Collegiate women's running: Some encouraging numbers
And reflections on some truly ridiculous shit
One of the prevailing narratives imposed on the running world when the Nike Oregon Project folded last year is that women are so often subject to the coaching of lecherous, abusive or uncomprehending men that the sport requires an overhaul — basically, parallel systems for women and men — if female distance runners are to be given a real opportunity to flourish.
Because I have never known a collegiate runner who hasn’t experienced moderate-to-serious difficulties at various points during the ride — I mean, even people who are hooked on running admit that running often, maybe always, sucks — individual anecdotes like my own below are almost worthless in trying to determine what the NCAA system as whole is producing. Data might be better. But what kind?
One objective way to assess the utility of the NCAA environment is to look at the number of athletes who reach a fixed time standard in a given event from year to year, like 16:00 for 5,000 meters. If more and more athletes are establishing themselves as true elites by the time they graduate, that’s a strong point in favor of “the system,” though not its wholesale adjudicator. If not, something might be up.
I used TFRRS, the database of which spans 2010 to the present, to compile these factoids:
In the 2010 outdoor season, nine women broke 16:00 for 5,000 meters, with the 95th-best performer at 16:31. By 2015, the corresponding numbers were 29 and 16:22; in 2019, these had improved to 39 and 16:17. (I would have used 2020 to allow for exactly equal intervals, but…)
The number of women who broke 33:00 for 10,000 meters in the same seasons: 3, 8, 12. The 95th-place time cut-offs in those years were 35:25, 34:44 and 34:32. (This isn’t a great event to use because so few 10,000s are run in-season, but they’re pretty scarce affairs to begin with.)
I was going to continue this analysis with other distance events, but this seemed superfluous. For whatever reason, the best women runners in the NCAA are plainly getting faster. And while this is not unassailable methodology, it has more to offer than “Those old white guys again” does.
My own arguments against myself here would include a progressively greater number of foreign athletes entering the NCAA, often as seasoned international competitors used to the greater training and racing rigors of the U.S. collegiate system and therefore more resistant to whatever subpar coaching and mentorship is foisted on them as student-athletes; and a higher number of athletes in the system overall. These arguments, even if true, seem insufficient to deny the significant of the observed trend.
The flip side of the bumper crop of faster performers is the high number of inevitable or highly unpreventable washouts, from people like me who had little business at even bad D1 programs in the first place to blue-chippers who never pan out. As satisfying as this might be to blame this reality on “coaching” or “the system,” I’m not sure that most of the onus lies on coaches in these situations, exclusive, obviously, of clear-cut incompetence or malevolence. You know those kids on your high-school team who never ran on the weekends, mailed in workouts, but never caused trouble and hung around for three or four years of half-steam racing? If you’re a not-quite-all-state performer at the high-school level in most parts of the country, that nondescript roster-filler likely to be you on any decent college team. A kid who runs a series of 26:00 8Ks, good enough to win a lot of local-yokel road races but pedestrian in college, or his distaff counterpart at the 18:30 5K level, may just grow weary of no longer being “good” and either drop from the team or play out the string as a de facto mascot, even if he or she never incurs a serious injury or undergoes other tangible setbacks.
Sadly, it’s not the job of college coaches to spend a lot of time on people who appear to be lost athletic causes. At a serious program, the only real concern of the coach is winning, or at least appearing to try to win, titles. My tireless work and gregarious nature bring me into frequent contact with current coaches and college runners, so I have a reasonable idea of what the training landscape looks like. And face it — even in good hands, you need to be a special kind of athlete to make it on an elite NCAA team. An “off day” might mean a train of 20 runners steaming by you in the last mile of a conference meet, even if you try to fight all of them off. There are virtually no easy days for, say, a varsity Pac-12 runner, at least not in the sense a typical half-decent road-racer sees them. Every coach at that level knows how to stress his athletes, and getting to the podium means finding a formula that gets about seven or eight people at a time to their peak collective fitness, with mumbled apologies to those left in various states of mental and physical infirmity along the way.
Although my own long-ago college running days were somewhat typical in that I failed to thrive after my freshman year, I cannot in good conscience hold my coach, though he was in fact abysmal at his job, accountable for much of this. I developed a lot of bad sleeping, eating and drinking habits almost immediately after I showed up on campus; if you stop to think about that combination for a few minutes, you can probably see how it might present physiological obstacles to sporting success, and that a coach can’t be expected to intuit all of these magically. Even as I tell myself this, though, man, he really did blow chunks.
