There’s some discussion going on about equality in collegiate cross country that was sparked by the recent IAAF decision to unify the distance for professionals. On the professional level, where women used to race 8k and men 12k, (and before that, there was a 4k too which I still mourn the loss of, but that’s another story), now we will all race 10k. In reaction to that, some are stoking the argument for similar changes to the collegiate system, and reading this article in Canadian Runner got my claws out. But first the background: in college, women race 6k. Men race 8k until the Championships, where they race 10k. Historically, this discrepancy was based on a belief we now know to be completely false: that women can’t handle the same distances as men. Everyone knows women can run as far as men now. So here is the question: is the fact that NCAA men do 10k enough reason to change the distance women race? Is matching the men the best way to define “equality?”
Here’s the twitter screen shot basics of what we’re talking about here:
Dr. Vic Jackson is a professor who specializes in sports history, and the history of equality, Title IX, and so on. She iwas also NCAA 10k Champ while at ASU. I’m not assuming she agrees with my position below, but I dig her vibe here.
So back to this:
First, I want to challenge the assumption that equality means women should move up in distance. The fact that men race 10k should be challenged just as much. It’s an arbitrary distance. What distance best serves the majority of athletes at that stage of physiological development, with consideration for the expectations and demands year-round collegiate competitors face? What distance optimizes the athletes’ health, performance, and experience in the short and long term?
When looked at that way, you may (or may not) not get the same answer for men and women, and that’s ok. I don’t know the answer. But I don’t think we are asking the right questions. It’s not about what is possible. It’s about what makes the most sense. It’s about what the athletes themselves want, when you remove the machismo, outdated assumption that more is better. This is not limited to running. True equality isn’t looking, acting, and walking like men for the sake of it. Equality is bringing who we are and the unique things we know to be important to the arenas in which we play and work, and having those contributions be equally heard, valued and respected.
Another thing to consider is that women have history and meaning in their current events, which keeps getting disrupted and discarded, so changing events is indeed a loss. When cross country was changed from 5k to 6k my freshman year at Stanford, I stopped caring about who the top women were who came before me because I had no method of comparison to draw my attention to the pioneers in my sport. When the women’s 3k was removed from track, the best 3k women in history became relics of an non-relatable time. It’s the sad truth. Considering the relatively short history of women’s sports, the events we’ve been running (regardless of how they originated) have cross generational currency that connects us to women who came before us, builds tradition, and makes it easier for us to imagine what’s to come (which can help us maintain a long term perspective). As a woman, I value those things way more than mimicking the men.
The Arguments For Moving Up
Let’s analyze the primary arguments I’ve heard for bumping women up to 8k/10k. One is that men get to do it so women are somehow being disrespected if they don’t also do it (even if they haven’t collectively asked for it). Meb isn’t better than Mo Farah just because Meb runs farther. So long as rewards, respect, and coverage is equal, the distance can be different. And I feel the NCAA does a great job in cross country and track and field when it comes to equal coverage, reward, and respect. I’ve never heard one XC NCAA champion say, “If only I ran 10k like the men this would have more importance to me.” Maybe some people feel that way, but out of all the NCAA Champs and All Americans I know, I’ve literally never heard it. Personally, I never felt that the 6k championship trophy I wanted so badly would be less valuable than the men’s 10k trophy. It meant everything. I was glad I wasn’t running 10k.
The second argument for why women should move up to 8k/10k is that racing 6k’s is robbing them of opportunities to prepare for road racing and marathons after college. Clearly there is a subset of athletes coming out of high school that is best suited to longer distances, and will eventually find their best success at half marathon and marathon distances. Does this mean that collegiate cross country is supposed to be the vehicle responsible for developing that subset of athletes? Maybe it achieves that by accident, but no, it is not.
Cross country doesn’t even have it’s own scholarships. They are dolled out from the pool of track and field ones depending on how much a track and field program is willing to devote to distance runners. There is a lot of variation between schools as a result of how competitive their track team is, but the fact is, the scholarships are track scholarships. Cross country for the vast majority of NCAA schools is built to complement and prepare athletes for track and field, where only one of the five middle and long distance events is longer than 5k. Even if you go to a school where cross country is as big time as football, athletes are expected to be three sport athletes, racing cross country in the fall, indoor track in the winter, and outdoor track in the spring. Don’t get me wrong, cross country is my true love, but developing marathoners during college is not it’s primary purpose.
