what you Posted about Anna Maxwell 3200m 10:24 after Arcadia was Wrong. CCS Championships She Doubled with 2.5 Hour break 4:42 1600m and 10:22 3200m also State 4:50 1600m Trials, 4:47 1600m Finals and Came Back in 10:25 3200m! 100 plus Degree Weather Both Days. After Arcadia She Was Doubling all the Way to State. Very Hard to Do In California, a 1st Place and 3rd Place finish at State in Cali.

Agreed on the divisions causing too much fragmentation in CA races. It can be hard to gauge performances by strong runners in D4 or D5 races, as they are often soloing their runs, and who knows if they would run faster (or crumble) if they had someone to race against.

As for Shehadeh's fall and recovery - that's the first I'd heard of it; very impressive! Thanks for pointing that out.

Bill Meylan, on , said:

Not That Guy, on , said:

Thanks for the correction on the Stanford Invite divisions ... I wish the California girls could race head-to-head more often than seems possible due to the divisional setup.

The Girls Footlocker race ... In a post-race interview, Anoush Shehadeh (who finished 4th) said she took a "face-plant" and fell back to next-to-last place early in the race ... Watching some video replays of the race on MileSplit, Anoush Shehadeh was indeed gapped behind the field in next-to-last place in the opening 800 meters ... she can be seen to steadily move up throughout the race and finish a very strong 4th ... It was a super effort that deserves some praise!

A couple minor clarifications: Maxwell had the fastest time of the day at Stanford, but both she and O'Keeffe won their respective races (quote below implies Maxwell beating O'Keeffe in direct competition, which wasn't the case). At Mt. Sac, O'Keeffe won by 20 seconds over a strong field and essentially solo'd the last two miles, so not sure that her race/effort was much different from Maxwell's similar victory.

In any event, both had fantastic seasons, and it will be interesting to see them compete in track this season. I predict Maxwell has edge at 1600 meters and O'Keeffe is slightly better at 3200.

Bill Meylan, on , said:

Thank for the quick reply Watchout and Meylan. I love what you guys do and like you said you two are usually pretty close. That's why it was surprising for me to see NXN so different.

It's interesting to see how both of you approach speed ratings.

Thank you for all you guys do for high school running.

RunSpokane, on , said:

As Watchout notes above, we use somewhat different methods and I think his method is completely valid and appropriate ... In general, we are fairly close in our assessments ... The difference in the NXN Boy's ratings is probably due somewhat to the methods, but also how I view the race as a handicapping assessment ... I approach NXN and Footlocker a bit differently than typical races during the course of a season and look for several potential different factors.

Assessing NXN is compounded by the enormous variability in the speed and conditions of Portland Meadows in December ... The difference in speed over the frozen tundra of 2013 and the swamp of 2012 is over 2 minutes (that's huge) ... and the variability in prior years is all over map ... It's not surprising that different people will have different assessments at times ... So the assessment of NXN is based almost entirely on assessing the runners as (1) individuals and (2) groups of runners.

Graphical evaluation is an important part of my methodology in comparing races ... I use it as one method of deriving a race adjustment ... I derive a separate race adjustment by comparing individual runners and teams to their speed ratings of prior races and then combine the two adjustments to derive the final speed ratings for the race.

I treat NXN a bit differently because a fair of number of runners run poor races at NXN compared to prior races (more so than seasonal races) and I am not forgiving in making that assessment ... It wasn't nearly as bad on the frozen tundra compared to the swamp of 2012, but it's still there ... I go through a process of excluding poor-performing runners and/or teams, and that exclusion process lowers the speed ratings somewhat because the remaining runners don't rate quite as good with the poor-performers removed.

I also go through an iteration process where I remove one or more complete teams from the results and rate those results separately for comparison ... For example, remove Gig Harbor and all teams that finished 12th or lower (teams finishing 2-11 "might" give a decent assessment on the speed assessment, but it requires other iterations).

