What to expect from my HS runners after major mileage bump

Not sure what to expect wrote:

Forgot to mention their average XC times from last year. I hate XC times, because every course is different, etc. etc. But anyways.

Runner A: 17:45

Runner B: 18:00

Runner C: 20:30 (serious improvement from him already)

Runner D: 18:10

Runner E: 18:05

Runner F: 18:25

Thought I should re-visit my own thread with a season update/recap.

We had a much improved season/team, but fell just short of team goals (qualifying for next meet, place at conference, etc.), which can be easily summed up.

The Runners: Previous Pace - Current Pace (I like looking at paces, rather than times)

Runner A: 5:40 - 5:18

Runner B: 5:50 - 5:40

Runner C: 6:35 - 5:55 (quit because he was relegated to JV)

Runner D: 5:55 - 5:30

Runner E: 5:55 - 5:40

Runner F: 5:55 - 5:40

Runner A was the JV football WR with a lot of potential; leading the team proved to be too much of burden and he started to have panic attacks in big races, so bad to the point that he DNF'd our District champs, making certain we did not qualifying for the next round. His times/placing improved greatly, but his head kept him from doing anything big time. Extremely disappointing and frustrating.

Runner B can be explained by him joining marching band and being a big part of the drumline. On top of the morning XC practices, he would march/stand for three hours every afternoon. His season started well, but plateaued for the season.

The best surprise was the emergence of two freshmen who worked out during the summer and learned to race as the season progressed. One finished 10th at our District meet and has advanced to Regionals; the other was our 4th man at that meet. Both started the season slow, for obvious experience reasons (no middle school XC here), and really came on strong.

The team frustration comes from our #1 guy sh---ing the bed at our district meet. So weak minded. Killed us. Three teams qualifying to move on and we finished 6 points out of 3rd in 4th place, without him. I knew that all they had to do was finish the race as we finished any other race and we would move on, but him DNFing screwed the team and the hard work put in by the others starting in May.

As far as the mileage, I held them at about 45 for most of the season, until championship time. It was a successful season in terms of the program being relevant and competitive. We are certainly on the minds of everybody in our district for now and the forseeable future.

Some time off, and then time for winter base!!!

They have gone from running at an abysmal 8:30 average pace on runs

It's funny you say that, because in hs our team trained at 8:30 pace and we won the 4x8 state title with a sub-8 and had 3 guys in the 9:20-9:30 2 mile time, and 3-4 guys in the 4:20-4:26 range. I never touched a lick past 8min pace on any normal trainning runs for 2 years, and ran a sub 9:30 2mile my senior year while I was a 18:30 guy soph year.

onceinadrop wrote:

They have gone from running at an abysmal 8:30 average pace on runs

It's funny you say that, because in hs our team trained at 8:30 pace and we won the 4x8 state title with a sub-8 and had 3 guys in the 9:20-9:30 2 mile time, and 3-4 guys in the 4:20-4:26 range. I never touched a lick past 8min pace on any normal trainning runs for 2 years, and ran a sub 9:30 2mile my senior year while I was a 18:30 guy soph year.

to follow up on this the entire team trained at the same pace. the 9:30 2 milers were training with the 11 flat 2 milers and we all ran together. anyone new to the team would immediately start doing 45-50 mpw at 8:30 pace, and start out running 60-75 mins relatively soon. my fresh/soph years we had the opposite training, 40-60 mpw at high 6's and 7 min range pace. under this training we saw inconsistent results and lots of injuries, under the junior/senior year training with the 9:20-30 2milers and the 11 2 miles training together, we had little to minior injuries from season to season. before this new training setup, we were lucky to have guys go sub 10 in the 2. imo, it was a great high school setup, following stictly John Kellogg's training.