BMeylan wrote:
high school xc coach wrote:
Bill, if you see this, just out of curiosity, at this year's mcquaid, did you score all the times basically as a merged race, or did you look at the individual races and find differences from one race to another.
Just asking, because being there, there was stark contrast in the weather from the fully sunny morning to the fully overcast afternoon. Maybe this would or would not make much of a difference. There is a decent amount of shade there.
didn't see the later groups of races, so not sure what the weather looked like for the largest schools.
All races at McQuaid were speed rated with the same adjustment (meaning merged) ... I do that whenever possible, which is nearly always .. on rare occasions it is necessary. Several coaches emailed me from the McQuaid course telling me of a difference in conditions (including the Tully girl's coach) ... So I looked for a significant difference in speed throughout the day, and there wasn't any! ... all races rated out pretty much as expected.
When a meet has multiple varsity races, some races can go a bit faster or slower than others based simply on the pacing of the race and it can show at the top end (which is where most people look) ... this is where I focus on the mid-level runners to see how fast they ran relative to everybody else ... it's done by looking at time differences between individual runners on the current day and other days where I have acceptable speed rated data ... and sometimes you discover that the mid-level runners closed the gap on the top runners.
When I speed rate many out-of-State races, I'm focusing solely on specific races with the top teams and individuals ... the rating adjustment is based on those races only.
Concerning split times in 5K races ... First you need to know if it was really a 5K race measured at a minimum with a calibrated wheel and the course was measured by measuring the shortest possible running distance. I don't include distance in any speed calculations because "5K" and "3-Mile" posted distances vary a lot. The Belmont Plateau XC course in PA (used for the Briarwood Invite) was officially measured and certified by the USATF in 2013 (and the certified course was found to be 150 meters longer than the previous 5K course) ... The NFHS changed the measuring rule for high school courses to be cutting the tangents (aka USATF style) I believe in 2012 ... courses that were previous measured as "5K" by prior guideline (mid course or mid-position of a group of runners) suddenly became shorter than 5K, but how many were adjusted??
Foot Locker told me their courses have always been measured via cutting the tangents, after they yelled at me for spelling Foot Locker as Footlocker.
Thanks for the response. I thought all the races looked slow except for the boys seeded AA, and in that I thought most of the top looked slightly fast, except for Lawler who I would have expected to be at least 15 seconds faster, compared to the other runners. I didn't look beyond maybe a half dozen names of interest though.