Throughout high school I always had the idea that it would possible for me to run in college. I got less hopeful when I wasn't improving as much as I wished with a 53.5 second PR for the 400m at the end of Junior year. However, I was looking forward to this year to improve my times because I KNEW I could definitely run faster, maybe around 52 seconds or lower, not as good as my teammates (the fastest being low 50 this year) but not horrible.
Me not improving is especially frustrating since some of my teammates are INSANE like Will and Colin Daly who are going to run XC and Track at UPenn. They've have broken records and just won 4th place for the DMR at Penn Relays along with a Junior who miraculously jumped from a 55 PR Sophomore year to a mid 52 second PR in his most recent race, a huge jump that proves to me that I could definitely improve. I KNOW I could have trained with this Junior and gotten a lot faster but extremely unfortunately I was diagnosed 2 weeks ago with a stress fracture in my left and right shins (doc said around 2 months to heal).
The pain began in mid October of 2015 and because of this I hardly ran these past two seasons. I resorted to taking painkillers before meets so I could run without feeling explosions in my legs. I knew it was stupid then and I know it was stupid now because all I did was make my injury worse. If I didn't have this nightmare of an injury I probably would have run the 4x400, 4x200, or maybe even the 4x100 which is what kept my idiocy going strong as I knew I had a chance of going to Penn.
Now that my tangent is done, I want to ask about running at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I've committed to UW Madison already and as I'm sitting here looking at Penn Relays results I remembered how badly I want to run in college. I was going to shoot the athletic department an email asking them about it but I decided asking here would be better as there are a bunch of posts about running D1 with sub par times. The most important question is if Wisconsin even accepts walk-ons. Are there tryouts? Would the coach give me a chance/let me practice with the big guns who run 48 second in the 400m or just shoo me away? I know Wisconsin has a pretty good track team as they're a Big 10 school, and as I looked through various race times I got pretty discouraged but that's why I'm asking so please don't give me false hope. I'm very committed (as I hope is obvious by me running with a stress fracture for months) and I love to run so is there anyway besides intramural activities that I could run in Wisconsin's team?