High School program under a new coaching staff

Set your alarm clock and easy run your miles in the mornings before school.

Unfortunately, a lot of coaches think 20 mpw is about all that high school runners can handle and athletic directors don't know enough to weed out coaches who are stuck in 90s training philosophy.

If you want to run in college, I would explain that to your coach, and that college runners tend to run 60+ mpw (often well above that). Rather than just saying "I think your training is stupid," you're saying "I don't think your training will get me to where I want to be." Maybe they'll listen to reason and let you run enough to be able to transition into college running without struggling.

Barring that, run in the morning.

Don't join this clown's team. It is really that easy. I did the exact same thing I propose when I was in high school. If you simply never sign up in the first place, the coach won't even know who you are. My high school track coach had no effect on my training in any way, ever. In fact, we never met. You won't follow this advice, of course. You feel it is essential to be on the team. But nevertheless, the approach I suggest is extremely effective. Guess how many threads I started with high school coaching complaints.

You sound just like me in a way. This happened to my kid. Athletes were wondering why this Dude was there with all these rules in place but failed to train them. What philosophy?

If the sport is so dangerous, don't do it. Wrestle, play football, do something similar that is far less dangerous.

Idiots!

Hey, I expected outrage and fury in any repsonse to my post. It seems the notion of running unattached, or even just without school sanction, is unacceptable these days for anybody younger than mid-20s. I've thrown this idea out on an occasional thread over the years and that's what I've gotten back. I suspect the social aspect of being on the team is big. I remember a thread once in which one poster after another wrote about being there with their best friends. So, ditching the school's program altogether competes with that.

I don't know when this changed, but it used to be completely OK to seriously train and race while in high school and not inform the school of your activities. None of the distance guys at my school joined the track team as far as I knew. Interestingly, my best training partner approached the track coach Senior year. I had just graduated; I heard this story later in life. Anyway, he offered his services and was turned down. Based solely on this, I expect I wouldn't have been welcome either!

Just run some extra on weekend or whatever. Over the course of 1 outdoor season, its no big deal. In fact, by April you *should* start focusing on speed more. You're not making aerobic gains of note before states anyway at this point.

9/10 troll thread. This is clearly alluding to Jon Marcus (J MAR PDX) - professional tweeter / low mileage advocate / mechanics and sprint “genius” / and recently, HS coach in the Northwest.

Tell him you plan on drinking 5 nights / week

There are lots of threads about "inept" HS coaches and "talented" HS runners being in disagreement over training methods (including mileage). You need to be honest about what your running history is, and how your last seasons of XC and Track went, and what seemed to work for you. Share that with your coach, and ask how that can be included in your current training. The easy thing to do is to get extra mileage by running in the mornings and weekends. If you are over-training and it affects your practices and meets with your coach observing, this will backfire. You can train all you want in the summer before fall XC. If you are thinking about running in college, then you want to get as much out of running in HS as possible with the XC and track seasons. If you are really serious about running in college and talented enough, then you may want to talk to your parents about transferring to another HS with better coaches.

Have discussions with your coach. If those don't work, do some training on your own and bag some of the stupid coach's workouts.

Talk to the coach about maybe the more senior athletes adding miles to their workout.

IMHO, I don’t think a low mileage program is a bad idea for the younger and still growing athletes. Our local high school runs a low mileage program and has had a lot of success.

"Younger and still growing," sure. My experience is mostly on the girls side, where many are finished growing before they leave middle school, and almost all are done by the end of 10th grade, yet coaches still treat them like they're made of glass. Yes, you have to be pretty careful with the ones who show up in 9th grade and didn't play any sports for the last 5 years, but you also get plenty who have been running 10-20 mpw at soccer practice. Coaches never have them run more than 2-3 miles per day and wonder why they don't get any faster.