17 yo runner foregoing high school running

As a former coach, I would have serious questions and concerns about how well a kid who used this (avoidance) approach would integrate into a college team structure (kind of like I had concerns about the social skills of some of the home schooled kids I recruited).

15:30? That's it?

I could crush you in a race and I'm only running 70 miles a week.

Yes. I am your age.

Stay in the HS system so I can teach you a lesson.

YOU THINK I FOLLOW WHAT MY COACH SAYS? He is just there to guide you, moron.

This is probably the best post I have ever seen on letsrun.

J.R. wrote:

I disagree with foregoing the high school competition.

You would also be foregoing the opportunity to compete at high school national events, which could be great for your career running if you end up having one.

Didn't stop Josh McDougal from competing at Footlocker, NIN, or NON.

I don't see what the big deal is. Gymnasts and tennis players have been doing this for YEARS!!!

Virtually no top level tennis players or gymnasts waste their time on very inferior high school competition. While running competition is great at the high school level, most of the top runners just cruise through their high school meets and focus most of their attention on the national indoor and outdoor meets where the competition is the greatest.

uareafool wrote:

15:30? That's it?

I could crush you in a race and I'm only running 70 miles a week.

Yes. I am your age.

Stay in the HS system so I can teach you a lesson.

YOU THINK I FOLLOW WHAT MY COACH SAYS? He is just there to guide you, moron.

he'll be beating you within six months...

Also, you probably ignored his 9:17 PR and chose to focus on a likely XC Pr and compared that to the 15:29 you just ran on the track.

As a college freshman (just finished my first year) I ran 4:24 in high school and was pretty consistantly mediocre, although I had pretty low mileage. This year, my workload got ramped up and it worked for me and I ran 4:13... keeping me at the mediocre level I enjoyed previously.

I think I could have run 4:13 last year in high school if I had trained differently, and it could have opened a lot of doors in terms of scholarship opportunities for me. Maybe I would be running 4:05 after successfully adapting to a higher level university program, or maybe I would have wound up completely burnt out by the end of the season running 4:30 or so. I'm happy about where I am now, and hopefully I'll continue to improve in college and wind up running under 4:00 (my life goal!) as a senior or post-collegiately, but running fast in highschool would have been sweet.

This may have been just at my school district, but coaches got bonuses for state champions/championships. We had a kid on our team who was a legit competitor at the state level but missed practice often to train mostly with his father. Coach never cared as long as he showed up for the meets and a practice or two every week, which he would half ass. None of our teammates really cared because he was our top XC scorer and ran his best at meets.

Of course I could see some coaches disagreeing with that concept. Maybe approach your HS coach with your parent and club coach. Explain your goals for the future and college. Maybe he will understand and let you participate.

IllComm wrote:

As a former coach, I would have serious questions and concerns about how well a kid who used this (avoidance) approach would integrate into a college team structure (kind of like I had concerns about the social skills of some of the home schooled kids I recruited).

This will be my last post on this thread because I think I summarized my opinion about the topic completely in my last response and have nothing more to add. It's been an interesting topic...

I did want to address the above post though.

I can see where you are coming from and maybe a lot of coaches think this way, I won't judge that one way or the other. But I did run on two different university teams...one of which had several runners from the UK and the other which had several Kenyans and other internationals.

The UK runners, the Kenyans, and other foreigners did not run on high school teams. The UK guys usually came from clubs whereas the Kenyans typically were soloists or maybe they had a training partner and informal coach but were not really affiliated with a team or a club. The other international guys I knew were from small countries where they were perhaps the only serious guy in their country so they were sort of coached by national coaches (ie the only knowledgeable coach in the country) before entering NCAA.

Neither of the two coaches that I ran for seemed troubled to recruit these guys who were effectively all running solo for private coaches. They were very happy to get guys coming in with low 14:00 PRs in the 5000 and confident that they would integrate well with the team.

I also had a close friend who went into the military after a mediocre high school career. He came out of the military 4 years later with mid 14/sub 31 PRs and got plenty of interest despite being self-coached. He went on to be a strong team leader and multiple all american.

I ran with plenty of guys who came up through the US high school system who were terrible team players and disruptive to the team atmosphere. One of the primary reasons I transferred was to get away from the collection of prima donnas and groupies at my first school and get on with what I was trying to do.

