Help Me Hit Princeton Walk On Times!

You should work with a coach over the rest of the year - but there are no secrets. Run a lot, don't get hurt, don't race the workouts, make the races hurt.

Anyone can do 90% of the work without a good coach.

As an aside, this just adds to my loathing of title 9.

A girl can get on the Princeton team with an 80% age graded time. Eyeballing the xc roster, the slowest fr boy is at 86%.

It's a stupidly enforced rule and needs to go.

And yes there is a fr girl on the wxc roster with an 11:21 3200 time, which is just 80%.

Princeton needs to let slow girls in to make up for accepting the slow-witted boys (rojo) of the past.

You've more or less answered your own question -- you dropped your 5k PR by over a minute following a solid summer of training. So now you want to put together a solid winter of training. The first thing to do is to talk with your new coach.

Have you let your new coach know about your goal times? If so, you should let her know ASAP and see if she feels comfortable in helping you reach them. If she is not, is there a boy's running coach that could assist in your training? And would your coach be ok if you worked with them one to two times a week?

I think you're on a good heading so far. Be mindful on what you consume though - make sure you have a balanced diet (lean proteins, fruits, vegetables, low sugar, healthy fats) and that you DO eat (eating less overall does not make you faster - it makes you more susceptible to getting hurt). Remember to get enough rest and recovery and try to limit the amount of time you're running on very hard surfaces (i.e. roads) as they can kill your legs or you could get injured from slipping on ice (if that is a concern in your area).

Don't be surprised if you don't hit your goals in your first meet or two of the season. Indoors can last until March and since you're coming off of XC, your body can burn out by early outdoors if you rush it too soon. Be patient.

I hope you get in, but don't feel like it's the end of the world if you don't. Ivies have low acceptance rates in general. If you don't get in, keep aiming towards those walk on goals - they could possibly help you get on the team you do ultimately make for college and it's a good positive mental boost to end your high school career to hit those goals that you set (and if it helps out the overall team result in the end, even better - you could improve team morale and that mindset could continue after you've graduated).

You have some good advice so far.

While it is not enough to significantly drop your goal times because these things just don't work linearly, if you have improved only 60 seconds for 5k, you should have improved roughly 60% or 36 seconds over 3000m and 30% or 18 seconds for 1500m, suggesting that you will get both.

As for training, you can never go too far wrong with a Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring of Malmo:

http://www.bunnhill.com/BobHodge/rtp3.htm

Once your season arrives, adding races and not changing the Malmo workouts, will bring you to a peak. Is this plan ideal, NO, but it will leave you hungry to race hard which is important senior year when you have so much going on.

Good luck with Princeton.

I'm going to b$tch and moan for a moment here:

At another Ivy League school, a buddy of mine was told he couldn't walk on with a 4:31 mile, whereas a girl was welcomed to the women's team with open arms who can't break 6:00 for the mile.

Parity? I think not.

Hoo Boy wrote:

I'm going to b$tch and moan for a moment here:

At another Ivy League school, a buddy of mine was told he couldn't walk on with a 4:31 mile, whereas a girl was welcomed to the women's team with open arms who can't break 6:00 for the mile.

Parity? I think not.

there is literally no limit on the girls' xc roster at dartmouth. Mens is capped at 55.

55 is a fairly big number for a small school, but this rule is insane

There are no universal rules for walk on times. Basically, the coach can do whatever they want. The men's and women's teams at Princeton have separate head coaches, so the walk on standards are totally different. Most of the time, the standard is completely arbitrary.

To the OP, find out what the walk on standard required is directly from the women's head coach. From what I know about Princeton, it is indeed possible.

Stay healthy. Do whatever you have to, no matter how annoying it is or how easy it would be to not do it. Everything else will work out.

Thank you so much everyone! And my school is all-girls, so no boys coach. I'll keep updating my progress.