Anyone NOT miss being a collegiate runner?

I never got a scholarship offer. But I'm still fast and available.

Hey,You ain't high class....you are a TOOL. Your the only one here with that opinion, and we all think you have issues. Maybe you should call you father and talk it out.

Great topic, and I'm surprised by how many people don't miss it at all.

Yes, after not running collegiately for 6 years, I still miss it a lot. The team, travel, training, racing, it was such a part of me and defined my day/being so much that I still think of running every single day.

Someone said earlier that it comes down to if you truly enjoy running. I agree, but I also loved the things that running did for the rest of my life. No matter what ever happened to me, I always had a run with guys that I liked coming at 3:30 every day.

I'm still in college... I could run for the team, possibly be a top seven runner (D3 college, I ran 16:20 5k xc and 27:30 5-mile road race, in high school). After a string of injuries and having no fun in the one season that I was healthy enough to compete, I decided to give it up. I don't miss it at all... I miss my high school team, but not the college guys that I ran with.

I was just dozing off in my office, and I had a dream that I was back in college, going to practice and doing all the the things associated with being on the team during the week before school starts. Yes, it made me miss running in college. What I realized from the dream, though, is that I miss the people and the camaraderie and all of fun things we used to do together as teammates. I miss going to practice and joking around on easy runs. I miss bus rides and going to dinner. I miss having impromptu captains' meetings where were indoctrinated with the team culture (sounds like a bad thing, but it wasn't).

I still run and enjoy training competitively, so I guess I don't miss running--because I still do it. I definitely miss being on a college team for the running purposes but mostly for reasons extracurricular to actual running.

Just graduated in the spring and one of the posters here sounds just like me, Ive been running 30-40 miles a week with some core work and enjoy it more than ever. Even better, ive been able to ride my bike a couple times a week again which I pretty much couldn't do the last 2 years of college because of the training load.

Its funny, I remember my last college race expecting some weird emotion to hit me that I was done, I thought id be sad or depressed but nothing ever really came to me.

Collegiate running was a miserable disaster at my ACC, D-1 school:

anemic, un-dateable women

underqualified, uncharasmatic coaching staff

uninteresting teammates with no social skills

complete waste of 4 years.

I miss running for my juco quite a bit. Although I only ran for 1 xc season (I left because of academic struggles which I later resolved at another community college closer to home without a team), my teammates were an awesome bunch to train with and the coaches were very knowledgeable and supportive. On my second team, whom I ran for one year for, my teammates were very nice and fun to hang out with, but during the track season I had no one to train with (I was the only 5k-10k runner on the team) and my coaches were awesome as people, but extremely incompetent as coaches (with the exception of the distance coach who only worked with the track team). I'm sure that if I didn't drop out of college after that year, when our new coach arrived, things would have turned out quite differently there for me the next season.

Of course, one thing that I did NOT miss about being a college runner was always struggling in races (sometimes after having really good training sessions the same week as the race) and the horrible feeling of not meeting the coach's expectations.

Can't say I miss it, but after being out 13 yrs, I'd love to do it over again knowing what I know now.

if you're on the right kind of team then missing it is impossible.

here's what I think wrote:

if you're on the right kind of team then missing it is impossible.

son of a bitch...I meant not missing it is impossible.

I agree with that statement.

I don't miss college that much because I was not in the greatest situation. It definitely could have been worse but it was difficult for me to trust our coach and my teammates with the exception of 3-4 guys.

High school was completely different, I would go back and run with those guys and hang out in a moment's notice.

I competed d1 and felt many times I was competing to appease my coaches, not the team or myself. Now if i don't want to do a race because I am kind of injured or just don't feel like it, it don't. I also remember sitting in class fearing the workout I was going to have to do. That being said it was still a much more postive experience and I made some really good friends

I like this thread and I'm glad that people are posting. I did not run in college because I decided to play basketball instead. After graduating I started running and racing in some local road races. Now I enjoy running a lot and have often wondered if I would still like running if I had run in college. I have thought about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that if I could do it all over again I would have run instead of play basketball. My running friends who ran in college though told me that picking basketball was the better choice... ha ha. But I think road racing is fun, because you get to choose when you want to run and where. Sure you run against people who are not in your age group and parents/grandparents and all that as an earlier poster complained about. But then again, you just have to accept every season of life and also, it's still a free country so get over it.

I meant to say that I played intramural basketball at a d3 school.

Cheers

Kudos to you for your honesty and eloquence.

Roger Sterling wrote:

Just graduated in the spring and one of the posters here sounds just like me, Ive been running 30-40 miles a week with some core work and enjoy it more than ever. Even better, ive been able to ride my bike a couple times a week again which I pretty much couldn't do the last 2 years of college because of the training load.

Its funny, I remember my last college race expecting some weird emotion to hit me that I was done, I thought id be sad or depressed but nothing ever really came to me.

You probably have a good sense of self, and other interests that give you meaning.

For me, when I "retired," I immediately focused on other interests and continued running for the pure joy of it. That, and I had a private goal of running every day for 10 years...which I managed.

sucks for you.