Plus, there is nothing stopping the pure endurance high school graduate from going straight into road racing, and doing halfs, fulls and ultras while attending university. There are ample opportunities and venues for that in just about every city. There are NAIA schools where you can compete in the marathon at the NCAA Championships. So what role should the college sport of cross country play to best serve the majority of athletes? What makes more sense to prepare athletes for all three seasons from a development perspective, 6k or 10k? What makes more sense for most athletes overall athletic development through a lifetime? Again, up for debate. And the answer may or may not be the same for men and women.
The Case for 6k
What I can say with confidence is 6k is more inclusive, serving a potential purpose for track events from 800-10k, and keeps a greater number of athletes engaged and in community with their teammates year round. It’s easier to keep track of all your athletes this way. Is this important or not? What do NCAA coaches and athletes think?
If we are absolutely insistent men and women run the same event, then why aren’t we seriously considering 6k for all? I don’t believe men would suffer any damage by decreasing the distance they compete in. I have never seen a physiological argument that athletes who don’t move up in race distance early enough can’t have success at the longer distances. In fact, the opposite is what I see the best coaches in the world putting into practice with their athletes more often. There is a shorter window for the development/maintenance of speed and power than there is for developing endurance, so why wouldn’t you optimize that from age 17-21, even if you may do marathons down the road?
Then there is health. At Stanford, top women were aiming for 50-80 miles a week of training for 6k, and top men 80-100+ miles for 10k. I can’t tell you how many male state champions I watched fizzle out at Stanford trying to hit those numbers before there bodies were ready for it. The stress fractures, chronic fatigue, and risk of other injuries increase with increased training load, especially when combined with a full academic load and social life. I never heard the men’s team saying “I’m so glad we race a longer distance at the championships than we do the rest of the year!” Maybe they saved that for the locker room, but I more often saw anxiety about moving up the distance, and having to up the training load significantly to prepare for it. I think men and women would both benefit from the decreased volume demands of the shorter distance.
And now for sex differences. They exist. And this is where people get uncomfortable. Read this article I wrote for Runner’s World to see what my own denial looked like. Women can certainly race 10k. Amazingly. We know this. Children, teens, collegiates, moms, grandmas. Of course we can. We can kick ass at it. We can podium with men at 100 milers like Ann Trason and set speed records on the Appalachian Trail like Jennifer Pharr Davis. That is not the question anymore. The question is, if we have a choice, what is the best event to choose for women (and men) ages 17-21 who are competing in three seasons per year while facing specific hormonal, physical, and emotional development changes correlated with adolescence (which doesn’t end until 25+ by the way).
While men ages 17-21 typically get stronger and stronger with a steady hormonal aid of testosterone, women face a shit storm of hormones designed to optimize us for fertility. Even if you’re not thinking about having babies, your body is. Like it or not, this is science. This is why so many women gain weight, and experience the late teens and early 20’s puffiness that many of us first learn to hate our bodies for. Needing to be lean for performance at this time of life is working against biology, and it often has consequences. This body change, and how we learn to deal with it, affects our injury risk, our relationship with food, our relationship with our bodies, our competitive experiences, and our overall experience with sport. We know that sports with an emphasis on thinness and low body fat are correlated with the highest rates of eating disorders. Women’s distance running has enough of these challenges as it is, and we need to significantly improve how we prevent and treat eating disorders before adding more risk factors, like a distance that favors thinness even more. Especially when there is not a compelling enough reason to increase it.
Of course it is inaccurate to paint a picture that all women are on the brink of an eating disorder, but it is also irresponsible to keep pretending they don’t exist. In our sport, we do not take eating disorders seriously enough. They have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. For women aged 15-24 who develop anorexia, the mortality rate associated with the illness is twelve times higher than the death rate of all other causes of death. If you aren’t aquatinted with NEDA, those facts and more can be found on their website.
So back to changing bodies…we can hate the puff, we can deny the puff exists, or we can work with it. At least in 5k-6k races, you can still kick ass with some early 20’s hormones. I did. Many of my peers did. I gained quite a bit and while I felt like shit, and plateaued temporarily (a plateau is lucky; many slow down), I was still able to be in the mix. Just about every rock star woman pro on the circuit that I know had a puffy phase. And you know what? It ran it’s course, and their bodies started leaning out naturally. They are succeeding and breaking records at 10k, 15k, half marathons, marathons, and ultras, and were not harmed one bit by racing 4k-6k in college. Most women, after a fleeting youth superhero phase, can look forward to a second bloom in endurance sports in their mid to late 20’s and beyond, if their high school or college experience doesn’t leave them too discouraged.
