Cade Flatt just ran a 1:54 800 at SECs

Flatt wasn’t even on that pathetic 4x4 team they assembled and he had every need to be just for training purposes.

fact he wasn’t on it, I’m almost willing to bet he redshirts outdoor and transfers at seasons end. Sure he saw himself ending 2024 at atleast the Olympic trials not in fayetville in February .

3 guys didnt break 50, one of which was a 52

in the SEC!!!!!

Nobody would've been surprised if Flatt stopped progressing; we all know that progress isn't linear and plenty of high school phenoms aren't able to handle the mental and/or physical stresses of the next level of competition.

But going this far backwards... man. Either he's not physically the same as he was 2 years ago, he's having personal issues that affect his fitness, or the Ole Miss coaching staff is effing up big time.

The answer's probably a combination of the three, a lot of things need to go wrong to turn a 1:46 19yo into a 1:54 21yo. Given how poorly the rest of the Rebels are running, I'm inclined to put most of the blame on the coaches. Hope Flatt can turn it around after a transfer.

I knew Flatt was an idiot after he jogged away the high school 800m record, missing by 0.04. Anyone with the slightest amount of awareness is not going to do that. Going to college was not the right move for him. He's going to have to figure things out.

Injured, sick, coming off injury....? Who ever knows with running. I doubt he's getting slower.

Michael Granville - the HS 800m record holder from '96 - never improved at all at UCLA. He matured early and his big, bulky, heavy-striding body just could not go any faster. At least he tried hard and competed. Flatt was never meant for college and he might never improve as well.

Cade get tf outta there bro! You already showed your loyalty after ya coach left. But now it’s time. You’re too talented for that team.

Yeah it's easy to tell that the coach is at fault. But these ego laden coaches want the credit with success and deflect responsibility with failure. Flatt is a speed guy. He's probably training like a 1500m guy (think 400-1k repeats) without the high mileage of course because he's never handled/done that. So the result is he's lost his greatest asset--speed. He needs to train like an athlete, going to the gym included to work on his strength and flexibility. The fact that he's lost weight/muscle is telling.

The coaches entering him in those events doesn't necessarily mean he's training correctly for them. Flatt's coach might THINK they're training him for the 400-800, but to them that could look like having him do the same workouts as the 8/15 guys but slower and/or with less volume. He still might not be doing workouts which stimulate the right muscle fibers and energy systems that his body is most adapted for.

Yeah and he MIGHT be running 90 minute long runs. But there's no reason to assume that.

Ole miss has a few 400/800 guys (Flatt, Carson, Dropik). The longest distance ran by an 800m runner on the team this year is a 1000m.

EVERYONE is racing like 4-8 guys. There literally aren't any 8-15 guys. So I'm not going to assume they are all accidentally(?) being trained for events that none of them run.

Do you have any evidence? Like a single workout he has done that looks more like a 1500 workout? The fact that you talk about 8-15 guys when they don't have a single one has me 100% sure you're pulling it out of thin air.

Good find Sherlock, what was Flatt's 8k time?

I don't think there's "no way" they're training him like a 8-15 guy. Looking at their top-20 lists, Ole Miss has only 1 guy who makes both lists in the 4 and the 8. That and the fact that Flatt's highschool 400 PR would make him Ole Miss's school record holder shows that those coaches probably don't have much experience coaching a runner like Flatt, at least not successfully. Even if Vanhoy didn't leave, running at Ole Miss was a pretty stupid choice for Flatt.

There's no evidence to suggest it but the poster above you treats it as a settled fact.

He thinks Flatt is training with the 8-15 guys but they literally dont have a single 8-15 guy this year. If I was that wrong I'd just shut up but he is posting through it anyway.

It is a clean split between 400-1000 and 1500-5000 guys with no variance, except the 1200 DMR leg which goes to a miler.

They have two XC coaches that are both track assistants, heavily suggesting two distinct training groups.

They run 4x400s with their four 4-8 guys.

All circumstances point to a focused group of 400-800m runners within the track team, who are technically on the xc team (working with the same coach) but run 0 or 1 xc race all season.

Assumptions about incorrect training principles (ex training the wrong systems, etc) are pure guesses by armchair coaches with no insider information.

Even if coached "wrong", a 1:46 would just become a 1:48 guy. Instead, Flatt is a perma-injured sandbagger who DNFs or jogs in half his collegiate races. That 1:54 is a sign of a quitter, not 'too many V02 max sessions'

You're right, I'm wrong. Flatt is running at a historically distance-oriented school, on the cross country team, but there's definitely NO WAY he's not training like a 4/8 runner because him and another teammate raced one, crappy 600. Totally checks out, and your name definitely doesn't reveal any biases either.

Edit after reading your above post: Again, just because he's running in an 800-focused group doesn't mean he's being coached well. He's running 1:54 because he's been dealing with injuries, and he's most likely injured because he's overtrained by a distance coach who doesn't know what they're doing with a guy like Flatt. There's nothing in the resumes of either XC coach to suggest that they know how to train a speed-based 800 runner like Flatt, and Flatt's results support that.

Ran a 1:49 last week. When was this overtraining? Wednesday?

Cade will be back and better than he was but it's going to take some ups and downs to find what works for him.

Alan Webb had a similar experience and it worked out. Let's not be quick to write someone off because of a few bad races.

Hopefully he learns some humility in the process. This is his desert experience in life and he will return stronger and wiser.

Never would have guess Nico Young running faster than Cade Flatt at 800, based entirely off of 5k training

MIchael Granville did more than just "try hard," he was on a 3:02 4x4 team that won a NCAA championship and won an individual Pac-10 championship. Definitely a letdown after the high school 1:46 but he was a good college runner, and that's something.

Flatt is a looong way away from that level of performance right now.