I am a junior in high school and the cross country season was injury plagued and, in one word, bad. Indoor track is starting after Thanksgiving and I am excited as I missed the last few XC meets with another injury. Well, I am mainly a middle distance track guy anyway and would like to post some good times both in indoor and outdoor. In outdoor last spring as a sophomore, I ran best times of 2:02 in the 800 and 4:32 in the 1600. I would like to focus on the 1000 meters indoors and the 1600 outdoors. While I was hurt in XC, I spent some time reading things about training and noticed something interesting. For indoor and outdoor, my coach has always had us doing Lactate tolerance, Anaerobic capacity, 100 meter all-out sprints, and some aerobic endurance (mainly warm-up, warm-down, and recovery). We rarely do VO2 max and lactate threshold stuff. The longest rep we do is 800 meters (at mile pace usually). We sometimes will do fartlek, but it is usually just sprinting for 100-200 meters (no long, fast) and aerobic endurance. What should I do? Any suggestions on how I can get my coach (the head coach is a sprint coach and the assistant coaches distance but the head coach makes our workouts and the assistant basically follows them unless he wants us to do a fartlek) to do this stuff that my team obviously needs as the mile is about half aerobic. Also, do you think that after practice it would be wise to run an additional 2 miles or so on most days as an extended warm down as we only average about 30 miles a week? I also saw a training schedule that Ted Haydon used for his runners and once a week they do 1.5 times the race distance at a fast pace to build endurance (ex. 1.5 miles at 5:00 or better for a 4:20 miler); this seems like something that I think would work well for myself that I could get the coach to let me do. What do you think? Moreover, should I be running mainly VO2 max stuff and threshold at the beginning and then later focus on the fast stuff as the big meets roll around? Finally, what times do you think I can run? I hope to get in the middle 2:30s in the 1k in indoor and low 4:20s for the 1600 outdoors. Are these reasonable and attainable goals (if it helps, I ended freshman year with bests of 2:12 for 800 and 4:51 for 1600 and ended in indoor last year with bests of 2:44 for 1k and 4:37 for 1600)? Thanks.