I graduated in 2011 and had a passing shower thought on whether I should have quit my high school XC and track teams in my senior year. Long story short, I didn't really get along with the coach, who seemed pretty stubborn and didn't see a need to change his training. To be fair, he was a former 400m guy who occasionally ran the 800 and started coaching in the late 90s, which was peak of the low mileage era. But his training program of hard intervals, frequent races, no easy runs, and only 20-25 MPW simply burned most of us out.
I ran a 5:10 1600 my junior year and thought that I might have an outside shot of being a great runner if I trained myself instead of having to follow someone else's sub-par training. So I quit the team, trained on my own, and got injured trying to build up to 70-80 MPW. I then set a goal of walking on to the college track team (this was a pretty good D1 school), but that failed as well. My only modest success was building up to twice my HS mileage without getting injured, running unattached in a few small meets, and pulling off a 4:29 1500, which is way better than my HS PR.
I didn't train seriously after college and only hobby jogged and did strides the past few years. Last month, I found that my HS was doing an all-comers meet, so I figured I might as well jump in for fun. And since I didn't run a 1600 since 2010 or so, breaking 5:10 would still technically be a PR.
Well, it was a lot different than the school I remembered. They got a fancy rubberized track that replaced the old cinder track, the coaches were different, and the competition was much better. I got a 5:08 and finished close to the back of the pack, which was an interesting experience since my 5:10 time in 2010 (as slow as it was) made me one of the fastest guys on the team back then. While doing my cooldown, I heard some chatter about "doing an easy 10 miler tomorrow" (Sunday), which was pretty much unheard of back then.
So, looking back at it, should I have quit back then? As a side note, I didn't have any grudges or bad feelings to any of my teammates, but strangely enough, the only ones whom I was close with were the guys a year ahead of me, who were starting their freshman year in college during my senior year. The coach would have been the same, though.