Our highschool cross country coach is great. For the runners who care and want to get better we start summer training two weeks after track season so our bodies can rest. We start off doing long runs and easy mileage, with one run (Saturday or Sunday) being a quarter of our weekly mileage. We build 5 percent each week for like 3-4 weeks then take an easy week where we cut back a bit and then ramp it up again. During this time we don't do much speed work, but this year we have started doing fartlek's once a week, normally Tuesday and then tempo runs (our longest was 40 mins) on Thursday. Before cross country season we cross train for a week so we can rest a bit and then get back into it. We still build during the cross country season but taper towards the end of the season. Our coach is great, he made a spreadsheet for us to track our weekly mileage and he also made a individualized pace chart with our 5K goal times. He puts sections to show us our (percentage effort), for example what 80% of that goal pace would be and we use that for our workouts. We had problems with strength and finishing our races so this year we have been doing way more tempo runs. All in all we have around 50 boys and girls on the team and we've seen massive improvements thanks to our coach and the effort he puts in. Last thing too, every race he puts our first mile time, our average pace and our race time in a spreadsheet so we can see the improvement, even adjusts what our estimated 5k time would be if the course was too long or too short.