10/28 News and Notes

The Week in Review

With only four days at school, this was a pretty short week for our team.  Part of our squad did race at North County on Thursday.  The rest did a race pace workout on Wednesday.  And we did close out the week with an optional practice at Blechle Park.

North County Meet Recap

North County was willing to add us to their meet at the last minute, and so we took a few of our runners up or Leadbelt Golf Club in Bonne Terre for one last regular season tune-up.  

The meet had a single race for boys and girls, and the boys started things off.  Going into the race, Luke had a realistic chance at at top-20 medal.  His plan was to run the first mile a little smarter and have more left in the tank to crush the second half of the race.  He did that perfectly.  While his first mile was actually slower than at Conference, he finished in 18th place with an 18-second PR of 20:02.  The steep hill at the finish was all that got in the way of him going sub-20, but that is well within reach at districts.

Cain went out strong to separate himself as our second boy.  While he fell a bit short of new PR, he stayed competitive the rest of the way, passing 11 runners over the last two miles, which is something extremely important looking toward districts and the large field of boys there.  

Our last three boys stuck together most of the race.  They didn't have quite as many runners at their stage of the race to compete with, but they tried to push each other.  Noah W. led the group most of the second half of the race, which is impressive considering he missed the entire previous week of school with pneumonia.  During the charge up the last hill, he was joined by Bo, who once again showed his signature finish kick.  Not far behind them was Caden, who has been sidelined in recent weeks with a leg injury.  At less than full strength, he hung tough and showed grit through some discomfort.

On the girls side we only ran two ladies, each with special circumstances.  Audrey had also battled illness in the prior week.  Not only did she miss quite a bit of training, but her lungs also weren't back to 100% capacity.  At the same time, Reagan hasn't been able to run for the last month due to some health concerns.  She wasn't cleared to run until the Tuesday before the meet, and so we wanted to be cautious in ramping her back up to full speed and full training.  

The plan was for the two girls to stay together for the first 2.5 miles at Audrey's pace before Reagan finished at a faster speed.  Reagan took off over the last half mile and passed a number of ladies.  She looked strong coming up the final hill and even edged one last competitor at the finish line.  

Audrey was able to run an impressive pace through the first half of the race before her breathing started to fail her.  She pushed through some intense side cramps over the last mile and demonstrated a ton of resilience to make it through the last stretch.  She showed she's willing to fight tooth and nail to the finish line.  Once she's back to full health, that's going to make her a dangerous runner in the postseason.

The Week Ahead

This week our focus will shift to the postseason, with districts and state both less than two weeks away.  We'll see a further taper of our volume, though that won't prohibit a race-pace workout on Monday and plenty of other work throughout the week.  We'll certainly still see a fun day woven in, as well as our last pasta dinner of the season.  All of it will take place in an extra-spirited fashion as carry out our themes for each day.  

Cross Country Is Not Track

Districts mark the point in the season where even fringe and novice fans of the sport take an interest in rankings and predictions.  Everyone with a MileSplit account thinks they are a data-driven prophet.  Even coaches and runners find themselves caught up in the craze of virtual meets.  

While this adds to some of the fun and hype around the sport, it can quickly devolve into a misleading distraction.  As I've mentioned previously, one of the main reasons for this is that people want to treat cross country like it's track.  Tracks are standard 400m loops.  They're so predictable that college coaches will often recruit high school athletes strictly based on their race times.  They might have to adjust for elevation in places like Colorado or temperature in places like Texas, but generally a 4:17 mile is otherwise the same regardless of where it was run.  

But college coaches don't do the same in cross country.  They know that in addition to the variability of races on the track, cross country courses have differences in turns, terrain, elevation, and distance.  Even though most races are supposed to be 5 kilometers, they very rarely are.  Few of them are permanent or professionally designed.  Courses like ours are often measured with wheels, which while better than the Google Earth/GPS watch approach taken by others, still leaves lots of room for slippage and bouncing.  Even on permanent courses like at state, a wide course can lead to variances.  A runner who sticks to the outside of every turn could end up running 200m more than someone who hugs the insides.  

College coaches therefore tend to prioritize places and performances at key races featuring multiple top-caliber athletes that can be compared ... generally the state course or a regional postseason race like those sponsored by Nike or Footlocker.  Trying to compare athlete times across courses becomes a guessing game without intimate knowledge of all of the involved courses.  

One can simply look at the last week in our region to see this played out.  I can give you two examples, one for boys and girls.  At this year's Oak Ridge Meet, Kelly's Truman White and Jefferson's Braeden Caldwell finished third and fourth in the boys race, separated by just 7 seconds.  This week Jefferson raced at the Northwest Meet we couldn't get into .  Braeden finished 14th with a time of 17:30.  Just a day earlier, Kelly ran at the Heartland Conference Meet, where Truman finished 4th with a 19:10.  That's a 100-second difference.

