Take note, broader NCAA cross country community: at last weekend’s 72nd Cross Internacional Zornotza in Amorebieta-Etxano, Spain, both the men’s and women’s races were contested on the exact same course. Yes, the women and men ran the same distance, which is neat, and a topic we’ve dipped our toes into before.

But this week’s fixation on cross country distance has to do with the distance itself—which was proudly listed as 8.7 kilometers. You might assume that converts to a standard distance in miles, but you’d be wrong… unless there’s something significant about 5.4 miles we don’t know about. It seems this is just a historic race that has at various points in time held races over longer and shorter distances, but settled on 8.7km as the sweet spot.

Very well. Burundi’s Egide Ntakarutimana won the men’s race in 25:19 and Likina Amebaw of Ethiopia, broke the tape for the women in 28:43.

Are those good times for an 8.7-kilometer cross country race?

Probably!

Ntakarutimana is the Burundian national record holder over 5000m and Amebaw was the 2026 5000m world leader.

But also… who cares? It’s cross-country. Time doesn’t matter. And the simplest way to make sure time doesn’t matter in cross country racing is to avoid the trappings of the standard distances contested in the NCAA—your 5- or 6- or 8- or 10-kilometer options—because these inherently invite comparison across courses, which cheapens the very identity of the sport.

We all know that looking at a time an athlete posted on a dubiously measured, bone-dry 8km course that’s been steamrolled and contains minimal turns is not equivalent to what their competition ran across the country through a mountainous bog in a Nor’easter. And yet, we talk about cross country times in a vacuum, instead of merely as a way to gauge how quickly a particular course ran on a given day. This invariably leads to a nation-wide arms race to make courses faster.

The professional European model avoids this—incidentally—by throwing athletes onto 9.28km, 9.707km, 9.3km, and all other lengths of courses, and continuing to hold meets that have existed for 70+ years. But what the NCAA lacks in quirked up, old-as-hell racing, it more than makes up for it with something the World Athletics circuit lacks: a truly meaningful team component.

The drama and intrigue of a fifth—or, if you’re a real sicko, sixth—runner determining the outcome of a major invitational trumps just about anything you’ll see on any cross-country course on the planet. So why not also ensure that the cross-country courses hosting these moments are, well… actually cross-country courses? Ones with variable terrain and mud and hills people genuinely fear.

The NCAA need not roll out bizarro distance courses or change its stated championship distances to achieve this goal. Meets should just list their actual distances. If a race is really only 7.9km or 4.9km, go ahead and say it! Lean into the notion of course character! There’s less incentive for another meet to morph itself into a speedway when it knows definitively the times posted elsewhere in the country weren’t run over 8km or 5km. And similarly, if your notoriously slow course is the way it is because it’s a touch long, congratulations—you’ve got yourself a beautiful 8.2km or 6.1km cross country venue capable of attracting big name programs that might think their 10,000m runners would benefit from the extra distance.

XC isn’t even unique in its love of uniqueness. Something major-league baseball does that is very cool is that every stadium is slightly different. Hitting a homer in Denver isn’t the same as hitting one in Boston. As sports in general become less art, more science, seemingly more every year, let’s look for the little things that keep things chaotic and non-optimized.

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