At my second school, the foreigners were following the training systems they were using before they came to the USA (each one of them doing radically different programs). Everyone was pretty much self-coached (our coach gave us a workout once or twice a week and let us sort out what we did in between). Nobody ever ran alone, but you rarely ran with the same person from day to day. I did long runs with the NCAA XC champion, I did interval workouts with an 800 guy who was trying to break 2:00, and morning runs with a freshman 800 guy and a post-collegiate sub 4 miler. Everyone ran with everyone at some point and we were all good friends. Nobody was burdened with the hierarchy typical of high school teams where the top guys beat the bottom guys into submission every day.

Running is only a team sport when you put a jersey on and people assign arbitrary point values to your place on the track. Running on a team has no bearing on how fast you will eventually get at any distance. Many of the best pros have never run on a team or with a training group.

A person's ability to get along with a group of people (team) who are pursuing the same interest has nothing to do with whether they did high school track or not. Maybe the original poster is a really social guy in some other activity he does and he is divorcing his track team because the atmosphere sucks and he doesn't want to waste his time.

There are plenty of anti-social guys on track teams and a lot of individual runners who are great outgoing people...perhaps because they don't need to be on a team to have a social life...

coming from a situation where you don't have a hs team/coach available is completely different than having them and quitting because you think you know better than the coach

i think it would be a perfectly legitimate concern for a college coach that after all the effort recruiting you, you are gonna make a letsrun thread in 2 years about whether or not you should quit your college team and train on your own for the trials because your training philosophy has evolved and you no longer agree with his training

aaaaaaaaaaaa wrote:

Letsrun as a website is so popular because of the hordes of unsatisfied high school 4:20 guys who left half their game on the table and are now back here looking around for clues as to how fast they might have run had they done something different. They are making happy looking numbers on paper to feel good about the fact that they let the best gift they ever had go because of some poor idea that competitive running lasts forever.

Kudos, brother. Good insight. You certainly got me pegged on this one. Ever since I came to this site I have been living in the past, like Al Bundy ranting and raving about his 3 touchdowns against Polk High.

Fair enough and good point. But there is a difference between a high school coach (usually a teacher or a volunteer who may not know anything about running) and a college coach (his whole job is to coach running).

I stand by my statement that you should never run for a coach who you don't believe in 100%. Maybe this guy just needs one good coach and he will remain loyal to the end. Or maybe he is going to need a change every couple years.

My point before wasn't to say that college coaches shouldn't worry about this (I stated at the top that I wouldn't judge that either way). I just don't think the original poster should waste time thinking about this aspect. I don't think he should run for a coach he's not confident in just so he can increase his odds of getting recruited. He should run with the coach he believes in, and when recruiting time comes he will either impress coaches or not...if not, then it's of no benefit for him to run for a college team...not the end of the world.

I fail to understand why people think that running in the NCAA is a prerequisite for entry into distance running. You know it's completely possible for someone to improve and work their way up to their maximum potential without running for a high school or college team. All it takes is a lot of desire and a good training plan. You don't even need a coach if you have good instincts for training. You don't even need shoes. Quite a few people are doing it as we speak. Many of them even win medals.

Just don't forgego your classes. You still have to study.

Interesting thread.

The OP sounds like he has already abandoned his high school team, even though his coach apparently let him run on his own for track season. Ok.

But he also makes the blanket statement that the whole high school system is a failure and he exhorts all other high school runners who share his elite aspirations to abandon their teams. Huh? So the only way to become an elite high school runner is to quit your team and find some private club coach who, he assumes, is more knowedgable than his school coach? So where do all our high school athletes find these gurus? Sounds nuts to me.

On another note, my understanding of the Kenyan training system is quite different from that of the previous poster who describes sort of a lone wolf system of barefoot guys running by themselves. I just read Toby Tanser's book More Fire. Tanser's book describes quite an organized training system. Schools such as Brother Colm's. Military acadamies. Private training camps in Iten. I didn't at all get the feeling that those guys were doing it on their own. (I did get the feeling that that is literally all many of those runners are doing, though. Education didn't seem to be a big part of their lives. I also got the feeling that the vast majority never made it on running.)

I run with a dog wrote:

Interesting thread.

On another note, my understanding of the Kenyan training system is quite different from that of the previous poster who describes sort of a lone wolf system of barefoot guys running by themselves. I just read Toby Tanser's book More Fire. Tanser's book describes quite an organized training system. Schools such as Brother Colm's. Military acadamies. Private training camps in Iten. I didn't at all get the feeling that those guys were doing it on their own. (I did get the feeling that that is literally all many of those runners are doing, though. Education didn't seem to be a big part of their lives. I also got the feeling that the vast majority never made it on running.)

