Mid Talent But Hard Worker!! Can I achieve 5:10??

Of course. Run under 5:10. You got this.

That's a big step, but not crazy. Work hard, do things right, and maybe you get there. If not, you'll at least get a lot better.

No. Not unless you had some type of huge physical maturation or you ran 5:29 in gym class with no training.

Yes, I do think that it is possible. It will take some consistent work and thought - out work. Make sure to stay very consistent with training and recovery. Don't bump your mileage up too fast, or you will risk injury, due to your body not being able to handle it. Just make slow and steady increases when it comes to mileage. Make sure to build up a strong base throughout the winter months, going into track. Don't do too much speed early on, as you will most likely want to peak during the later parts of track season. Strides are great to do throughout the winter. Lots of threshold work, easy running, and long runs are what you will want to start doing before heading into the track season. Then you can start to incorporate some more speed based work. I don't know you other times, but you will most likely need to increase your endurance to get down near 5:10. I don't know anything about your current training, however, a sample week could look like...

Monday - Easy Run + 4x100m strides at mile pace

Tuesday - Threshold Workout of some sort. With an adequate warm up and cool down.

Wednesday - Easy

Thursday - Same as Tuesday

Friday - Easy run

Saturday - Long run ( maybe hilly throughout most of it if you can)

Sunday - off

Good luck

I don't know what your training looks like, so this may not be relevant to you, but I will share my personal experience and the results.

Run twice a day. 20-30 mins in the morning, 45-60 minutes in the afternoon. I did this and went from average to good in races. If I felt good during my runs, I picked it up for awhile. As time went on, it was closer to 30-40 in the AM and 60-70 in the PM. If you need to start at 20 AM and 30 PM do it. Doesn't matter.

While this isn't the most comprehensive program out there, I found far more success than when I was doing a ton of speed workouts and leaving practice fairly exhausted most days.

My point to this is not that intervals, thresholds and all different types of workouts aren't valuable, they certainly are, I was probably doing tempos many days a week, I just didn't plan them or call them that. My point is that before specialty workouts really pay dividends, I found that I needed to become a serious runner first. I went from mid-high 16's to mid 15's on the track in one calendar year. I felt like I wasn't training anywhere near as hard, just more often. Adding the workouts with my college team but retaining the general twice a day, don't kill myself philosophy helped me drop another minute down to the mid 14's.

This was all during the late 80's early 90's high intensity, low volume era, so it wasn't surprising that I started destroying people who had always beaten me simply because I was willing to put in the work and had good council that concentrating first on aerobic development would aid me far more than any speed work would.

A teammate that I recently had started beating for the very first time in either high school or college who was very competitive decided to start running in the morning too, sometimes we would run together. A month or two after he started adding a morning run, I never beat him again or was even really close. He ended up running in the Olympic trials a few years later after having a 16:00 5000m PR as a senior in high school. Once he caught the bug, his dedication and results far surpassed mine.

All of this seems completely obvious now, but at the time we didn't have online resources so we mistakenly thought doubles were just for long slow marathon type efforts, not 1500m-10000m. They were not.

I was shocked when I ran an 8000m early season cross country race as a college sophomore 2 minutes faster than when I was a freshman and didn't even feel like I was going all out. It was just a hard run.

Finally, after having some confidence that I was training at least somewhat properly for a serious runner, I stopped concentrating on time and focused more on place. This is much easier when you are in the top 10 rather than the top 100 of a race. Also, this was DIII so I was right where I should have been, competing with people of like ability.

There are endless stories on letsrun throughout the years of runners who weren't dominating on low mileage, but suddenly became competitive when they took it seriously, many far more serious than me.

So every runner who asks the question can magically cut 20 seconds? I ran 4:05 last year. Do you think I can run 3:45 this year?

this isn't really a helpful thing to fuss about. trim seconds and set 5 second improvement goals. you can pick up a few seconds working out a little harder, chasing the next runner harder, pushing a bit more, kicking hard at the end of the race. worry about trying to catch the next runner. 20 seconds is a bit much to worry about. that will likely create more worry ("will i ever") than motivation and determination ("i want those 5 seconds").

it's magical thinking, isn't it? just wake up and 20 seconds gone. about every jump like this in my sports life was either a growth spurt or a sustained period of training hard to do things a different way for a sustained period of months. working on skills drills every day after work all summer before college soccer. etc.

dreams are not bad but the dreams don't fix things, the work does. and "the work" is best based on sitting down and analyzing what you are weak at. which most people don't want to sit down and think about what could i fix to find those seconds. do i run a lot of miles but need speed? do i have speed but need to be able to pace myself or have more endurance? do i work out too much or not enough? do i eat right? do i fight every second or do i zone out? quite a few people with dreams don't want to look over that cliff. for some it leads too easily to some sort of depressive "i suck" which doesn't help.

20s seems like upper end but still reasonable improvement in HS. Just train hard & see what happens. Don't put pressure on yourself that it has to happen all at once. Set intermediate goals.

Would maybe expect something a little faster than 19:29 5k XC with a 5:29. It's hard to say because XC courses differ in how tough they are & how accurately they're measured. 19:29 probably came on one of the faster courses. Idk if it's an outlier or if you were mostly around there this season. It doesn't indicate 5:10 mile fitness. But maybe you have more speed than you think. Your 800 needs to get down to 2:20ish. Maybe a strong runner can do it closer to 2:25 but it would be less likely.