Looking Forward
Out of fear of acknowledging the unique challenges facing female athletes at different stages of development, we do them a huge disservice and often cause more damage when problems arise. We know women’s bodies go through changes in that age group, we know distance running is a high risk sport for developing body dysmorphia, and yet we put our heads in the sand. New research is showing that women’s physiology responds differently to training, and should be tailored differently, and yet just reading that makes many people uncomfortable. So does talking about weight, food, and eating disorders. It should come as no surprise that coaches are often grossly unprepared, and inadvertently see the illness spread through their team with long lasting consequences. We need to figure out how to honor and respect women’s unique differences and challenges without them being seen as weaknesses. We need to do this even though not all women have these challenges. Lives are depending on it, but also thousands of women could be getting even more out of their experience with sport if we stop pretending everyone is a dude.
So back to “equality.”
So much of the feminist movement has been about “Give us what the men have!” And rightfully so. We spent most of history being blocked from having things we wanted, things that gave advantages to men by way of restricting access. But the next wave of feminism involves thinking about what we want, what serves us, and having the courage to create those things/systems/roles that set us up for short term and long term success and satisfaction. We don’t need to look at a man’s paper for the answers. Most of what we’ve been fighting for equal access to was created randomly, or based on outdated ideals of masculinity that don’t even really work for men anymore, or by freaking accident! Why copy that for “equality?”
Let’s consider the research, our health, and the three-sport-athlete collective collegiate experience, and go from there. If the result of that is 10k cross country, and that’s what college women themselves want, then by all means, give it to them. But for the love of Pete, saying “but the men do it!” is just blind mimicry disguised as feminism.
Things I’d like to see change:
- That running step for step with men is presented as our assumed ultimate destination.
- That “different” = worse without giving ourselves a chance to own and claim that difference.
- That our discomfort with difference limits our understanding of ourselves, and makes it harder to reach out for other women.
- Men feeling uncomfortable saying they want to run the shorter distance, or have more paternal leave, or something else that women have, because it would imply weakness.
- That sometimes it feels like men are trapped in a box, and women are fighting to get inside it.
Thanks for reading,
Lauren
#womanup
The problem with moving women to 10K is this will lead most coaches to pile on the volume. As you describe, little good comes from it.
It’s more age-appropriate to have both genders somewhere in 5-8K. My unsolicited and inexpert opinion is 5k. Why? More distance is not better. Generally speaking, developing more aerobic speed is better.
Are there some losers if college XC was 5-6K? Yes, but, they would be maturing into their better distances anyway.
Totally agree on all fronts.
As someone who didn’t run cross country or track in university (played varsity rugby – though I’m built like a distance runner) and came to running as an “adult” I’ve been watching this debate play out. Loved your perspective – thank you!
Thanks for reading.
Great post, Lauren! Do you think the longer distances (8k and 10k) in XC make middle-distance track runners less competitive in those races? (I don’t personally know the history of whether someone has won both an NCAA XC title and 1500m before…) I imagine they have a different set of genetic gifts making them well suited for those shorter, faster races, and moving the men’s race to 6k could make them more competitive with the longer distance track runners as well!
Yes I do think the middle distance runners are less competitive in 8k/10k races. That is one of the main reasons I am sad IAAF got rid of the 4k XC distance as an option. There used to be two race distances, and this was fantastic because it provided competitive opportunities for our best middle distance athletes in the fall/winter, and gave fans a chance to follow them outside of track season. Since switching to the longer distance, the diversity of participants has decreased dramatically, and we have essentially reserved another sport for the most highly served group in USATF: long distance athletes. There are year round opportunities for racing, exposure and prize money for this group, which is fantastic, but I do wish the sport of cross country could continue to serve the groups that fell in love with it and succeeded at it as youth.
A well-written piece, but a huge oversight here; how do you suppose these longer distance athletes ‘happen’ to find their success at half-marathon and marathon? XC is certainly a vehicle responsible for developing longer-distance athletes through college – XC season is when long-distance men are center stage, it’s their time to shine! And if you accept that argument, many of your other arguments fall flat – you’re depriving long-distance women the same opportunities you’ve created for men. You need to think bigger picture; the indoor season and outdoor season are for middle-distance athletes, and the outdoor season and XC season are for long-distance athletes. XC shouldn’t be just another middle-distance race.
