletes who double off of the 3200 to double off of the 5000.

u blade brah wrote:

Queen4DaDey wrote:

Do you think the guy that wins the 3200m wouldn't also win the 5000m?

In a lot of cases, no. Every year there are kids who crush it in XC, but don't have the same success in the 3200/3k. That extra 1.1 miles makes a big difference.

Are those winners from xc owed the opportunity to run the same distance so that they can win? I like that high school track forces the distance guys to work a bit on speed for the spring.

Then when they get to college, they can really specialize. High school is too soon to get overly specialized.

Atavist wrote:

Championship meets and big invitationals do have the 5000. Look at Texas Relays and New Balance Nationals.

so do you think the kids run the 5000 at texas relays?

2 miles is a distance race. Especially for high schoolers.

u blade brah wrote:

Queen4DaDey wrote:

Do you think the guy that wins the 3200m wouldn't also win the 5000m?

In a lot of cases, no. Every year there are kids who crush it in XC, but don't have the same success in the 3200/3k. That extra 1.1 miles makes a big difference.

I'd wager the surface makes more difference. If you compared a 3200m track race, 5000m track race, and 3200m xc race, I bet the results would be more similar between the two track races than they would be between the two 3200m races.

I agree. I think the 3200 should be eliminated and replaced with the 5000. 3200 is basically a throw away distance in HS. A few kids can double, but most will favor the 1500. If you have a 5000, you will get a larger group of middle distance kids running because it is very difficult to double a 5000/1500. The 5000 will attract a dedicated group of runners and actually expand the number of kids who run middle distance at HS track meets. Plus, it is good prep for college.

Having a bunch of 5000s would really increase the burnout rate of high school runners. My high school would run one track 5k track race in early March. It was good because nobody was fit yet anyways so it was more like a hard tempo/lactic threshold run.

But could you imagine running 5+ all out 5000s in consecutive weeks during Championship season. At least in SoCal you would have to run it at league, then CIF prelims, then CIF finals, then Masters, then the state meet. That would crush and possibly injure even the best high school runners.

If you have a 5k those kids are not going to double, so you have a 1 event athlete. You could end up with a stable of 1 event 5kers.

We already have that, it's called XC and there is an entire season dedicated to it.

sbeefyk1 wrote:

But could you imagine running 5+ all out 5000s in consecutive weeks during Championship season. At least in SoCal you would have to run it at league, then CIF prelims, then CIF finals, then Masters, then the state meet. That would crush and possibly injure even the best high school runners.

How would that be any different than xc? They don't get "crushed and injured" running 5ks every week during the fall, so why would they in the spring?

There was one invitational that had the 5000 instead of a 3000/3200/2-mile race when I was in HS. It kind of sucked, actually.

I was a distance runner so the 3200 was my best track race. Maybe I would have been better in the 5000, but I ran it so infrequently - just the once in HS - that I had so idea how to pace myself or what time to aim for. This was back in the 80s, when you couldn't just look up everything you needed online, and I didn't get any advice on my coach beforehand.

If you ran it every other weeks, maybe it would be OK. But switching out the distance from 3200 to 5000 for one race does not result in exciting races, but in a slow, boring, weird race that everyone wishes would be over soon.

distance race wrote:

HRE wrote:

If I was a high school coach hoping my team would do well at a district or state meet I wouldn't want my distance runners needing to score at a distance they hadn't run previously.

You don't think that in-season invitationals would run the 5000m if it was added to the state championship?

I think they probably would add a 5,000 but I don't think it would matter much. at least based on the schedules the high schools I'm familiar with are like. There aren't very many invitationals and there are lots of dual and tri meets so most meets you'd run would have a 2 mile or 3200.

I suppose you could do something with the 2 mile/3200/5,000 like colleges do with the 5,000/10,000 where they run the 5,000 at most meets but have 1 or 2 meets on the schedule with a 10,000. You'd continue having a 2/3200, then have a big meet or three with a 2/3200 and 5,000 and also have the 2/3200 and 5,000 at your state or district meet. But I think you'd get a lot of push back from coaches whose teams score heavily with sprints and field events for adding another scoring opportunity in an event that favors schools with strong distance teams.

When I was coaching high school in the early 2000's I always wished that at the District and State Championship there was a semi- final and then a final the next day for the 3200 and the 1600.

I felt that having to run a semi and a final would force the training to be more aerobic and strength based rather than the intense repetitions that predominated high school training.

I think it would be better training for the long term into college and beyond to train more aerobic and less anaerobic at that age.

I think it should be added without taking anything out. The way it is now, scoring is much easier for sprint powerhouses than it is for distance. For sprints, you've got 100m, 200m, 400m, 4x100m, SMR, and in many cases, sprinters are also be pretty good at long jump. That's a lot of points. For distance, we've got 800m, 1600m, and 3200m. That's not even close to as many points as sprinters can get. For a team to win state, they don't even have to have a distance team if they can have four or five good sprinters. Having the 5000m in there would even it out quite a bit more.