What is it like being part of a top NCAA D1 program?

d1 exp wrote:

I'll only speak in generalities, don't know if this is what you're looking for, anyway here it is.

At first, it's intimidating, lots of other incoming froshes who are just as good as you let alone the guys currently on the team who have run times way beyond what you can picture running.

Soon you get to be part of the group and it's great to have a social circle built in. Your roommate/s are all on the team and you spend most of your time outside of class hanging out with them. Includes parties and weekends. You are in the xc team bubble.Helps give you a social leg up over the other freshmen but also means you don't meet many other freshmen and probably you won't have many/any close friends outside the team. Workouts are still intimidating. A huge number of freshman get injured, chances are you're among them at some point. While injured you realize how fun it is to not have to care about running all the time, or else you x-train like crazy and work even harder than when you're healthy. This can probably only go on so long before mental/moral breakdown. Hopefully you get healthy before then.

Depending on the team/place you have awesome parties pretty often, which is cool. Depending on the team/place you spend most of your time outside practice/class studying, trying to keep your 3.5 (or 2.5) gpa, or else you spend most of your time outside practice hanging out with teammates and shooting the shit.

In practices, you want to move up and "do well" in workouts, but teammates and coaches remind you that you can get burned out fast by pushing too hard. You often do anyway, and you're doing more mileage than you have before, but if you don't get injured then you see pretty big improvement. Still at some point in your 4/5 years you realize that you can't be toward the front of every easy run and still be ready for workouts. Hopefully you realize this sooner not later. As you get older these easy runs matter less and less, and you use them for mental recovery as well as physical, but you know when an interval workout "matters" just a bit more than for pure fitness building, when coach wants it to mean something, to make a statement, and you hit those workouts hard.

If you make travel squad you get to go to a bunch of somewhat cool places around america, but you spend most of your time in those places sitting in a hotel room or else at the meet itself. You don't even notice because you're not there to sightsee, you're there to race. Sometimes you get a day or two to wander around/explore which is aight and fun. But you measure the days and weeks and months by results, yours personally and the team's. Your mood for the week or month can be killed or elevated by a big invite or conference meet. Plus it's an emotional echo chamber since everyone else on the team feels either down or up depending on how things are going, and that's who you hang out with. A test or big assignment can mess up your day or be annoying too. Mainly school events are viewed as distractions from the priority of competition, and you try to minimize distractions. If you get really excited about doing well in a subject or even an extracurricular, it feels like a double life, totally separate from and alien to your day job of running. You might get into it and involved to an extent, but it always is a side hobby. (If not, then probably you quit the team sooner or later, realizing how much commitment running is demanding.)

You spend half your free time thinking about how badly you want to be good, looking up results, etc. But with studying and training you probably don't have a ton of free time. Team runs are mostly fun and you look forward to practice on easy/medium days cause it's just a big group (or splits off into smaller groups) and you can just talk about girls and whatever for 5-10 miles. Includes morning runs unless you do them on your own (or don't do them for lower-mileage guys). Chances are good you have most classes with some of your teammates cause you planned it that way (plus you had to schedule them around practice time ... and practice time comes first) so odds are you are hanging out with a teammate from the time you and your roommate wake up in the morning (often for a morning run) till practice in the afternoon, plus dinner at the dining hall or back at your apartment, then maybe after that while studying or whatever.

Chances are good that you pick a somewhat b.s. major and/or take lots of b.s. classes, a decision you don't question until suddenly you graduate and are faced with the prospect of getting a job. You also don't often go to recitations, group study sessions, office hours, or the like. You probably don't interact much with students in your major outside of classes. Who has time? Half of that stuff is scheduled during practice anyway. You figure out your own study habits that (hopefully) work for you, well enough. You wouldn't even consider skipping practice for a study session or something. Maybe you get to know a few others in your classes (and maybe get them to help you on the tougher assignments). Maybe not. But you're not likely to hang out with them much, when you have a team full of best friends to chill with.