And in Canada, where your referenced article was written, the situation is worse. Collegiate athletes don’t have a competitive outdoor season. The men develop long-distance runners through the 10k XC program while the women, who only run 6k XC, have an almost non-existent development for long distance running.
Yes, the longest distance runners get a chance to shine, temporarily. But there are consequences for many. It is complex.
Probably the wisest counsel is to go a route that enables the individual athlete to choose their own destination. And that also means an athlete can compete/train with their college team, but not necessarily compete for NCAA championships. Their goal race could be part of another league, system, or whatnot.
Here is a question: why do a large majority (not necessarily all) of college student-athletes find it necessary that they must compete with their college team? Why or how has university officials been able to more or less monopolize the athletic endeavors of all student athletes, in all sports? Why don’t more athletes choose the path of, say Alana Hadley, and compete athletically outside of the collegiate system while studying for a degree?
I guess my last concern is that why do we, the collective we, need to do anything? I love the whole embedded philosophy in the Believe Journal. The most important thing in the world is that I, the individual, move towards a better place of being with every opportunity that I find.
create, not find.
my mistake.
As always, this is a well thought out and well written piece. On the way to a meet last year, I started discussing this with teammates and felt a little odd about the whole argument. I both wanted and didn’t want us to move up in distance. Selfishly, I’d love to move up to 10K to take a little bit of the kick out of the milers’ legs! 🙂 But 6K seems like a better race for women in this age range.
I’d also like to thank you for addressing the weight gain (or “puff”) issue a lot of women face. It has definitely been a significant and difficult aspect of my life/running in the past 3 1/2 years, and I’m glad to hear that it gets better! Thank you for reminding me to persevere and to not get discouraged!
You bet, Meghan. Definitely ride it out. It gets better. And I can totally empathize with that feeling of “but why are we running shorter again?” and not knowing how to feel about it. It’s not until I’ve gotten older and experienced more instances of women’s experiences being different than mens, but not negative, (sometimes being incredibly positive), that I’ve started to see feminism as more complex. But regardless of my personal opinion on distance, I think if a change is going to be made by the higher ups in the sport overall, they should absolutely ask the women and men who do the racing what they each want, and go with that. If women choose 6k for themselves, it certainly won’t be because they don’t believe we can do 10k. We know perfectly well we are capable of anything, thank you very much!
Thanks for posting your thoughts here, Lauren. One point where I agree with you is that there’s no innate reason that 10K is “better” than 6K. Ultimately a race is a race, and athletes will happily race over whatever distance is chosen. The physiological differences between those distances are too minor to quibble over, and the arguments about the need to develop marathoners are overblown.
It sounds to me like your most strongly felt arguments come from a sense of continuity with the past. That’s fair enough — I can’t tell you not to feel that way. But I also think it’s worth trying to step outside the present moment and think about how you’d design the sport if it wasn’t tied to the past. That’s the only way change happens. There are places in Canada where high-school women run 3K for cross-country (a reasonable stepping stone to 5K, which is what university women here ran until three years ago). There’s plenty of history and course records there, but at a certain point you have to ask if that’s what you really want.
My personal opinion is also that you’re underestimating the implicit message of such dramatically different distances. And no, it’s not that I think shorter automatically equals weaker — I was a miler! I grew up with girls running shorter XC distances than boys from the time I was in elementary school (before the hormonal storm). The message I and everyone else took from that wasn’t that the female sex had collectively taken a reasoned decision to pursue different goals from the men in cross-country; it was that girls couldn’t handle the same distances as guys (which, as you point out, was exactly the reason those distances were chosen). If you head out and canvas a bunch of 14-year-old XC runners and ask them why the distances are different, I’ll bet that’s the most common answer you’ll get. The history still echoes.
(Of course, you wouldn’t get the same answers in the U.S., because high-school XC distances are already the same!)
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your comments and I like the thought exercise about being tied to the past. I actually see the same point playing out for men currently. That men are tied to the past of being in these longer distances, when it might actually not be the best thing for their development as three sport collegiate athletes either.
I suspect that if we really could wipe the slate clean and reinvent cross country from scratch for collegiates, we would probably choose 6k or 8k for both.
