It's not lonely at the top when "the top" is crammed into a small set of frantic, intimate encounters

Everyday runners, probably less than ever, fail to appreciate how good NCAA runners really are

Last fall’s NCAA Division I Men’s Cross-Country Championships had 250 finishers on the nose. On a 10K course that was at least a half-minute slower than a typical 10K road race, 190 of those 250 finishers, or 76 percent, averaged under five minutes per mile. 2K into the race, all 253 starters were still going, and every one of them was on pace to run under 29:50.

Some of these young men had off days. But every one of them was capable on his best day of cruising through a flat 10K road race in 31:00 (4:59 per mile). Such an effort wouldn’t even qualify as an honest threshold run for many in the field. Yet 31:00 is good enough to win practically any road race in the United States that doesn’t offer significant prize money or its equivalent in visibility. And since this same runner could almost certainly crank out a 14:50 5K with the same investment, he’d win almost every certified 5K on offer as well.

This explains in large part why post-collegiate runners who are good, but not close to elite and probably not equipped to get there no matter what, often spend a year or two racing 5Ks and 10Ks in just those kinds of times, often winning local designated USATF Grand Prix events and series titles, before losing interest and either taking up jogging in earnest or retiring their running shoes outright.

While this apparent abandonment of demonstrated excellence tends to confound observers who started running as adults and see such performances as otherworldly for people without shoe contracts, it’s completely understandable why someone who busted his ass for four or five years to run 13:40 and 28:45 has little interest in racking up far slower times just for grocery money, especially if he’s doing standard adult things like busying himself with career or family expansion. He’s found out what he can do every other weekend while averaging 45 often unstructured and solo miles a week, and knows he’s probably seen his lifetime fitness peak.

But aside from what happens after these runners finish college, the crush of talent a runner experiences as a reward for better and better performances can be overwhelming, leading a lot of college freshmen and freshchicks used to leading the pack to wash out unpretentiously after one or two seasons. But even for those who remain and seek to compete as honorably as possible, it’s a mind-fuck.

Most of you have probably been in a pack of runners in a large road race, with a sea of moving bodies on the pavement in front of you as far as you can see. You may have been on target to meet or exceed a cherished goal and know it’s in the bag. You’re close to exhausted, but it’s that manageable sort of pain resulting from a well-paced, all-out effort. You’re moving steadily past runner after runner.

Then a runner passes you, maybe two or three of them together. Do you respond to this with any sort of inner imperative, such as “I must keep these strangers behind me?” Probably not, unless you happen to recognize one of them as an age-group or other categorical rival. If you’re on goal pace, what other people are doing is beyond your control.

If you have ever raced in an NCAA championship race, even a conference meet, or for that matter taken part in a statewide high-school championship (or Canadian provincial championship), then you know the bane of being surrounded by people as fit or fitter than you and being hellishly aware that your best effort is both expected of you and assured of landing you in no better than, say, 50th or even 100th place.

For some runners, trying to beat everyone around them is automatic, as existential concerns like “Who’s winning this damn thing 800 meters ahead of me?”—which quickly trigger notions like “My place doesn’t matter that much”—are simply foreign to these specimens, to whom every nearby human in a specified competition is simply animated meat to be vanquished in accordance with the proffered rules of fair play. But people lacking an instinctively competitive mindset can be thrown by their first or even second or third exposure to a race field in which they are at best mediocre.

The commentators for this weekend’s New England High-School Championships alluded in both races to the fact that many of the runners toward the middle and back of the field were used to being in the top three or four spots in dual meets throughout the season (I’m liberally paraphrasing). Even when you know you’re about to get your ass kicked by dozens of superior runners, being in a situation to defend an ostensibly middling placing requires an adjustment that some runners simply never make.

I ran in two high-school New Englands myself. I was not well motivated for the first and feeling slightly less tepid as a senior, when the race was delayed by one week thanks to a snowstorm in the Hartford area. But I felt decent in both, and I remember finishing thinking that I’d finished with a good 20 seconds in reserve and had resorted to overly comfortable coasting in the second half of the races. I remember passing a few New Hampshire kids in both races who were usually ahead of me, but at no point did I look 100 meters ahead on the course (about 20 seconds) and start thinking, “I ran all summer so I could beat guys like those, whoever they are and whatever place they’re in.”