I've been out of school for a long time (so whoever posted as my dad or whatever don't worry I finished all my classes). Anyway, I think the Kenyan system has changed dramatically since then and the guys I knew were only examples of people who did not come from a team system, not to be taken as an overview of how Kenyans in general train. Perhaps they were the only guys in Kenya who weren't on a team and that's how they ended up in US colleges?

Also the guys who I knew were not quite good enough to make the Kenyan national team (though they all became very good). They used their running skills well to get a college education...none of them was skipping classes to make time for running...

All of them had nice careers in running, one of them was around for a long time on the GP circuit, another flamed out pretty fast in the marathon, but they all accomplished what they were capable of and then moved on with their lives. Even professional Kenyan distance runners have variation in the length of their careers and their life goals.

Unconventional wrote:

My Beliefs

I believe that the high school distance system is a failure. Coaches aren't selected on their knowledge or their commitment. I believe that all young runners should forgo high school running if they are serious about becoming elite.

The Question

What are your thoughts? Agree? Disagree? Why?

The high school system does race too much. However, I really enjoyed being part of a team and representing my school. Something I am glad I didn't miss out on. So here are some of my suggestions for how you could focus on regional/national level competition and still be part of your hs team.

1. Make dual meets tempo runs

2. Don't start banging the workouts hard until October so that you peak in late November/early December. Run any type of intervals in August/September more like tempo intervals (even if it means putting your ego aside and running with 5k runners 1-2 minutes slower than you).

3. Keep your mileage up. Even through the state meet. If your hs coach only sends you on 30 to 40 minute runs than run for an hour in the morning to bulk up your mileage. It is not hard to run higher mileage even if your hs coach doesn't promote it. Neither did mine so I ran in the morning and always did a nice long run on the weekend. Also, running 100 mpw is not a bad thing unless you try to be a world beater on every run. Relax and run them nice and easy. Geb ran 15 miles round trip to school as a kid, however, he ran it easy. It worked it well for him.

4. Running is suppose to be fun. Don't take it so seriously. Your one injury away from never running again so don't bank so much on it. Just enjoy the gift.

As a HS coach I get sick of all theses wanna be HS kids coming on here and complaining about the HS sysytem. If you think you are racing too often, you probably are. So, when you are in a race that offer's no comp, don't race it, don't try to break the course record, don't try and PR, pretty simple.

If you think you know it all, then do what you need to when you need to. Also, talk to your coach, most will listen if you treat them with respect and educate them without putting them down.

"I believe that all young runners should forgo high school running if they are serious about becoming elite."

I think this is a viable alternative for about one in every 1000 (?) track participants. I've never coached a kid who had this potential, and if I did, I would gladly let him go elsewhere for coaching, especially if he had a piss poor attitude. Hey, some kids are as good as they think they are--and that's awesome! If you're that good, having a different coach may be the right thing for you; However, I've coached a few kids who think they're better than they are, and they try their own training program, which, in every case, has resulted in injury, burnout, or not peaking at the big meets. But, this is not before they have their teammates so mad at them that any team unity or camraderie is absolutely destroyed. Not that it should matter to elite athletes....

"I believe that the high school distance system is a failure. Coaches aren't selected on their knowledge or their commitment."

I am glad that you are finally being coached by someone you believe in. One question: when coaching positions open up at a HS, where are all the "highly knowledgeable and committed" people who would save the high school distance system? Gee, I guess they don't want the job. Yeah, I'd rather have a cush job where I only have to privately coach the best of the best, and their mommies and daddies shell out the $ for me to do so. Maybe the coach that wasn't "good enough" for you had 50 other athletes that were just as important to him (or her) as you were. Try coaching in a high school for a few years--maybe you'll see my point of view.

In the meantime, I'll take my little paycheck and continue coaching the autistic kids, the kids who can't afford spikes (much less private coaching!) , the kids who finally finish a race and are so proud to do it, the kids who make it to state after 4 years of working hard (even though they know they'll never be elite), the kids who never win a race, the kids who smile like they won the lottery when they finally beat someone..... These are the payouts for my knowledge. These are the rewards for my commitment.

are you EVan Selsor??

If so, you are a dumb ass.