As to your point about the 6k being designed because we couldn’t handle longer races, and how can we expect to move past that…that is the experience of every single minority and underserved group in history. Originally women had to wear dresses because pants weren’t allowed. Now we are allowed to wear pants, but that doesn’t mean we can no longer wear dresses, or that wearing dresses somehow makes us inferior. We choose them, despite their historical meanings. The ultimate sign of progress is not assimilation. It is often claiming your history for your own, if it happens to serve you in the present. The 6k does not have to be sullied forever just because of it’s intention when dudes gave it to us. Dudes don’t have to give us things anymore, including a longer distance. And in the case of the 6k, I feel that fresh eyes on the event show it’s value, and like dresses, it should be an option for us, if we want it, on our terms. But the debate over distance is never presented that way.
If colleges are going to change distances, I think it is still sexist, “showing women what’s best for them” if you just move them up to match men. I think if discussion is being had about changing the sport of cross country, the women and men actually participating should both have a say, and different answers for men and women, should it happen, should be an acceptable outcome. Then when asked why the distances are different, we’ll have a good answer: because we chose it.
But just as a side note, I’ve run a shorter distance than men for years, and I always thought I was the lucky one and that they were getting a raw deal. The training load was borderline inhumane, and middle distance athletes were left out of competition opportunities. When difference isn’t met with decreased opportunity or reward, it isn’t sexism. Women’s bathrooms don’t have urinals, and you don’t see us staging a protest. Why would we want urinals? Now if women couldn’t get contracts because we didn’t have 10k cross country times out of college, then you bet I’d be fighting for access to the 10k. But I don’t see anything the men get for doing 10k that we don’t get doing our own thing.
“If colleges are going to change distances, I think it is still sexist, “showing women what’s best for them” if you just move them up to match men.”
Actually, the defeated Canadian university motion that you were initially responding was to shorten the men’s distance and lengthen the women’s distance, not just “move the women up to match the men.” I would bet that, when the dust settles in a few years, both men and women in Canadian universities will be racing 8K.
Lauren, good conversation you are effectively asking the question that really is seldom asked, what is best for athlete development, to Eddy , I don’t know about NCAA but USATF had a 1550m runner win the National XC Meet about 20 years ago. My observation is that if we want to develop the best 5k-marathon runners over the course of their careers, then racing the shorter distances in college is probably better, anyone recall when Salazar and his Oregon team mates who had never raced beyond 12k jumped up to the marathon, the results were impressive Most of your world class 10k runners mostly raced 5k when they were younger. We ask the collegiates to race pretty much every weekend and the scholarships are T&F so it’s a compromise by design already They’ll have plenty of time in the longer distances as they get older.
Yes, I see it that way too.
Wow — what a well-written and informative article! I really agree with everything you said, especially about doing what’s best for the athletes. I definitely subscribe to the “better to be undertrained and healthy than in top shape and injured” school of thought, and I think that we are seeing a lot of female high school athletes who are wining state titles right now on 30-35 miles per week. Having consistant training, not broken up by constant and reoccurring injury, is really undervalued in the competitive distance running community at the moment. I think that lowering the mileage for college athletes would help us stay mentally and physically healthier, and make the sport more enjoyable in the long term.
Thanks for this piece. I am a scientist, and athlete, who also happens to be female. In both my sporting life, and in my professional life, I am sick and tired of the conversation being focused around how women need to adapt to the male-centric social norms. For example, at conferences I see men loving the podium too much, and garnering attention for being loud and overly confident in their scientific findings. I’m not saying women couldn’t use more confidence in our tone but in this case, the current male-dominated status quo is generally wrong, and we should all be more humble about our work. Your example in sport, and Dr. Vic Jackson’s point is well taken. I think the more we can bring this to bear in our conversations about equality, the more true equality we can ultimately achieve. Keep it up!
Hi Lauren, it’s great that someone with as much influence as you is putting serious thought into this issue and sharing that with us. All across this argument though, probably on both sides, are some flawed assumptions. Or at least, there are several options, not just status quo vs 10k for all. It seems to me that 8k cross-country for men and women addresses most of the issues at hand.
Men and women run the same distances and the message sent is that, yes, women and men are similarly capable. I really believe this is an important factor, possibly the most important in all of this.
In terms of the potential health risks that female runners face at that age, I am not sure (would need to see some research) that racing longer distances is equated with higher incidences of the triad. Anecdotally it makes sense but is it actually true? Or would a runner with a tendency to extremism choose to run more mileage, as opposed to it being the mileage itself that causes the issues? Because not every female runner who runs “high” mileage loses her period, right?
