Should I compete in high school track this year or train for a marathon?

but hey, at least you're not a triathlon guy

snowdays wrote:

cross country teams aren't cool but 15 year olds who run marathons are even less cool

That may be true now (or may not - I don't know the right kids to ask) but what you said was most certainly NOT true in the '70s. Sports fans- the guys who watched football - would ask us about Boston Billy the day after Patriot's Day. Maybe this would be incredibly strange now, but non-runners:

A. Knew when Boston was

B. Knew who Rodger was

People knew Shorter. NYC was on regular network TV - on day with a full slate of football games. But no offense intended - this is not a personal attack - you don't really know if you didn't run marathons as a teenager yourself, or if there was a crowd at your school that did. There were quite a few at my school. I'd admit it now if we got beat to a pulp daily by the football team. We didn't.

Seems like I disagree with the majority of the sentiment here. If you want to run a marathon, you'll still have plenty of races to run on track senior year if you go ahead and start training now.

The way I see it, if you started training for a marathon now, you could be ready to run it by the end of summer. You can even see it as long-term base building for your senior season. You can come off of higher mileage than most/all of the other people on the team and then get into xc shape, then you can still have your senior track season after that.

I can believe that's how it was in the past.

I graduated HS in 2011 and am only basing my opinion of teenage marathon/triathlon kids on a sample size of 3 people. So I can't with any authority say they are ALL losers. But I can with authority say that XC/TF kids are still largely dorks today, and the marathon kids on our team were undoubtedly at the bottom of our own social food chain. That culture of nonrunners knowing about marathons doesn't exist anymore, so they didn't fare any better with the general population of the school either.

Worse than being shoved into the lockers by the football team is being shoved into the lockers by the cross country team.

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One particular kid quit the team his sophomore year to train for road races alone. By letsrun standards, this kid would be a genius, because he went on to run an easy 60-80mpw year round while my coach was the type to have us triple at 2 meets in a week, and still give us 400s @ mile pace or 1600s @ 5k pace during the same week. 50mpw or so of total volume.

While we got injured quite a bit on our schedule, we were still fast and the 17:20 road 5k the kid ran would not have been good enough to crack the varsity XC squad or score a single point on our track team. (You'd roughly need 54/2:02/4:35/9:50/17:00 XC)

Choosing to run road races (no matter what the distance) over HS track or XC is short sighted and stupid. Sure, go ahead race soccer moms, old men, and the scant few actual runners that show up the race vs competing against your peers.

You only have 4 years to race in HS, you have the rest of your life to do road races.

Well, I graduated in 1981. So 30 years earlier. I am not here to mock you or the prevailing 'wisdom' of the day. I realize that what I described just isn't the situation now. You make it sound like there were road racers at your school. At my school the whole distance crowd did it. None of us participated in the school-sanctioned T&F program.

But what I just wrote is slightly misleading. It wasn't just the half-dozen guys at my school. Most races we went to had a huge field in the 17-and-under Division. If it was just one weird clown who got ostracized from his school teams, we would have known him. If it was the same couple guys, they'd be familiar. In reality, there were enough of them - presumably, they went to other schools - that we didn't say, "Hey, check it out. There's someone in our Division!" It wasn't a novelty.

But whether or not this WAS the case (if you don't trust me, look at the all-time top-10 HS 10000 list on T&FN; it will become obvious that kids used to specifically train for and regularly race events longer than 2 miles) this is certainly not the situation now. All I'm telling the OP is that I did it, it worked, it wasn't a problem.

I guess you're right that you might get static from the nerdy teams at school (now, not then), and yeah, that would be even worse than the same from the football team. We just didn't see anything like that. By 'we' I mean both my training group and friends AND the other couple dozen active road teens in our area. They must not have had social difficulties such as you describe or there wouldn't have been that many doing it. Let me go this far and say:

The geek-filled school teams were for those who couldn't cut it racing against serious, even semi-pro runners in their 20s and 30s.

Oh well. Those days are gone and societal pressures may render the OP's choice moot. Bummer that kids who are uncompetitive sprinters (you and others on the MB actually list HS 400 PRs) and mid-D runners but very effective at 10k and up don't have competitive outlets any more. I was trying to give the OP a pep talk. Go for your marathon if you have the courage. Although it didn't take much 40 years ago, I did!

YersiniaPestis wrote:

Choosing to run road races (no matter what the distance) over HS track or XC is short sighted and stupid. Sure, go ahead race soccer moms, old men, and the scant few actual runners that show up the race vs competing against your peers.

You only have 4 years to race in HS, you have the rest of your life to do road races.

In my. view, you're 180° off. Road races, in my part of the country anyway, are much more competitive than races restricted to HS students. Of course they are. How could they not be? Where do you think the good Open runners race? In my locale, Shadrack Biwott won 2 of the local halfs last Fall. I've looked through Boston results for some years and seen names I knew from the local road scene in the top-10. You can't serious believe some HS meet is more competitive.. The guys I'm talking about wouldn't have won the HS race? Laughable!

If nobody over 18 was allowed in the races I ran in HS, I would have been winning them! (Nof all of them, unfortunately. There were some pretty decent young marathoners around.) The shallower the pond you're swimming in, the bigger fish you believe you are. Stick to mid-week dual meets. Or, run with the big dogs.

Yes. On we or the other. Can't personally imagine that the marathon cant wait until after h.s. you can't go back and do h.s. again, but marathons are gonna be there aplenty

Btw: four of my xc guys and I ran our first marathon just after our last xc season race. Total blast and everybody did fine. Nice way to top off the season.

Joejoewilty wrote:

I am one of the slowest runners on my team, and I am a junior, so it is a little embarrassing. It has always been my dream to run a marathon, and I think that I would feel way more accomplished after running a marathon than getting last in every track event and not helping my team.

Do whichever brings you more joy.