Was the Course at the RunningLane Cross Country Championships Short? Well…
By Jonathan Gault
December 13, 2021
Admit it, the thought crossed your mind as well. You saw the results from the Garmin RunningLane Cross Country Championships on December 4 — four high school boys under 14:10, 73 under 15:00, 20 girls under 17:00 — and wondered, Is that thing really a full 5,000 meters?
You wouldn’t be alone. Before RunningLane, no US high school boy had ever run under 14:10 on a 5,000m cross country course (Dathan Ritzenhein‘s 14:10.4 at the 2000 Michigan state meet was the fastest known performance). As I type this article, the LetsRun messageboard thread debating the length of the John Hunt Park course in Huntsville, Ala., used to stage the meet is at 645 posts and counting.
“Whenever something fast happens, speculation abounds that it’s short,” says a former local high school coach that has helped stage races on the John Hunt Park course, including this year’s RunningLane Cross Country Championships, but requested anonymity due to his current job. “…I don’t think we take any offense to someone taking a wheel out there and [measuring it]. That’s what people do at courses. That’s just reality, right? You see blazing times pop up all over the place and you’re like, Is that real? Is that not real?”
Newbury park ran incredibly fast at RunningLane last weekend
Indeed, one coach did measure the course ahead of the meet. It’s not a stretch to say Dr. Neal Baumgartner is detail-oriented. Chief of the US Air Force Exercise Science Unit at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas, Baumgartner conducts exercise research used by both the US Air Force and Space Force. He is also the coach of a group of homeschooled runners, the San Antonio Homeschool Spartans, and Baumgartner frequently measures the courses his athletes run beforehand. Baumgartner likes to track his athletes’ improvement throughout the season and wants to make sure his course lengths are as accurate as possible before comparing performances.
So on December 3, the day before the RunningLane Championships, Baumgartner took his MM30 Rolatape measuring wheel and walked the entire John Hunt Park 5k course, following the shortest possible route. What he found appeared to be the smoking gun the skeptics had been searching for: his wheel stopped at 4935 meters.
Despite that measurement, Baumgartner came home from the race amazed by what he had seen.
“An excellent venue, excellent event, and one of the very best organized and executed meets I have seen in multiple decades,” Baumgartner says. “Definitely a needed boost to the sport of cross country in the U.S.”
But he also saw the growing debate over the length of the course. So, late on the night of December 5, Baumgartner emailed LetsRun with his findings of his pre-race measurement.
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We thought we were sitting on a scoop. In consecutive years, John Hunt Park had played host to the fastest cross country 5k performance by a high school girl (Jenna Hutchins‘ 15:58.5 in 2020) and the four fastest cross country 5k performances by high school boys, led by the 14:03.29 by Newbury Park’s Colin Sahlman at RunningLane. If those performances came on a course that was short of 5,000 meters…well, that’s a big deal.
The issue is that it’s very difficult to definitively measure a cross country course. Using a wheel might sound like a good way to get a precise measurement, but while wheels are very accurate on asphalt, they are prone to mistakes on surfaces such as dirt and grass…which happen to be the surfaces found on most cross country courses. Unlike asphalt, which has an even surface and provides good grip for a rubber wheel, grass is not as even and, importantly, does not grip the wheel quite as well. That can lead to slippage, which means the wheel doesn’t turn quite as much as it should — a minor error over short distances, but one that can add up over 5000 meters. (Professional surveyor Mark Caulfield has a great explanation about this phenomenon in this article).
Four days after measuring the course in Huntsville, Baumgartner conducted a calibration test on dry short grass, a surface similar to that of John Hunt Park (the course was wet on race day, but not when Baumgartner measured it the day before). He then compared that measurement with the same segment measured with a steel tape measure.
His findings? His wheel was off by a factor of 1.0058. Multiply 1.0058 by 4935m and you get 4963.6m — still short of 5000m but 28.6m closer than before.
So are we done? The John Hunt Park course is short, but not quite as short as we thought? Not quite.
Sean Allan, co-race director for the Running Lane Cross Country Championships, says they measured the course earlier this fall with two wheels simultaneously, both following the shortest path possible.
“One wheel 4983m, another wheel 5014m, two different wheels, same path, same day,” Allan says.
Allan adds that Eric Enchelmayer of Huntsville Parks and Recreation, who helped construct the course in 2018 and 2019, has measured the course “dozens if not hundreds of times,” though Enchelmayer did not respond to an interview request from LetsRun.com.
“All of the measurements I have ever seen have been within the margin of error,” Allan says, noting that “none of those measurements were calibrated via steel tape on a known calibration course, most likely because it is a very time consuming process.”
Indeed, the most accurate method of measuring a course, according to Caulfield, is to use a steel tape measure and follow every tangent.
“But,” Caulfield writes, “it…generally takes a minimum of 2-3 people and 3-4 hours of time to complete every year unless you have a permanent course.”
What about GPS? The John Hunt Park course has a geodetic datum set embedded in the course in the form of pins to ensure the course stays consistent from year to year. But for measuring a course precisely, experts such as Caulfield and David Katz, who measured the Olympic marathon courses in London, Rio, and Sapporo, agree that GPS is insufficient. (Katz did take a crack at measuring the John Hunt Park course on Google Earth however, and shared his results on the LetsRun messageboard with estimates varying from 4942m to 5000m+ depending on which measuring criteria was used).
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So, could the John Hunt Park actually be a full 5,000 meters? However long it is, it’s clearly fast. If it’s 4935m (Baumgartner’s initial measurement), then Sahlman still ran 14:14 5k pace; if it’s 4963.6m (Baumgartner’s adjusted measurement), Sahlman ran 14:09 5k pace. Last year, three weeks after her 15:58.5 at RunningLane, Jenna Hutchins ran 15:34.47 for 5,000 meters on a track, a 2.51% improvement. Apply the same improvement to Sahlman’s time and you get 13:42.15. Ritzenhein ran 13:44.70 in high school; the US high school record is 13:37.91 by Galen Rupp. It’s not crazy to think that Sahlman could do that this spring (for comparison, Ritzenhein ran 8:41 for 3200m as a junior on the track; Sahlman ran 8:43).
But there’s one last problem. Even if, by the power of steel tape or divine intervention, we could get a 100% accurate measurement of the John Hunt Park course…what would it mean? Track performances are meaningful because tracks are standardized, not just in distance, but in how they’re measured. That’s why we can compare Carl Lewis to Usain Bolt, Lasse Viren to Joshua Cheptegei.
“There is no official standard for measuring, certifying, verifying, or justifying a high school or college cross country course or record for that matter,” Allan says. “There are simply best practices, which we have followed.”
So even if we knew, definitively, that Colin Sahlman ran 14:03.29 for 5,000 meters at John Hunt Park, that knowledge alone isn’t all that helpful unless all of the performances we compare it to came on courses that were measured the exact same way. After Sahlman’s 14:03, it was tempting to get carried away and say he broke the national record for a cross country 5k (and yes, I’m guilty of this). But until course measuring methods are standardized, any sort of “national record” in cross country is meaningless.
“There will never be real credibility for any XC record from course to course until the courses are measured the same way,” Katz writes. “You can disagree until the cows come home but this is fundamental for records. And that my friends is one of the reasons why there are no USATF or World Athletics cross country records.”
Discuss this story on the LetsRun.com messageboard: MB Is the RunningLane Course 5K? Or Is It Short?
Did you know we have a HS-only forum? More interesting HS threads: