For reference, the original article has been linked at the bottom of the page. Simply click next. Worth the read, if you haven't already.
Musings of a Now Junior XC Dad
By Glen Hazelwood
About two years ago, I wrote a piece for MileSplit NY called, "Musings of a Rookie Cross Country Dad", describing my experiences as a raw newcomer to the sport of cross country. I sent it in unsolicited to Kyle Brazeil, who I didn't know at the time, and he graciously published it on the site. Amazingly, and quite unexpectedly, this article took off and was picked up throughout the MileSplit network and by a few other running websites throughout the country, where it ended up being seen by thousands of parents, athletes and fans nationwide.
Wow…
Thank you all for that.
I've since written several articles for MileSplit, and you'd think that the logical line of progression would lead to a follow-up to the original article the next year. That never happened, and I'll shed some light on why later.
But with the heat of summer beginning to lose its edge, our kids wrapping up with camps and deep into organized team practice, and the internet buzzing with season previews, it feels like a good time to revisit that perspective, and see what I've taken from this wonderful sport in the time since the previous article.
Please accept this offering of my experiences and observations over the past two years, and some of the things I’ve taken from our sport in that time.
Your #1 Runner May Win the Race, But Your #5, #6 & #7 Kids Win Meets
Let there be no doubt…winning is fun. Being the first across the finish line in a race is a great achievement, a major adrenaline rush and something any runner can be proud of. But from a team perspective, while grabbing that “1” is huge, what happens farther back in the pack more often than not decides the meet.
This is certainly not a hard, fast rule…but figure that in any given race there are probably a handful of athletes capable of winning it. On a good day, your top runner wins and takes the 1. On a lesser day, that runner may come in 4th or 5th and get those points. That’s a differential of 4-5 points that that athlete becomes responsible for. While that certainly can change the outcome of a close meet, in most cases it’s not necessarily going to have a huge impact on the team result. Also, no matter how much faster the first place finisher runs the course than the second place finisher, he or she gets 1 point and second place gets 2. It doesn’t matter a bit what the spread is…it’s still just 1 point gained.
Your #5 runner, who would likely be running further back in a more densely populated part of the pack, could theoretically come in 30th place, or come in 80th place, a differential of as many as 50 pts., which obviously would have a much greater potential impact on the outcome of the meet.
And going back to the ‘close meet’ scenario, your “non-scoring” #6 and #7 runners can turn a meet back around in your favor by passing another teams #5 runner in the stretch, statistically giving that athlete just as much scoring value as your #1 runner winning the race over that teams #1.
The scoring system for cross country is mathematically very simple, but at the same time incredibly elegant in how it’s designed, so that all seven runners have a role which can turn the results of a meet. Every athlete, from top to bottom, matters.
I like that a lot.
Speed Ratings Are the Most Valuable Metric In XC
One of the many things that make cross country compelling, as well as very different from track, is the variety of the venues the runners face week to week. Some courses are flat and wide open, where your burners can get unchained and hit PR’s. Other courses can venture into being downright mountainous, and bring a completely different set of challenges to the athlete. The top runners are the ones that can adapt to the course in front of them and shine anywhere in the spectrum.
But…the downside to that variety of different courses is that at the end of the day it’s often difficult to reasonably compare performances between athletes in different meets.
For that, we have the Tully Speed Rating System.
The Tully Speed Rating System, developed by Bill Meylan of the Tully Runners website, takes all the hard data from any given meet and factors in a set of potential variables; difficulty and distance of the course, weather conditions, quality of the field, etc., and assigns each time a numeric value, based upon those variables, that allows that time to be reasonably compared to any other “speed rated” time, from any meet, on equal terms.
Bill Meylan is my hero.
Here’s a good example of how the speed rating system works…
My son Kevin, and James Asselmeyer from Arlington, were fairly evenly matched in XC last season. On October 12th of last year, Kevin ran a 16:49 on the 5k course at the Byram Hills Bobcat Run, and James ran a 15:48 over 5k at the Burnt Hills Invitational…a difference of 1:01. But after applying the Tully Rating system to the times, accounting for the potential variables & differences between the two courses, Kevin’s speed rating was 171.63, and James’ was 172.69…a theoretical difference of approximately 3 seconds, head-to-head, on either course, or on any course in the state.
The Tully Speed Rating System is not perfect. It’s theoretical. A kid who’s a monster on the flats, but who dies on hills, is likely going to have a better speed rating at the fairly flat Croton Point Park than they would on the hilly trails of Bowdoin.
But at the end of the weekend, after all of our athletes have given their best efforts, the Tully system is a tangible way of looking at how all the runners, and all the teams statewide, compare against each other, no matter what course the race was run or what the conditions were.
The Tully Speed Rating System is an invaluable tool for this sport, and I constantly find myself silently thanking Bill Meylan for bringing it to us.
The Internet Resources Available to Us Are AMAZING!
In my original article, I spoke about the purity of cross country as a sport, and its inherent fairness. You get a gun at the start line, a click of the watch at the finish, and everything in between is entirely up to you, your training and your guts. It’s always been that way, and there’s no reason to think it will ever change…nor should it.
But sometimes change is good, and arguably the biggest change this sport has seen has been the birth, growth and application of the internet to it.
When I competed in track & field in the early 80’s, home computing was in its infancy and it certainly wasn’t a tool we were able to make much use of yet. Athletes and coaches from my area in Westchester County had little idea what was going on in upstate or western NY, far less the rest of the country. Once in a while, we’d get a Xerox copy of state leaders or something to that effect, or you could spend hours on the phone with folks you knew, trying to find out what happened at a faraway meet. But for the most part, you didn’t really know what was going on elsewhere until you went head-to-head with your competitors at the bigger meets or at seasons end.
In 2014, I can’t even imagine getting from one weekend to the next without the incredible wealth of information I have at my fingertips via the various websites dedicated to cross country and track & field.
Sites like MileSplit, Tully Runners, and others allow us to know virtually anything we want to know, about virtually any meet, virtually anywhere, almost instantaneously.
MileSplit, with its photo, video and stat gathering, keeps a digital scrapbook for each of our young athletes. Tully Runners, with its comprehensive coverage of cross country and the aforementioned speed rating system, lets a ‘numbers freak’ like me crunch away all week between meets to see if I can get a bead on what may happen at the next one.
And it’s all right there, instantly…just a mouse click away.
Since its inception, the internet has made the entire world a lot “smaller”, and in many cases I wonder if that’s such a good thing. Sometimes the flood of information we get each day can be overwhelming and hard to digest.
But in our part of the world, the internet is absolutely a game-changer for the positive. It won’t make you run faster. That’s still on you. But it can help you and your coaches be better prepared for meets. It keeps a record of your accomplishments that can be referred to and shared easily. And for me personally, it offers a stage that I would not otherwise have, to share my thoughts and experiences on the sport I love.
Cross-Country Kids Are Some of the Coolest People You Will Ever Meet
I stated in the original piece how incredibly fit and well-conditioned these young athletes are and how much I respect them for that. And they still are, and I still do…even more so now.
But there’s something that I suppose by its nature took a little longer to manifest itself for me, and it’s one of the best things I’ve discovered so far…
These kids are just super cool people as well.
I’ve watched my son develop friendships over the past two years, and I’ve gotten to know quite a few of these kids myself, and these kids are so smart and so respectful and so funny…and after a while, you find yourself really liking them as people and wanting to see them do well, just as much as your own child.
And another thing that I never saw coming….they graduate and you’re genuinely sad to see them go. I’m going to be a complete mess when my son runs his last high school race, and I’m getting a good taste of that now from watching the young athletes I’ve come to know and care about leave the “high school XC” community to go on and compete at the next level in college, or start their first steps of adulthood on whichever path they’ve chosen.
I couldn’t say if it’s the sport itself that makes our kids turn out this way. It certainly would be a place where they would learn a lot of good ‘life lessons’; discipline, self-sufficiency, respect for others. Things like ‘you get out of it exactly what you put into it’. Maybe they already have these things inside them, and this sport and the values that come with it just brings all those good things to the surface as they grow and mature.
What I can say, with great certitude, is that we are putting some really, really good kids out there, and we should all be very proud of them, what they’ve done on the trail and track, and what they may do going forward in their lives.
It's Not All Gold Medals & Glory
I’ve written a handful of articles for MileSplit, on both cross country and track & field, and everything I’ve ever talked about in every article has been from a positive angle. That speaks volumes about the nature of this sport…in addition to exposing me for the ‘romantic’ I am about it.
But it would be naïve to think of cross country as some Utopian activity, where everyone comes in first place and gets a medal, and everybody has fun all the time and nothing bad ever happens. That’s unrealistic and silly.
We had a real good taste of the ‘down side’ of things over the past year, and it benefits no one to simply ignore that or gloss it over.
A brief “timeline”…
In June of 2013, my son Kevin capped off a pretty respectable freshman year with a trip to Greensboro, NC for the NBN Freshmen Mile, where at approximately the 600m mark, a previously misdiagnosed sprain became a full-blown, 3mm crack in a bone of his left foot. He finished the race 5th, in 4:29 (which speaks more to his guts than his common sense), and shortly after crossing the finish line, removed his left shoe revealing a foot that was the rich, purple color of a ripe plum, and stating to his coach, “I think I need to go to the hospital…”
He subsequently spent the entire summer of 2013 hobbling about in a boot cast, which he didn’t get out of until the day before XC camp that August.
He fought back from this injury like a champ, starting out camp running with his coach, then the girls team, and finally catching up to his teammates and competitors and going on to have a pretty decent sophomore XC season.
Then, in November of 2013 at the Section 1 XC State Qualifier, somewhere out on the trails of Bowdoin Park, he ended his 10th grade XC season with second broken toe, on his right foot this time, which likely cost him a trip to the state meet and essentially shut him down for his sophomore indoor track season.
Once again, he fought his way back. After getting out of the second cast, he ran a handful of “rehab” races in the second half of the winter season and started to become somewhat competitive toward the end of winter, with the real focus being on the upcoming spring season.
With the unfaltering patience and nurturing of his coach, Joe Scelia, and some guidance from an old friend, White Plains A.D. Fred Singleton, we got Kevin with the right doctor and into the right shoes, inserts, socks, etc., and by the end of his spring sophomore season, I believe he was within sight of where he might’ve been without the injuries.
Kevin handled this yearlong battle against adversity with a level of grace, patience and maturity that I had little reason to expect from a 16 year old, and seeing that gave me an opportunity to gain a tremendous amount of respect for this young man as an ‘adult in the making’. I’m so proud of how he handled himself during this time.
I, on the other hand, did not do as well with it.
This was, without question, the single most frustrating period of time I have ever experienced as a parent…not just the parent of an athlete, but a parent in general. We want so badly to see our children do well and flourish. We want to see them developing their strengths, whether it’s on the trails at a cross country meet, in the classroom, or wherever those strengths may lie. It is our job to see that they do so, and when they can’t, and you cannot do a single thing about it except watch and wait, you feel powerless, which is a feeling we never want to have in regards to our children, and one that I’d wish on no one.
This is the first time I’ve put this past year down in words, and it’s still hard to talk about. The whole series of events affected me in a variety of ways, including completely shutting me down as a writer, which I thankfully do not do for a living because I’d have been in big trouble. I know that sounds like a bunch of “artist nonsense”, but it was very real to me. I didn’t know what the future was going to bring for my son as a runner, and at times I wasn’t even sure there would be a future for him, considering the nature of the two injuries…and I simply didn’t know what to say.
I still went to the meets. I still supported his teammates and friends. I watched Kevin struggle through 5 minute 1600’s and 11 minute 3200’s as he “found his legs” again. But my “muse” completely punked out on me and left me with nothing to offer, because I just didn’t know what was coming next.
In the grand scheme of things, the positive aspects of this sport far outweigh the potential negative sides of it such as this. And we, as a family, took away some extremely valuable lessons from the past year. But it’s something that I hope we never, ever have to go through again. And I sincerely wish that my telling of this story is as close as any of you athletes or parents ever have to come to an experience such as ours.
I Cannot Wait For This Season To Start!!!
It’s a new year, and a new XC season, and it’s time for a fresh start…and I can’t wait to see what these kids do next.
I can’t wait to feel that crisp, autumn air engulf and energize me as I walk into a school or park for the start of a meet.
I can’t wait for that first mob of athletes to explode off the start line and blow by me, invariably followed by an eye-watering vapor trail of Tiger Balm as they pass.
I can’t wait to see what a kid who pulled a 168 season speed rating out of a summer in a boot cast can do off of a summer of 80 mile weeks.
I can’t wait to see what a bunch of kids from Brewster High School, who my son has literally grown up with, can do with an opportunity to potentially make some noise on a statewide stage this year.
I can’t wait to see Mikey Brannigan, Bryce Millar, Aidan Tooker, etc. push toward that lofty and exclusive “200” speed rating.
I can’t wait to discover some kid that no one’s even talking about yet, who will break out this season and become a star.
I can’t wait to see all those faces…old and new…athlete, parent or coach…who take this wonderful sport and turn it into the vibrant, living community that it’s become to me.
And I can’t wait to see what I learn about it next!
Runners, take your marks….