The idea that the training is that much different from 6k to 8k or 8k to 10k is a flaw of coaching. You don’t coach the distance you coach the athlete. So it’s entirely possible to coach runners to 10k races using a variety of methods. Maybe the problem is coaches haven’t been exposed to the research you mention about women having different physiological responses than men. But even in that case, individualised coaching will solve the problem every time. And you can race whatever distance you want in that case.
I agree with Alex that while the question of history is important, change is as much a part of history as tradition. A new distance will likely be established collegiately in Canada (and it would be a first if we got there first!) and the US. It will likely end up as 8k for both genders and we won’t see an increase in injury, or a decrease in participation.
Finally, I do think it should be 8k and not 6k because xc is meant to be an endurance test. The 4k at World Cross was fun, but as you know, it was a failed experiment (probably for several reasons). If middle distance runners are at a bit of a disadvantage racing-wise, that’s ok. They are probably going to be at an advantage relative to middle distance runners who don’t do cross country when it comes time to race indoors and outdoors.
In general, this is awesome. Why not alter WHATEVER standards to make it best for EVERYONE? Raising OR lowering, for men or women, it doesn’t matter which or for whom. Why do I feel a constant need to prove myself to be “just as good as?”
Taking that in regards to body image and eating disorders, the idea of “proving oneself” (and associated thought processes, perception of self and body, and associated behavioral changes, is absolutely not an issue specific to women. Men develop eating disorders as well, however they are not as frequently diagnosed. There is at least one eating disorder treatment program in the country tailored specifically to the needs of athletes, both women AND men.
I don’t have an XC or track background. I swam in high school and college, and took up running in grad school. Is there a particular reason why XC championship distances are different than distances raced in the regular season?
Love your analysis Lauren as always. There were many years in my string of national wins and podium finishes in Canadian Cross Country that I got very close to not starting the women’s race and jumping in to the start the men’s just to prove that women could run farther than the 5k that I typically ran. At worlds, the 5k distance favoured the 1500-3000m women easily and I was a distance kid. I would have rocked at 8-10K cross country but it’s not about what the individual women want, it’s about respect and equality period. The women’s movement has always been about respect and equality, not “getting what the men have”. Inequality is insidious in sport still and you can look at opportunity and salary over a wide range of sports to see that easily. The equalling of distances is about optics and the message for a future generation of female athletes and for women, period. Whether they meet in the middle or get close, a 20′ race versus a 30′ race is simply not equality in sport.
YES.
Also, for the sake of argument, why not have two female races/two male races in Cross (like how track has >1 event). While personally, I like that all females are in the same race, fighting for the same/similar thing, I think this could be a reasonable argument to open up.
Additionally…let’s talk about female heptathlon and male decathlon, female 100m hurdles and male 110m hurdles…there are undoubtedly more examples in sport but these are ones that came to mind for running.
Kelsey
Once again, another well thought out and written piece Lauren. Thank you!! As the mom of both men and women collegiate mid-D runners I’ve seen and felt the challenges associated with the increase in race distance. I’ve questioned it and studied its history and shook my head in the lack of solid reasoning behind the distances. I love, love, love the idea of considering all factors (physical, psychological, historical, etc…) and ultimately having an outcome that puts the athlete’s well being first… regardless of gender!!
Janet
It is unfair to both genders.
People, regardless of gender, prefer to run shorter or longer distances.
Why not allow people to choose the distance they are the best at?
Furthermore, while there may be “science” to back it up, there is clearly a lot of historical gender discrimination in distance running, that needs to be overcome. I was one of the qualifiers for the first women’s marathon trials in 1984. The qualifying time was set based on the top 100 times ever, up until that point. In ONE year, over 250 women made that qualifying time.
What does that tell you?
I agree with everytbing you said. I think the wants of the athletes as well as the ramifications for their physical health and development should be taken into account. Maybe have the men and women run somewhere between 6k – 8k, if not just running the 6k straight up. Then it wouldn’t add extra stress in college during an already stressful time in the academic year. Also, why not add a short course race? A 2k – 4k distance, depending on the long course length, to give more options for people. An 800 meter runner would probably hate cross less if they had a short course option. Plus it would be like the world’s cross country championships used to be before the axed the 4k for whatever reason.
What a great read. The biggest takeaway I found was that in some ways the distance for men and women is in fact arbitrary. I agree very much that for women we have a special history in our sport that I too was saddened to see wiped clean. But in many ways I am not sure that the distances in cross country are set for any true purpose. Having a true discussion about what is best for athletes, men and women in terms of their physiological and psychological development as athletes and people would be pretty progressive.