By David Melly
December 18, 2024
The holidays are a time for celebration and gratitude, so we’d hate to start this newsletter off on a negative note. But with so much… shall we say, room for improvement… in the sport that could be driven by powerful governing bodies, we’re going to do it anyway. Here’s this week’s old men yelling at clouds contention: the fact that the United States has one national cross country championship in December then another in January is wild.
First, let’s focus on the upside: Club Nats rocks. The USATF Club Cross Country Championship, usually held in early- to mid-December at rotating venues from Tacoma, WA, to Tallahassee, FL, is a beloved year-end celebration for a wide range of runners. The women’s open championship featured Allie Buchalski and Brooks Beast teammate Kayley DeLay outkicking the Hasz twins of BAA, but it wasn’t a track-only affair – 2:22 marathoner Emma Bates rounded out the top five just eight weeks after her 11th-place finish in Chicago.
The fastest finisher overall this year, men’s 10km champ Kenneth Rooks, has an Olympic silver medal in the steeplechase. Rounding out the field was Joyce Hodges-Hite of Atlanta Track Club, who at 87 years young, covered the master’s 6km course in 1:12:46. Literally no other race in the world celebrates that kind of range.
With 1,416 finishers across five races this year, it’s a real Goldilocks race – large and visible enough to be worth investing time and resources, but manageable enough that hundreds of cities and courses around the country could conceivably handle the burden of hosting.
But here’s the weird thing. Despite the big names up top, solid fields throughout, and it being a beautiful reflection of the dedicated running community at large, this final cross country race on everyone’s calendars each year is not the real national championship. No, that’s the other race: the USATF XC Championships, the next edition of which is scheduled for January 11, 2025 in Lubbock, Texas.
There are slight differences between the two: Club Nats runs 6km for women vs. 10km; U.S. XC features a junior race, etc., but if you’re looking at the USATF calendar and thinking to yourself, “hey, isn’t this redundant?” you’d be correct.
U.S. XC tends to be a much smaller affair, in part because it overlaps more directly with the indoor track season during a time when the top distance running talent in the country is fully locked in on track. Despite that, it also serves as a selection race for the World XC Championships in years when that championship is contested. (It was annual until 2011 then changed to biennial, then it got messed up by pandemic-related delays, but is now back to every two years: the next is in 2026.)
Club XC used to serve as a selection race for the Great Edinburgh Cross Country Festival, but that race went the way of the dodo in 2018. U.S. XC has individual prize money but no team prize; Club Nats currently offers team prize money alone.
So what would it look like to combine championships? Well, it would probably look a lot like Club XC with the addition of a handful of junior racers and a few more pros. The marginal costs wouldn’t be significant: in 2024, three of the seven races at U.S. XC had fewer than 50 finishers and all but one had fewer than 100. It would actually probably look a lot like Olympic Marathon Trials – a popular and proven championship format where the selection of six Olympians happily coexists with an entertaining and boisterous sub-elite race. And unlike road races, where permits, road closures, and police details can be a significant burden for a host city, cross country races are comparatively cheap to put on.
If nothing else, the American cross country season happens in the fall, dammit! And the national final should act as a satisfying conclusion to the racing year, not as a strange dangling appendage that doesn’t quite kick off the new year nor wrap up the previous one.
If there’s a compelling reason to keep two separate national cross country championships beyond maintenance of the status quo, let us know because we’re coming up empty. In the interest of focusing on the positive, let’s not think about this change as nixing the pro championship; we’re simply giving Club Nats the due attention and respect it’s earned. If the happy marriage of the two eventually turns sour, USATF can always split them up again – but until we’re proven wrong, let’s double down on a meet that people like and give them more of a good thing.
David Melly
David began contributing to CITIUS in 2018, and quickly cemented himself as an integral part of the team thanks to his quick wit, hot takes, undying love for the sport and willingness to get yelled at online.
