Ritz: 76 races in a year!

Eh,

76 seems like a high number and probably is.

But I actually just counted 75 for a girl we coached last year(also in Michigan).

We have many fewer XC and Outdoor meets compared to other schools in the State. We do indoor meets but again other do more.

Her number gets high as a fair amount of our track meets she was in 3-4 events. But like others have said sometimes those are workouts or off distances. For example she was a 400-3200 athlete. A 4 event day where we needed her to win 4 events but focus on speed could be 400, 200, 800, 4x4. She even did the 100 once. Hers probably gets high also because she continues to do 4 events at the regional and state meet as well. Maybe it's too much but I don't think so.

My senior year - 17 XC, 28 Indoors, 39 Outdoors = 74 races. I also could high jump over 6' and score points there , so there were 18 HJ competitions that probably would have been 2 mile relays otherwise. 15 of the indoor/outdoor races were mile relay anchor legs which weren't much stress.

But still, we raced too much and were burned out at the end of most seasons. Years later, when our coach figured that out, he won a XC state championship and nearly broke a national relay record.

memoize wrote:

Has to be something like:

Michigan HS XC season:

- 12 meets in 12 weeks

He would have done more in the Michigan XC season, even if many of them were not high effort. Most leagues did not have jamborees then, so there were 6-9 dual or tri meets, along with the high school invites. I ran 17-18 races freshman-sophomore year in a similar format on the other side of the state, with only 6-7 dual league meets. In fact, I started coaching my alma-mater 10 years after the fact, and despite the league now being in a 3 -meet jamboree format, I had to back out of some meets the prior coach had been doing because state participants were still running 15 in the season.

you can do anything you want if you adapt and recover.

so if you do a race like 6 k cross country, and you're a lot better than the rest, and you just run with the leaders and waist them in the last 1/2 mile, that is more like a training thing, and the effect is like a good workout.

but going to exhaustion, multile times in a short period of time is the forjula for disaster.

99% of the time

I assume that 76 figure includes a lot of dual meets where Ritz was running well below maximal effort. For a guy in 13:40 5k shape, doing a 3200, 1600, 800 triple in 9:30, 4:25, 2:00 with full rest in between is barely even a workout...

When I responded I wasn’t trying to poke at you because you are bad or something like that, I legitimately thought you were lying to make Ritzenheins stat sound even crazier. Honestly I find 6 races in one year just as, if not more shocking than 76.

I get your point, but some people including me, are not capable of a very heavy racing schedule unless most are just workouts in actuality. That may have been Ritz's situation at the time, as posters have pointed out. As I mentioned, once I thought about it a bit, I don't think I even did 6. I'll probably do 3 this year but could end up with 1 more. Anyway, although I do not 'compare myself to' him in any sense, Kipchoge is the poster child for the exact opposite. He ran 1 race last year and 2 the year before. None yet this year. Of course he is an all-time great and I am not. Still, it shows the dissimilarity between 2 guys who are hard not to admire even if you tend to root for their competitors. Coming from an approach more similar to Kipchoge than Ritz, perhaps one can understand why I might have spit out any liquid in my mouth when I heard the 76 number.

In the 90s and early 00s teams were generally smaller and not nearly as deep. There were a lot more small midweek invites. My senior Xc season had 15 races from a quad the last weekend in august to State the first weekend in November. I ran 5 Xc races in 14 days over two different stretches of the season. ( That was too much. Not because it was too many races, but because it wasn’t enough training)

Good distance runners generally doubled as a rule and often tripled in track. Michigan has a lot of indoor races, so yeah 70 plus races over xc, indoor, and outdoor was definitely possible for ritz who ran footlocker xc, junior worlds Xc, and post season elite track races outside the normal prep schedule.

