i'm currently looking at several top law schools and have eligibility left. my pre-law advisor told me running during 1L isn't feasible. was it possible to do well in school and run well? how did you initially approach the coaches at the law school?
LI runner21 wrote:
You get into a routine. I ran D1 and graduated in 4 years then went to law school and continued to run in law school. You just need to break out your day and make a point that 8-10 each night will be at the library.
law school... wrote:
i'm currently looking at several top law schools and have eligibility left. my pre-law advisor told me running during 1L isn't feasible. was it possible to do well in school and run well? how did you initially approach the coaches at the law school?
LI runner21 wrote:
I don't think anyone can answer that truthfully as it applies to you. Just because some people have done it doesn't mean you could do it.
I went to both law and med school and I personally could not have run on a team and competed while in either. I actually seldom even exercised while in either place.
Law school for me was intense - I went to a top 10 school and wanted to make law review, and I studied virtually all the time. We formed a study group that met for a couple of hours each afternoon to go over cases and to try and figure out the reasoning behind study cases, and to challenge one another. Quick dinner and then it was usually many hours in the library poring over new cases, writing briefs, preparing for possibly getting called on in class the next day, etc.
Some of my fellow students were either smarter or faster workers than me, and I know some of them didn't really care about law review or class rank, were from wealthy or connected families where it really didn't matter, etc, and they worked far less, went to parties, spent a lot of time in the cafeteria bull shitting with fellow students, etc. (and some of them have been super successful attorneys and politicians - the straight A guy is not always most successful after school is over....).
You know yourself better than we know you. My experience may not be yours.
sf wrote:
... I went to both law and med school ...
Can you briefly explain why you did this?
That is unusual wrote:
sf wrote:... I went to both law and med school ...
Can you briefly explain why you did this?
I became involved in law school towards the end of my second year in a student pro bono project where we would work with some Harvard Law attorneys who did migrant farmworker law. As part of that, we occasionally would go out on weekends to the migrant camps and talk to the workers, and occasionally try and help them out by giving them a ride to a store or a doctors appointment.
The more I did it, the more I came to realize that my heart really was more into having direct daily contact with people, rather than in a court room or law office. By my 3rd year in law school, I had pretty much made up my mind that I wanted to be a doc.
That was about it. I've never used my legal training and in retrospect, wish I'd never done it, but who knows - if I hadn't done it, my life now would probably be a lot different. Not all of us really know what we want to do. I have a physician friend who is now triple boarded in surgery, anesthesia, and critical care, and he is still fishing around for his real purpose in life....
Sorry, not too brief.
I graduated in four years with excellent grades in a difficult major with honors. I also worked 10-15 hours a week my last two years. I also ran one year in an elite grad school program (I red-shirted my first year). I always did well academically, but I was very careful about never taking a particularly difficult load.
I was a mediocre D1 runner, and I do think my running suffered because of how much energy I put into the academics. I tried to keep up something of a social life as well, although life was mostly academics and running. Probably the biggest problem I had was not sleeping enough, which is absolutely essential to running well.
I think the whole combo can be done, but you have to either be naturally really efficient, or you have to focus on being very, very disciplined. My best running seasons were when I got in excellent routines with studies, work, running, and sleep. That's tough to do when you go from high school, where everything is mapped out for you, to college where you have a lot you need to do but very little forced structure. In some ways, the schedule of practice and work helped force me into better discipline.
You really can't do a ton of all 4 of these: social, school, sleep, and sports. But if you nail down sleep, school, and sports first, you can still get your social in the margins.
You learn to count running with teammates as social interaction time. As long as running isn't seen as an obligation, but as a time of the day to take a break, it is very doable. Granted, workout days never really felt like it was a break, but most days running/practice wasn't anymore demanding than getting together with a group of friends to hangout. I was never really able to figure out how people who did not play sports or work could complain about not having enough time to do school.
You would be surprised how much time gets burned up doing things that could be easily cut out. How many TV shows do you watch that you actually care about? How often do you watch movies or play video games? How much time do you spend on facebook/letsrun? Cutting one movie is 2 hours of time that could be spent studying.