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Post NCAA's

November 22, 2014 (Afternoon)

Exercise Type: Run

Weather: Plesant weather, nice for the light

Comments:
Ran after NCAA's from both divisions, gave me some saturday motivation after doing random stuff all morning (cooking maybe?).

Thoughts on NCAA's (mostly D1, I followed them most this year).

First off Kelsey Amouth runs my life!! I've seen enought Solon shirts. Solid learning expirience. Gotta build on the preformance for next year.

D1 thoughts

All the favorites won. How often does that happen in sports?? Feel like that in and of itself is kinda un predictible. And for all intents and purposes the 3 out of the 4 favoirtes should be favored to win again next year (Ches is a SO, Avery a Jr, Colorodo loses only 1 senior from its top 5 and redshirted a guy who was 17th last year and has the winning expirience). They return 2 guys from the top 10! Read that again they return 1/5th of the top 10 from this year and 5 All-Americans. Only Michigan St. loses significant pieces of its championship.

That said I believe some of the individual places from Colorodo were inflated due to the slow pace of this race. Amar Mossua is my prime example. You're telling me he is teh 5th best runner in the country. I don't believe it. He ran a great race and is a great runner but I don't think he'll replicate that sort of result in track or even next year in XC nats. Just don't see it happeneing. That said every race Ches is in goes slow and Ches should be around next year... so maybe it's just a repeat of this year pace wise. It'll be interesting to see how things shake out.

Kinda dissapointed in the drama of the races though, and kinda why XC isn't that interesting of a sport to watch. Its no fun to watch 1 person blow out a race and only ever see 1 person on a live stream (happened in D3 and D1 women). Makes it really boring. They try to being the team competation into it which is good. But the team battle is never going to be shown on a live stream and it all happens too quickly for anyone to really notice were one person passing another ended up winning the race for one team over the other.

Conversely it sucks to see a mob of people running slow right together (D1 men). You want to see people battling each other not just generally jogging around. The guy that was leading at 6k ended up getting like 227th. Granted he probably had a bad race but still... I want to see elite athletes run fast, not jog 8k then sprint to the finish. Just makes it look like a huge track race and I can watch plenty of those in track.

ON a lighter note Colorodo's 7th man was like 220th. Wouldn't you like to be that guy?