Should I take a break after track season?

Do whatever you want

:D

I like the idea of a break following an intense season of racing or a long buildup for something like a marathon.

If you're going to college, check to see if your school has a club xc team, if that's something that interests you.

Will you be running in the NCAA or have plans to?

In general, taking a break after a competitive season is a very healthy and advisable thing to do. You don't necessarily need to take multiple weeks completely off, but you should definitely take some time to fully rest and recoup both physically and mentally. For a lot of people, this will indeed look like taking 2-4 weeks completely off from running, but it could also look something like a few days off followed by some easy low mileage days for a couple weeks.

Whatever you decide to do, don't train hard over the summer. Training hard for long periods of time is not sustainable, again, physically or mentally. lf you plan on still competing in college, treat summer like a base building phase, mostly mileage and easy runs, some long runs, some threshold runs, some strides, no hard workouts. Stay healthy.

Just my thoughts as a guy in his 30s who is still going strong.

Taking a break is still advisable. 2-weeks, 1-week, 1-month, whatever doesn't really matter a great deal -depends on what you specifically need to mentally and physically recharge and what your next goal is.

How training should look like that after that again is entirely dependent on your personal goals. If you aren't joining a college team you obviously will have a lot of flexibility with what you can do and how you can approach it. If you have some sort of serious performance goal this would be the time to shift towards a much more long term development strategy -break away from the short term season-by-season perspective of school running and instead look at year and multi-year timelines.

Take the break. High schoolers are expected to run xc, indoor, and outdoor these days and they never get to take a break. Take a mental break. Be a regular kid. Those two weeks will have no impact in the long term. Practice patience. Look up what periodization means and how it affects your body to be at it nonstop without taking a step back to recover every once in a while.

Well what are your running goals?

run a bunch of 8K's and 10's in the fall as an "unattached" runner to give myself my own cross country season. Regarding any long term goals, I just don't want to lose my fitness because I want to qualify for the Boston marathon one day. It's been a bucket list item of mine for a while and I don't want to lose all of the work I've put into it so far.

Seb Coe used to. Seemed to work for him.