Slowazz wrote:
I'm with the old timer. I don't care if you're 70, 60, or 20. 8 min/mile for any college male runner is ridiculously slow, and I don't care about hills, wind, or mud.
I don't disagree with you that 40:00 for 8k is super slow for a college runner. But sometimes there is a circumstance that is in the team's best interest to have that student-athlete on the team. An example from a team I coached maybe 8-9 years ago... This high school senior emailed me to say he was slow but he loved running and wanted to try out if he came to our school. I look him up and he's a 25-26 minute 5k XC kid. So I write back and tell him about our track club and basically try to steer him away from our XC program. We're not a great team, but that year was looking to be one of the better ones, with some solid runners coming back and a couple decent recruits-and I did have 2 open roster spots available. Over the summer his high school coach emails me and gives me some background info, then the kid shows up in my office during orientation (he wasn't invited to preseason).
Turns out the main reason he's slow is he had an issue at birth that caused one of his legs to only bend about 45° at the knee. He says, give me a chance I probably won't beat anybody but I'll outwork everybody and I won't stop trying to get better. So I mull it over overnight and decide maybe there's a reason why this guy is at my door that I need to see through. The next day I tell him we'll give it a 2 week trial and see how it goes and reevaluate after that.
In that 2 weeks he busts his butt everyday. It's not pretty, he's 1-2 minutes/mile behind our 2nd slowest runner in training. We have a race, he goes about 44 minutes, something like that. But he's fitting in and the rest of the team has their eyes opened about hard work on a daily basis. I think some of the guys reevaluated what hard work is in this sport after seeing what he went through on a daily basis just to make it through our training.
Fast forward 3 years, he's a senior and a 4-year team member. Zero quit in this kid. I think he got his 8k pr down to about 38 minutes and beat a couple runners along the way. Team Captain that year. Outside the team he's a close to 4.0 triple major and active on campus. Fast forward another few years he's a med school graduate, still running.
Most programs wouldn't have room for a kid like this. I'm glad ours did.