The girls race in the Heartland Conference Meet was won by Bernnie's Ella Harris with a time of 22:42.  Just a day later, East Carter's Aliyah Miller finished second with a 20:26 at the Ozark Foothills Conference Meet.  We saw both of these girls run at Van Buren, where they finished 4th and 5th respectively and just 20 seconds apart.  

The problem with armchair race predictions is that they rarely take account of these differences.  MileSplit rankings simply use a runner's fastest time of the year, regardless of what courses an athlete ran on.  This is in part why our boys were ranked 16th going into last year's state meet but finished 10th.  We'd run harder courses all season that made us stronger, even if the times weren't impressive relative to other schools who raced on some scorching fast courses.

I suppose my main point is to not get too invested in all of the rankings in the next two weeks, whether of your own making or posted by others.  As I've said before, a week from now no one's going to care which teams were ranked in the top four in the district by MileSplit.  They're going to care who's actually planning a trip to Columbia.  Rankings are just one more thing we can't control.  Let's focus on the races!

Districts Preview

With that out of the way, we can talk about the races on Saturday.  With the state's current structure, schools in cross country are divided into five classes based on enrollment.  By true enrollment, our school would be in Class 1, but due to the the state's championship factor for private schools (maybe some time I'll devote a blog post to explaining that), our boys must compete in Class 2, while our girls remain in Class 1.

The state divides each class geographically into four districts.  If you cut the state into four corners, you would essentially get the districts.  The southeast corner of the state is traditionally District 1.  Given the limited number of race timing companies in the state and the fact that all of the state's district races are the same day, the races are consolidated.  Classes 1-3 for a given district run at a single location, while Classes 4-5 run at a separate location.  

With our boys and girls in different classes, this is actually a blessing for our team.  However, it does mean that Arcadia Valley, the host school for Classes 1-3, will be responsible for 6 races and some 70 schools in total.  That dwarfs most regular season meets, including any that we've been to this year.

The order of the races goes from highest to lowest class, with Class 3 races starting at 9AM.  Girls will run first in each class, with a 45-minute gap before the boys.  There will be a 75-minute gap between the boys race of one class and the girls race of another class, which allows time for that class to have an awards ceremony and begin to clear out.  That actually means our boys and girls will run in consecutive races.

The district meet only includes varsity races, so we can only run seven boys and girls, though we are allowed to register up to three alternates.  One of the best things about our sport is that there isn't any bench during the regular season, so having to narrow our team down to a district roster is never fun.  That's especially true for a small team like ours where just a few athletes end up left out.  In the end, health, experience, and recent performance all factored into the decision.  Our lineups for Saturday will look as follows:

The course should be the same two loops + switchbacks format as during the regular season meet.  There is a chance of rain in the days leading up to the race, but if the ground doesn't get too squishy, past experience with districts at Arcadia Valley mean there will be some crazy fast times.

In some sense that's irrelevant, as times don't really matter at districts.  It's all about places and points.  The top 30 individuals advance to state, whether 30th place finishes in 17:30 or 27:30.  The top four teams advance regardless of whether they have 54 points or 540 points.  It's simply a matter of doing what it takes.

Both the boys and girls race should include roughly 20 schools.  I did a profile of the teams in both districts several weeks ago.  Since that time things haven't changed drastically.  In the boys race most of those schools will have between 5-7 runners, so there should be a pretty big field.  As of press time (which was after the entry deadline), there were more than 140 boys registered and 20 scoring teams.

Woodland has a pretty tight grip on the top team spot in the boys race.  The battle for second will be between East Carter and Jefferson, and I would give the edge to Jefferson.  But the fourth and final ticket to state is a wide open race, with as many as 7 teams being part of that conversation.  Puxico has dealt with some injuries, and with limited depth it's going to be tough for them to compete despite a very strong 1-2 punch.  Saxony doesn't have much at the top end but has one of the tightest 1-5 spreads I have seen for a team.  Neelyville has a similar build, though with slightly less impressive times.  Kingston lacks a solid 5th runner, but their 1-4 are impressive.  Kelly is a strong team end-to-end, as is Metro, a school in St. Louis we haven't gotten to see this year.  I expect them to be our biggest competition for that last spot.

Individually, Carter brings in the fastest seed time, though I expect a duel between him and Woodland's Calvin Layton, with a few more runners not too far behind.  

On the other hand, many of the schools in the girls race only have 2-3 runners.  Just 4 schools registered enough girls to score as a team.  There were just 58 girls registered in total. 

The team side for the girls is pretty simple, as all four girls (ourselves included) should advance to state.  Dora remains the heavy favorite.  After that it's a tough fight for the second place plaque.  Van Buren lacks a strong top runner but is pretty solid the rest of the way.  Summersville is a balanced team front to back.  Beating them will probably require winning more of the positional battles.  

On the individual front, Reagan brings in the fastest time, but reigning champion Isabelle Martin of Dora and Bernie's Ella Harris will also be in the mix up front.

​All in all it should be an exciting day.  If you do plan to come out to watch, be aware of the $6 cash admission cost.