My senior year, my team was first at the New Hampshire Meet of Champions. At the New Englands in Wickham Park, most of the snow had disappeared throughout the preceding week, but it was historically cold and a few of us literally almost froze our dicks off. (One of the parents who had traveled with the team starting at 5 a.m. from Concord on the school bus was a registered nurse, but none of the kids scampering onto the bus cradling their frighteningly white bits chose to seek her guidance on an arguably urgent medical matter.) I wound up our second man, as usual, and was 12th from New Hampshire, not great and not awful. Our team wound up tenth out of twenty-four teams (Maine wasn’t yet participating and Massachusetts had given up on the meet fifteen years or so earlier).

When I looked back on those results over the weekend, I realized how different things could have been if all of us had cared a little more that day. We had beaten the team that won the New Englands, Essex Junction, at the Manchester Invitational earlier that season. We had beaten the third-place team, Stevens High, the last time we had raced them two weeks before.

Concord would not have required a miracle to place fourth or fifth that day. What we needed was simply a more exquisitely burnished level of in-the-moment discipline; the ability to make every moment vital and every runner around you, in your mind, the race leader. It’s easy to fight for first or fifth or even tenth place in the right setting, but exactly when it matters most—in a high-parity, high-quality scenario—is precisely when a lot of talented runners with more in reserve than they believe they have could make an enormous difference by forgetting about context and numbers and just red-lining.

How do people who more easily lose focus on top effort when “top effort” translates to an unpalatable finishing place overcome this tendency? I haven’t raced a lot of cross-country as a full (over-21) adult, but I have clarified a few ways to overcome this in long road races and other settings.

One strategy is to always focus on someone or some point on the horizon. If you can see for several hundred yards, it’s better to pick a more proximal point. Keep your eyes on one or more runners who look comfortable. Note which people ahead of you have their heads up and are focused on what’s coming and which runners have already settled for an okay-but-not-ballbuster effort. Bear in mind that some of the people around you, even if you all seem like also-rans, probably have personal bests you’d be gleeful to possess—and that they are, or should be, thinking the same about you.

This kind of determination to simply keep up with a battalion of intimidatingly fast bodies can be developed along with any other competitive skill. Obviously, good coaching helps, but a lot of high-school runners are guided by men and women who, while armed with adequate book knowledge, simply lack the experience to convey how important it is to value every step you take in a race on behalf on not just your teammates but what you’ve worked for.

When you race for a championship, it’s the most important thing you’ll ever do. That day. Probably. It helps to remember that in sports, which are not warfare, you are really competing with people rather than against them. Not one NCAA champion in history has ever looked back and wished that his or her competitors had let up at some point and made the whole winning thing easier. It’s all about finding personal limits and deciding on the day to refine them by just enough to matter. The difference might make your team land on the podium instead of in seventh place, but more than that it will make you a more complete runner. I myself only got to that point a few times, relatively late in life (well, I was over thirty).

Savor it all. My 56th place at the 1987 New Englands could have been 36th or 136th, but it will forever be 56th. And while I “like” to think I packed it in somewhere around my second trip past an inexplicably occupied bird coop in Wickham Park on a single-digit temperature day, I also remember snot and spit flying in the high winds as I ran toward the finish line trying to hold off some rando in a green uniform and extremely wooly mittens.

It was work, and I was pleased to do it. I still am.

As an entertaining footnote, only in the last week did I gain access to full results of my New Englands races. I noticed a funny thing: The same kid who beat me by 0.3 seconds and one place my junior year got me by 2.8 seconds the next year (when he was coming off a win at the Vermont D-II State Championships). On the other hand, I showed that Sylvestre kid who was boss after all.

(Social share photo: 2022 New England girls’ runaway champion Ruth White of Orono, Maine.)