It might be down to other factors (further to what ppl have said here). I was training well, putting in good sessions, obsessed with running tho and ran some crappy times. Got like I didn't care, cut down on the training for a few months, focused on health, ate well, good lifestyle, and didn't really train very much and ran much better times. Can't remember who said it but better to be 90% fit and 100% healthy than the other way around.
undertraining alot of times is better than overtraining.
A better answer then all of these is... Who cares? It's a WORKOUT not a race. You shouldn't be racing your workouts anyways. You should be training at the optimal level not the hardest level.
800 miles over summer actually isn't extremely alot, over three months thats an average of about 60 a week. I know a high school in West Plains that averages 1000 every 12-13 offseason weeks, and thats high school training. I know I got about 1000+ in high school easy over summer
not too happy wrote:
This f***ing drives me crazy. I\'m a sophomore in college. I ran about 800 miles over the summer, with an average training pace around 6:30 per mile. This kid comes in, lucky if he ran 300 miles, averaging around 7:40 per mile, and he beats me in every race during xc. He got injured after xc was over, and so he cross trained, in a really half ass manner, and he just beat me in a workout today, and he only started running again like a week ago. How the hell does this work? It pisses me off.
Same thing happened to me. This guy did NO running in the summer, coach was desperate for bodies, so let him on the team. He did respectably. He only really tried in the one race before conference so that he would be selected to race and get a souvenir t-shirt, but coach was on to him and took someone else-HA. His attitude stunk like $hit, and the team could barely tolerate him. The only thing anybody could do was just ignore it and keep focused on their running - which is what you should do. There will always be someone with more talent than you. If you keep at it you will probably overtake him.
Just be thankful that the US doesn't have a large Kenyan population, because I've heard that many of them can drop a 4:20 mile on absolutely no training at all, and that's just when they're 16 years old.