Mt. Sac New Course Analysis
Mt. SAC’s golden era was 2014-2018 when individuals and teams were setting records seemingly in every sweeps event across all divisions. Austen Tamagno, Claudia Lane, and Philip Rocha ran the course with impunity, posting times that no one has come close to in the last 5 years. New construction at the college, COVID, and the re-establishment of Mt. SAC as the southern section CIF post season venue all conspired to tamp down competition in subsequent years. The new course is an attempt to re-establish the event as the premier elite XC race, first by adapting a certified 3-mile course and then by reducing the difficulty of the course with the elimination of the notorious “Poop-Out Hill”. So, mission accomplished?
Our analysis looked at 3 different aspects of the new course versus the post-construction (2020) “old” 2.93 course:
Analysis of overall average times for the new 3-mile course versus adjusted* average times for the 2.93 course
Analysis of average time by percentile (top 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%) for the two courses
Analysis of top times for the new ‘24 “Saddle” section versus “Poop-Out Hill”
Our analysis looked at all boys Friday and Saturday performances from 2024 and 2023 based on postings in athletic.net.
Before we get into the detailed analysis, in summary it should be noted that average ‘24 new course performances were slower, across the board. In talking to some of the principal architects of the course change I’m guessing this came as somewhat of a surprise; the thinking being that a .07 mile course extension (approximately 113 meters, average time 29.4 seconds) would be more than offset by the elimination of “Poop-Out”. That didn’t happen and the table below provides proof; 79.8% of all boys ran faster than 20 minutes in 2023 while only 65.5% ran faster in 2024 (for City boys it was 71.2% and 55.7% respectively).
Parsing this same data out by percentiles shows that across all performances levels the new course ranges from 18.2 to 30.3 seconds slower:
If we look at adjusted* ‘23 Mt. Sac performances compared to ‘24 performances, the difference is uncannily close; less than a second for ALL runners as well as City runners:
All Runners-Boys:
Average Time 2024: 20:29.5
Average Adjusted* Time 2023: 20:29.3
City Runners-Boys:
Average Time 2024: 20:49.6
Average Adjusted* Time 2023: 20:48.8
*Adjusted times factor the 2.93 average times for all runners to a 3.00 mile equivalency
This suggests that the course change to include the “Saddle'“ and avoid “Poop-Out” had little impact on performances and that the time differences between new and old course are exclusively due to the extended new-course length. That’s somewhat true but consideration should be given to the fact that the .07 mile extension is flat (and mostly track) and so using a factor based on overall course time to calculate to approximate the .07 extension (2.93 miles to 3.0 miles) probably overstates the Adjusted 2023 times. I would deduct a couple of seconds off of the adjusted times and with that this initial analysis reflects that the new “Saddle” route is slower than “Poop-Out”.
For our deep dive analysis on the “Saddle” we looked at the top 10 runners in the 2022, 2023 and 2024 Team Sweeps races and identified their splits from the start of the Airstrip (approximately 1.5 mile point) to the 2-mile marker. Except for the course extension, this is the only change between the 2 courses. The tables below identify the runners and their splits for each year and race and it’s clear that the new “Saddle” route is slower than the previous “Pop-Out Hill” route:
