Why a mile time trial, when races are 3.1 miles?

the coaches can extrapolate you can't

Is it like a 3 x one mile time trial with a short rest?

If you're talking HS they race so much that the coach probably doesn't want to put yet another full load on the athlete's already full plate, but they want data to make decisions on who's on varsity/travel team etc...

It’s not always about figure 5k estimated time but finding out training times. Some coaches use a mile time trial to estimate vVo2max, aerobic threshold, and lactate threshold training pace for the beginning of the season

This just in, guys that can run a good mile can also run a pretty good 5k.

All of the above posters are correct. The time trial obviously isn't locking the top 7 down for the year anyway so why get so offended by it? The best 5 or so will be in the top 7 time trial for a high school team. You may have a guy or 2 on the fringe run a better or worse mile but they aren't scoring anyway.

You can recover from a 1-mile time trial a lot faster than from a 5K.

If you are familiar with high school athletes, a 16ish y.o. can fake their way to a fast mile on a track. An 800 runner can also bust out a pretty nice mile time, but it certainly doesn't equate to a tough 5K cross course. Personally, I DO NOT think its a good predictor of where kids should be placed on a cross country team and can discourage, as well. Wouldn't getting a VO2 max be better running an 800, rather than a mile? Yep!

Common sense guy wrote:

If you are familiar with high school athletes, a 16ish y.o. can fake their way to a fast mile on a track. An 800 runner can also bust out a pretty nice mile time, but it certainly doesn't equate to a tough 5K cross course. Personally, I DO NOT think its a good predictor of where kids should be placed on a cross country team and can discourage, as well. Wouldn't getting a VO2 max be better running an 800, rather than a mile? Yep!

Many of the great HS programs prided themselves on their preseason 2 mile run which as you wrote is a great V02 max indicator than the mile or 800. Unfortunately the average American kid going out for XC wouldn't be able to run 2 miles. As others stated the mile still allows you to get enough data to set up a program.

2k - 3k is a better overall idea. As above posters stated, 1600 too easy to fake and too many 5ks on the schedule already.

A 2k TT is a great idea. Have everyone go thru 1600 at 5:00 then let them loose.

As a coachfor many years, I have had my athletes (HS/MS) do a mile time trial to start XC “camp”. It really is to find out what kind of shape they’re in, and figure out what paces they should be running. Ideally you would want to do a VO2 max run ...run as far as you can in 10 min and then plug the numbers into an equation. But the catch with HS/ MS in my experience, is that anything over a mile and most will just half-a$$ it and you are left with no useable data.

Unless you are talking about a well trained team (in August), the results of the mile TT will correlate pretty well to 5K fitness for HSers. While it could affect the varsity lineup by a spot or two, wouldn't the top JV runners have chances to rotate into the varsity 7 after subsequent races?

Keep working hard - it's better to be fit in October than August!

OP is a former D3, 15 minute guy who doesn’t understand that you should only race every other week. We held our 1600 time trial last week with about 30 returners and 10 freshmen. The top 10 finished in the identical order where they finished xc last year. Our first freshman was 11th. Wanting the guys to race this early in the season like the OP is suggesting would be demoralizing for the team because they would be a minute slower than where they left off. We have the guys do 5 miles befor the 1600 so that we can rationalize the slower 1600 times.

I have a similar approach. My team camp is the third week of July. We end camp with a mile road race. Three weeks later I have another mile TT on the track. Two weeks after that we do a two mile TT on our CC course to determine the lineup for our first meet.

This is all to gather training and fitness data so I can help them with tempo and racing paces. These are the only early season racing we do. Everything else is tempo or long runs.

Lydiard recommended time trials above and below your race distance.

hart crane wrote:

2k - 3k is a better overall idea. As above posters stated, 1600 too easy to fake and too many 5ks on the schedule already.

A 2k TT is a great idea. Have everyone go thru 1600 at 5:00 then let them loose.

Yeah, I remember when I faked a sub 4 so that I could make the XC team...

For my newbies first week of practice last week, we did a 400 tt on Monday. A 1200 on Wednesday and a 20 min moderate effort run on Friday where we recorded the distance completed.

All of those efforts were so that we could place kids in the appropriate training groups. Kids with good speed but poor endurance might get moved into a higher group when we do rep work and kids who were slow at 400 but had natural grinding ability might get moved up a group for tempo intervals, etc.

hart crane wrote:

A 2k TT is a great idea. Have everyone go thru 1600 at 5:00 then let them loose.

Yeah, because a 400m time trial is better than a one mile lol

Sand Dunes wrote:

Is it like a 3 x one mile time trial with a short rest?

That would be better, training not straining. not testing before training.

There is zero reason to have young runners do tests at the beginning of seasons.

Much better is to get into training. A regular session of 4x 1200 with 2' rests would be good.