Perth Australia here, so I have no idea how the American system works with school and college XC. At school we could choose cross country as a winter sport which is broken up into Junior (Year 7-9) and Senior (Year 10-12) alongside the likes of soccer (football), hockey, rugby and footy (AFL, good football) and I was one of two people to originally choose cross country in Year 7 in my year, so my school kinda sucked for a while. The season consisted of races against the other 6 schools in the PSA individually and then all-school races such as 3x5km relay or 5x3km relay or the final 8km race for Seniors (Juniors run less). The top 15 runners count in Seniors, top 10 in Juniors with races being 5km and 3km respectively. I was glad to see the team go from not even having 10 runners competing in the Juniors to eventually placing 4th in the Seniors in my final year of school when I was XC captain (though I’m not the fastest runner).
I’m at university now and I’ve maintained a passion for running but there isn’t a university XC competition or any group at uni to join that does something like school did, at least not that I’ve found, which I find really frustrating. We do only have like 4 universities here though, so it’s not quite the same as the US colleges.
My personal best 5km time is 20:01, which isn’t as great as some people in this thread, as I said I’m not the fastest runner. My benchmark time was a 25:20ish three years ago though, so I hope there is still improvement left in me as my times have come down quite a bit. I’m more of a long distance runner, I ran my first marathon a month and a bit ago which taught me a few bits and pieces (Perth Marathon, nice relatively flat course with beautiful scenery along the Swan River if anyone from overseas is thinking about running it next year). I ran the first half in a 1:45:35 which was pretty much dead on 5min/km but then I tweaked my hamstring at about the 24km mark and had to walk for a fair chunk of the rest, did eventually get going again for the last 7km or so and ended up finishing in a 4:43:07. I’m running a half marathon in a months’ time rather than another marathon as I hurt my foot the week after my marathon which derailed my training a bit. Ran a 20:37 5km on the weekend. Hope everyone’s training is going well. Great thread.