I'm pretty sure that we would have approximately 7-8 xc meets, most weeks during the season, and I can't remember having both a dual meet and a weekend invitational. We did few of the latter, maybe one, plus leagues and didn't quite qualify for North Coast Section. There was no winter track, only a running club. Outdoor track would have a couple time trials in February and one or two invitationals, plus maybe 6-7 conference dual meets and league champs. I would double in most, if not all, the track meets, mile or 1600 and two mile or 3200. That adds up to around 28 school races a year, add a handful of road races over the year for 33. That was typical in California for runners of my level.

Seems doable. I’ve never counted, but I’ve estimated that I ran more than 50 races my senior year. PRs across the board. Would do it again, if I could. Probably the best 12 months of my life. It also taught me how to race.

Cross Country, 9 League races, 3 invitationals, Class, Eastern, All State- 15

Indoor- 2 races per meet- 9 League, 4 or 5 invitationals, Class, Eastern, All State- 25

Outdoor- Same- 25

Summer- a few 5Ks, 2 or 3 5 Mile races, 2 or 3 track races- 10

That's 75 for me and I wouldn't have gone to Regionals or Nationals like Ritz. Easy doable

I had a teammate on my college team that ran more races his senior year of HS (25) than his entire college career (24 in 4 years)...

If you race 2x a week in HS XC, which is still quite common, you'll hit 75 easy... assuming you make post-season meets and count each event at a track meet separate.

So although I agree with OP that this is a lot, it is quite reasonable to say he was above 70 official races.

This is what we did in high school

XC - 2 races per week. 1 weekday dual meet and 1 weekend invitational

Indoor - 1 race per weekend. Sometimes 2. Due to entry limitations each athlete could only enter one event. Exception being the larger meets at the end of the year.

Outdoor - 6-7 races per week. 4 in the weekday dual meet and 2-3 in the weekend invitational

I don't remember how long our seasons lasted so it is difficult to tally an annual total.

Anything over 75 races is insane. Anything under 7 races is far too little. The best range is 7 to 75 races per year.

info wrote:

Anything over 75 races is insane. Anything under 7 races is far too little. The best range is 7 to 75 races per year.

I'm thinking back to my Senior year. It went from early September to mid January. (That may seem like a strange time for it to end, but I wasn't making the rules, you know.) I can remember one pretty well and it seems it was that year. Not all of them stick in your mind, right? I'd guess I did 3. I suppose the above post was supposed to be a joke, but I'm pretty sure that even with 40 year old memories being what they are I didn't get 7!

Followed by an injury filled and inconsistent pro career…. Surprise surprise surprise

with American Records, World Medals, and Olympic Finals. Surprise, surprise.

Gomer P wrote:

Followed by an injury filled and inconsistent pro career…. Surprise surprise surprise

Sounds high, but I doubt he's making it up.

In Iowa, most teams have about 10 cross country meets, if you count state. If you add in Footlocker regionals and nationals, that's 12. He also ran US Junior Nationals and Junior World cross. There's 14.

In Iowa, most teams run maybe fourish indoor meets. Let's say he triples at each of those. That's 26.

Outdoors, most teams are going to have about ten meets. Let's say he triples at those. That's 56.

The state meet in Iowa allows an individual to do four races. That's 60.

If he runs the high school nationals and doubles, that's 62.

US Junior Nationals is another race or two races. That's 64.

Any meet that Junior Nationals qualifies for would be another two races. That's 66.

If his school had a few additional meets, and he runs for time at some national invite, like Arcadia, that'd get to about 76.

Way too much racing, but believable.

I've probably had a kid do 70 to 80+.

broken down like this:

outdoor track:

6 dual meets x 4 events per = 24. The only race done at maximal effort would be a 4x4 and perhaps an open 400

5 invites x 2.5 events = 12.

League, sectional, states = 8

Total : 44 races

Cross: 15 races, including triangular meets run at less than tempo effort.

Indoor: 10 meets x 2.5 events per: 25 races. Usually one distance race to focus on, with one or two relays to cap it off.

that makes 84.

A non elite runner wouldn't do this. You are not running 4 races at a dual if everything you do has to be maximum effort. But those mid range guys are still probably doing 60-65 races on a schedule like this