Your teammates are the constants you stick with, especially that core group in your year who stuck through it together (though you "lost" a couple on the way, that is some who quit the team) and the guys a year or two above you who helped mentor you through (not that you thought about it that way at the time). You have a really big, really tight-knit group of best friends (again, not that you put it that way to yourself) who've been through the ringer enough times, week in week out, together and you've got each other's back no matter the situation. You've been through so many hotel catered dinners, van rides, bus rides, rainy pre-meet course jogs the day before, that time you got stuck at the airport together for six hours, that epic long run in a blizzard, that party that got busted by the cops and everyone took off running out the back door, or whatever it may be. Sure you're closer to some of the guys than others, but next to other friendships you had (or will have), it's no comparison. Even though each year a big group graduates and leaves and another big group comes in, you still think of them all as "the team" or "the guys".

On hard days (2-3 times a week) you hang with your "pack" (group/pace level) to hit times that you could probably never do in a million years running by yourself, but everyone else manages so you do too. You get used to digging way too deep on the 3rd-to-last rep. By junior or senior year you're more comfortable with the workouts, more used to them. Even though you're doing them faster than ever, they're somehow less sharp, you fear them less. You get used to the weekly routine. Lifting, strides, stretching, easy runs, tempos, intervals, long runs.

You get used to the big meets, the self-imposed pressure. Conference meets start to feel small and familiar. You know all the old faces. The ones who are supposed to beat you, usually do. The ones who you're supposed to beat, you usually do. The others, you sometimes beat, sometimes don't. Yet each time, it feels absolutely vital, you go in totally pumped up and determined. You usually come out thinking, well, that was all right. In track you get excited to watch your teammates in other events, and the relays you're not on, and you usually know all the opponents in contention and their strengths and weaknesses. You know when it's good and bad that the race turns slow and into a kick-fest, you know who the threats are and when they like to make their moves. Depending on your team/school you are either friendly with a fair number of runners on the other teams, and say hi/make small talk at meets, or you scowl at them from a distance and ignore them. On the national stage, you see old faces you haven't seen for 6 months or a year, but they get lost in the bigger crowd. Your first time at nats is a bit of a whirlwind, larger-than-life. Hopefully your teammates have been there before and guide you through it like it's no big deal. Odds are you don't run well. But when you go back a year later, you know the drill and treat it like any other race, while simultaneously being the only thing you've really cared about for the past 364 days. Odds are you still don't run well. Lots of people go to nats 3, 4 years and never run well. But then, there just aren't many AA spots up for grabs to start off with, and you always wonder what if no matter how good a day you had.

You get to know your teammates down to how their form breaks down when they're tired, what their opinion is on the hottest actresses of all time, what foods they randomly refuse to eat the day before a meet. Their small habits, their likes and dislikes, the way they react to a good workout or bad workout or good race or bad race. You watch sports together, talk trash in the stretching circle, in the showers, at breakfast, wherever about who would beat who in a 200 from blocks, or who has what kind of chance with what girl (who is probably on the women's team at your school). You travel in packs around campus. You attend mandatory ncaa compliance meetings and study sessions together. You carpool everywhere. Track parties are always at the same house -- the track house -- and you live there your junior and senior years because that's the way things work. It's not that you can't picture life without the team, it's more that you never thought about trying to picture life without the team.

Track season goes later than graduation. The day after you hang up your cap and gown, you're back on the track doing intervals. Sure, some of the guys haven't made the post season and have left, but a fair number are still there. You guys are living together, training together, no school, nothing to do except give it one last go. Then regionals comes. If you miss the train to the big dance (as you probably do), you take that last bus ride back almost in shock. It wasn't supposed to end this way. You never pictured it ending this way. (It never does end the way you pictured in any case.) If you make it to nats, you are living on a cloud for two more weeks, with nothing solid under your feet and hoping that the feeling of floating lasts. More of your friends have packed up and gone, but you don't notice all that so much because you've still got your one last chance at glory, and your last small group of teammates training together. Then nats comes, and you run however you run, and you have a hell of a time, and your friends fly back home and the lease on your apartment runs out and you are standing there with a diploma in your hand looking sideways at the rest of your life as it barrels down the runway at you.