At 18, I was naive about people older than me, but not so much so to keep me from determining soon after being assigned a locker that my coach was not tasked by his superiors with winning in any sense, or with anything specific other than driving the team van to Boston or Hanover, N.H. when a bus was not required. He treated his job as a sinecure, most likely for 90 percent of the many years he was there. Boggling as it sounds, we never got any kind of instructions for the summer other than “keep in shape.” He had been a throws guy, and while I’ve seen some weight men and women serve beautifully as distance coaches (though never the reverse), I don’t think he knew much about the javelin, either. I wish I could say he made up for this with bonhomie and approachability, but all he was really good for was comic relief, usually at the wrong times.
We never did double workouts, but during my sophomore year, coach got the idea (not online; this was in 1989) to institute 20 minutes of pool running at 6 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. We were told, hollowly as always, that those who failed to show up would be kicked off the team. The three or four times I went, about half of the men’s team was there, meaning about six of us, never the same half. The smell of booze was usually powerful at poolside for these monster sessions, and like a kick to the face in a Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker vehicle, it was impossible to tell which small group of carcasses it was emanating from. The women had a different coach, but were also given this assignment, and, despite not having the same team spirit of weekday-morning hangovers, their attendance was similarly shoddy. This experiment was abandoned before the end of the season, only to be tried and abandoned again over the winter.
My sophomore year was leavened by the addition of a free spirit who was that one teammate whose form was the worst for miles and who seemed to suffer the torment of Christ himself in every hard workout, yet was a total money performer. He truly loved to compete and was the happiest guy around, and also a wheeler-dealer who liked to pull various stunts for attention and profit. Throughout the cross-country season, he was secretly training for the New York City Marathon. Although I’m no longer completely sure, I think the race fell just after the conclusion of another unremarkable campaign for the varsity. Coach saw the 2:38 result in USA TODAY, which printed a list of each state’s top finishers, and declared him off the team, apparently a formality since he was suiting up for indoor track within a week or two.
He had a great indoor season by our standards, meaning he almost broke 15:00, and then found himself in trouble again for racing during the season. This time, it was an eight-miler up the lake, some kind of maple syrup thing. He won, and coach busted him again because, for all his vocational laziness, he read a lot of newspapers and this time the results had been printed in the local rag. This time, though, he sort of punked my teammate by kicking him off the team right after a race, by design. And it was a bad race, mostly because I decreed that it would be so.
Our spring season was short and conducted almost exclusively in snow, rain and wind, and our home meets could only draw small schools like Middlebury, which had smarter kids than we did but even shittier runners, and Norwich Military Academy. We had all been dumped into the 1,500 and 5,000 on a dank, drizzly-ass day, and because my buddy couldn’t be bothered with math when in the throes of pre-race excitement, I demanded sotto voce on the starting line that he take it out in 61-62, and promised I would take over from there, which I had no honest intention of doing no matter the pace. That’s a perfectly reasonable opening lap for most collegiate 1,500s, but represented suicide for us clowns.
I don’t think Eric did anything much different after the gun went off other than dip his head a little more than usual and skitter off the line, a muppet-like construct of pipe-cleaner limbs, a hair more energetically than was customary. We weren’t 30 meters into this farce before someone behind us yelled “What the fuck!” for no apparent reason. Eric took this as a signal to speed up and move into lane two, which I also did. The “plan” held for a lap, 62-63. The rain picked up just then, which was great for a field of marginal laggards who’d been tricked into a devastating opening 400. It seemed to take forever for a Middlebury kid to go by, and there should have been a lot more of this, but I seem to remember a decent group of us splashing across the finish line in around 4:13. Within seconds, coach was berating Eric for his participation in the Sap Run. Few people observing this understood what the hell was going on, but I did. I have laughed during track races before, and also in the immediate aftermath, but this is the only time I can remember laughing through so much of both.
I hope you can understand why I treasure this 4:13 1,500 so much. A photo taken of a group of Catamounts rigging around the final turn of the race in perfect dumbass harmony wound up in the 1990 UVM yearbook, and it included both me and my friend Mike, who passed away in June.
That episode ended Eric’s spring campaign, but was only part of a build-up to an even better dynamic between him and coach. My junior year, Eric’s main goal for the cross-country season was to better his performance at the NYC Marathon. Being the sort of teammates who pulled together and strategized when outside interests threatened to scuttle our shot at, say, cracking the top 10 at the New Englands, a group of us made plans to stay at Mike’s house in New Jersey and watch the marathon. We did, in the vicinity of the Queensboro Bridge, and Eric ran a sterling 2:29 and change.