Doing that, my 2013 NXN Boy's assessment was in-between whole numbers ... I like my race adjustment to be a multiple of three because I use a linear scale where 3 seconds equals 1 speed rating point for 5K races ... So Kai Wilmot became 199.0 rather rather than 200.0 (I am not forgiving at NXN).

RunSpokane, on , said:

For my part, it's probably two things:

1. I'm more dependent on what runners ran at NXR and State meets to influence how I view the NXN results (I know Meylan looks at that as well, but I don't think it's the biggest factor in developing his ratings - graphing the race plays a more important role in his system than in mine)

2. I only separate boys and girls ratings when the results suggest there is a notable difference in how fast the races were - and this race, to me, suggested a difference of 4-4.5 seconds at most, which wasn't enough for me to really worry about (that's within what I consider to be the margin of error, as it's only a difference of about 0.5%), especially considering when I looked at the ratings for athletes I kept good track of and saw that they tended to match a bit better (in the top half of each race) with the more combined rating, rather than the separated ratings. Note that the 200.0 marks for my girls ratings and his girls ratings are pretty similar (15:06 vs. 15:07.31) -- so any difference in the girls ratings, beyond 0.4 points, is due to my using a multiplier system rather than a straight +/- system (re: my ratings are 0.7 points higher for Efraimson, so at that level the multiplier vs. +/- system accounted for about a second's worth of difference in the girls ratings; for Courtney Smith, it was about 0.8 points, as it was a minute further from the 200.0 mark).

Watchout and Meylan,

Why do your ratings for the boys NXN differ by so much? How did each of you choose your 200 mark?

watchout, on , said:

I also agree ... Fiona O'Keeffe is a huge talent, so I expect her track PRs will be lowered significantly in the coming seasons.

With respect to cross country, I consider Fiona O'Keeffe and Anna Maxwell to be relatively close in performance levels ... Maxwell did beat O'Keeffe handily at the Stanford Invite in late September (by 16 seconds), but O'Keefe did run 2 seconds faster at the Mt. SAC Invite and 9 seconds faster at the California State Meet ... However, in those races, Anna Maxwell was in different divisions than O'Keeffe and Maxwell won by huge margins with NO competition, while O'Keeffe had good competition to push her in both races ... One CA coach thought I should re-rate Maxwell's State Meet race because Maxwell's Division IV race was run at 1:00pm in the afternoon when it was warmer as compared to the Division I race at 8:30am.

Anna Maxwell finally had the opportunity to run against top runners at Footlocker Nationals and she ran very well in finishing 5th ... But Tessa Barrett did beat her by 23 seconds.

I'm still wondering how good Tessa Barrett actually is ... I think Barrett finished Footlocker with something "left in the tank" ... I don't think she knows her actual ability at this point in time, but she's very competitive .... A growing number of people believe she is capable of running competitively in an XC race with the top three from NXN ... Barrett did not displace them from the top of the rankings, but she has certainly made her presence known.

I knew virtually nothing about Tessa Barrett until she popped a huge performance at a PA invitational ... She was on crutches a year ago due to an injury ... she amazingly returned to run some indoor races and finished 4th at Indoor Nationals in the 5000 meters (16:42.99) losing to Wesley Frazier and Erin Finn by only 25 seconds when the National Indoor record was set ... Barrett set track PRs in outdoors at 1600m (4:55.63) and 3200m (10:25.16), and finished 4th in the Penn Relays 3000m (9:40.45) ... So her success in XC is not really that much of a surprise IF you knew who she was.

By comparison, Anna Maxwell has track PRs of 4:43.01 (1600m) and 10:10.51 (3200m) ... That 10:10.51 was run at the Arcadia Invite and her next best time at 3200m is 10:24.29 (nearly the same as Barrett's PR).

newfan, on , said:

I agree: 5:03.75/10:40.17 to 10:13-10:14 would be a HUGE jump if it was completely indicative of where she was last year at her best. A more reasonable jump would be something like 10:20-10:25 to 10:13-10:14.