In my experience, if it’s just you struggling that’s your problem, if it’s half the team struggling it’s your coaches problem.
This year our MD coach left to coach his pro athletes full time, and our long distance/XC coach (who is fantastic at creating good 5k/10k steeple types, he sends those athletes to natties yearly and has created some big names, so I don’t want to dog him too hard here) took over for middle distance.
Weve been running extremely anaerobic, bootylock on half of the reps, not getting nearly enough rest (he thinks if you need more than 2-3 minutes between reps it’s a fitness issue, which is fair for high mileage long distance types running 5k+ pace, not the 400-mile pace for 200-800m at a time we are usually prescribed) positive splitting the whole workout type sessions. SINCE DECEMBER.
In the beginning I just thought I’d lost fitness from some health issues I had in January, so I blamed myself for not racing well and having poor workouts, but then I started to notice our MD guys getting sick, injured, running horrifically bad workouts (a 48.5 1:52 guy only broke 30 on one rep of 200m on/off and was on the floor after) and one day I showed up for practice and it was just me and one other athlete there. We usually have 6-7 guys working on the MD squad. All of our 800/mile guys have PBs of 1:56 or faster and 3 of our guys have not broken 2:00 this year and another 2 haven’t even raced due to injury.
For this reason I’m either going to be racing unattached with my old coach or transferring somewhere else to finish up eligibility. I love my coach, he’s been great to me, but he doesn’t quite know how to work 4/8 and 8/15 athletes.
If your situation also looks like this, don’t make yourself miserable for 4 years and find a new program.