Unlike the corresponding weekend the previous fall, our season wasn’t over yet; we still had the IC4A Championships at Lehigh University the following Saturday. And unlike the previous fall, coach was actively looking for NYC Marathon results. When he found them, he was livid, but since throwing Eric off the team never seemed to deliver a meaningful lesson, he decided to punish him by making him run a hilly 10K six days after an all-out marathon instead. Eric wound up as our top runner at Lehigh even though the team as a whole performed well. He still holds at least one school record — I mean the kind you can look up. I may hold a few others.
That race outside Philadelphia was one of the last I suited up for in college. I’d had a rough junior fall for a variety of unforeseeable reasons, made worse by increased drinking. After a few dismal races, I approached coach in his office and tried to start a conversation, but got nowhere. I sort of broke down, and couldn’t really articulate what the issues were. It would be years before I could do that in any setting, but this guy was never going to be that receptive guy unless you were on a winning streak. After a grotesque 3,000 at Dartmouth in January, I turned in my uniform and quit the team without a word. I heard nothing from coach, although he asked about me at Monday’s practice. I wasn’t the only one at the school whose college running career ended this way. This seems weird to me now, but didn’t at the time, and I can see why.
Another stark memory from that era is of the coach threatening to pull the van over on I-89 after someone’s particularly eye-watering post-race farting. Whoever the non-confessing culprit was, he had been slowly filling the van with toxic effluvia starting near Concord and progressing toward Lake Sunapee, where Steve Tyler was then known to occasionally party with his Aerosmith bandmates. When this almost palpable cloud of what smelled like sun-baked possum worked its way to the driver’s throne, coach began dropping f-bombs and issuing noisy directives over the sound of the country music he liked for people to plug their assholes; I believe these, unlike most of his bluster, were serious directives. He refused to let anyone open windows because it was January, and most everything on these vans was usually broken, spirits most of all. I could see his angry eyes in the rear-view mirror as he scanned the rear-view mirror for clues, and all he was seeing was heads disappearing into shirts and ducking behind the seats in front of them in a pointless effort to hide puppy-chuffs and wheezes of make-it-stop laughter. The silent farting continued unabated and unchallenged from on high over the N.H.-Vermont border, by now with other assholes probably adding to the olfactory cacophony. I know this is pathetic, but it would have been less so had coach actually made someone walk back to Burlington from someplace like Montpelier or Quechee Gorge. (I later linked the source of the farting to someone with a habit of fingering peanut butter out of the jar into his mouth on most of these rides, and also singing snippets of Broadway show tunes, but never turned him in.)
I won’t say I’m thankful for how my collegiate running turned out or who was in charge of it, and if the variables had been different, maybe I would have struggled more in earnest, more out in the open. But although I didn’t have a good coach, I can’t blame him for most of my burgeoning problems at the time. Also, not a lot of guys conclude their college days with a 9:30 3K and go on to run 2:24 for the marathon and sub-15:00 for 5K at age 34; having a slate of preposterously weak college bests gave me more motivation to keep going later on, as did a cheerful aversion to full-time, on-site employment whenever I could arrange this.
Returning to the original point about the allegedly ramshackle state of young women’s running: If I didn’t follow the sport, and I’m not even sure I really do, I would wonder why it took the arduous process of suspending Alberto Salazar — who probably didn’t and doesn’t care, other than not liking losing in any guise — from the sport to reveal the existence of an endemic problem of clueless or dictatorial male coaches. I might even surmise that the idea sweeping change is needed was grounded more in the search for a problem to magically solve than in a quest for a genuine solution.
Fortuitously, I was tasked this week with compiling a complete list of D1 NCAA head cross-country coaches — around 340 of them — and was reminded of how many women have, over the past five to ten years, become not just head coaches of both male and female collegians, but directors of entire men’s and women’s programs. These are — mostly, anyway — professionals who share information, do research, and pursue best practices, often in data-driven ways.
While there are always going to be problems with bad coaches, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that “the system” is in need of an overhaul — or if it is, that the people making this claim have any unique or unexplored ideas concerning how to go about it. Maybe at some point we* will be offered a more complete explanation of how the NCAA system is failing women runners, and at least the nuts and bolts of how this will all be repaired.