advice for being the only distance runner on my high school team?

i should add it’s been consistent, as soon as i let my coach take over my training, my performances plummet, probably to due to too much intensity and not enough volume + terrible terrain so it’s hard to recover

You probably can't have your own training program but you may choose to do workouts with less intensity. What about adding mileage in morning before school?

OP: (finds coach at a good, somewhat private moment) Hey, I was wondering if we could talk about track.

Coach: Yes, lonelydistancerunner, what's going on?

OP: I was thinking about practice. I have some really good trails to run on near my house, and since I'm the only distance runner on the team, I was wondering if I could train on my own on the trails twice a week. I want to be here for the track workouts and all the meets, but I think it would be better for my legs to have a couple days on the trails. What do you think? If not, no worries.

okay perfect i will talk to him tomorrow about this

Good luck - it will completely depend on the personality and coach philosophy (such that there is one) of your coach. I hope that, even if he/she doesn't go for it, at least they won't take it as an insult (which can unfortunately happen). But I do think it's worth trying.

Interesting thread and concept. Let me distill this down to the essense of the situation:

You want to train on your own as opposed to obeying the coach the school district hired.

A very reasonable desire. If you run without team/coach/practice most of the year with good results, I would suggest doing the same all year. At my school, the distance runners would possibly run XC, but not necessarily every year. I did 2 seasons. My best training partner did 2 that overlapped with me for 1. But the season was 6 or 7 weeks long, so it didn't completely change or interrupt the trajectory we were on long-term. And none of us had anything to do with the track team.

It seems what I descibe is pretty close to what you envision. I mean, the school affected a total of 3 months of my whole high school running career. Looking back, I can't tell you why I even did those 2 XC seasons. Maybe because my main sidekick, running-wise, was doing it that 2nd year and he talked me into it.

I agree complety that cutting the coach out of the equation only has upsides. One bonus is that you can run actual distance races as opposed to the mid-D you imply you have been running I had the benefit of several other guys who ran distance and did much the same as I training-wise, so I wasn't by myself 99% of the time. But you make it sound like that part of the scenario doesn't bother you, so I suggest you stay out there on your own.

Yeah it sounds like your coach may be overtraining you if you're doing worse from his/her workouts. It's a difficult conversation to have because the high school system allows you to race other high schoolers/state meet so it makes sense that you want to have a good relationship with your coach. I think talking to your parents about this too may be beneficial since it may be good to have that conversation with your parents involved, especially if you have any aspirations to run in college. If you're looking for a coach who has experience in Power 5 division 1 let me know! I'd love to help you get to the next level.