Agree with the saturday long run deal. However, we are dealing with kids of varying levels of motivation.
We had 5 of 23 at yesterday's practice. I cannot make saturday's mandatory, so the LR is on the next best day, Thursday. Thursday is best because we generally race Wed/Sat. So, we have been doing quality days on M/W. LR on Thursday gives us a nice shake out from a quality day / race and gives us 48 hours before any potential race on Saturday. We haven't started racing yet, but our first outing is in 6 days.
I also agree that milers should be going further for their long runs. However, the kids in that group are either: A. just coming out of basketball and didn't do cross or, B. Coming off injury. My #1 guy in the 400-1600 group missed almost all of CC season and almost all of the winter base period. A couple of weeks ago, we were still wondering if he would even be able to compete this season and if so, could we do so off of mostly cross training and short reps? Another guy in that group struggled with I.T. band issues during cross and has issues with longer sustained runs (but doesn't seem bothered by shorter intervals). He may be lying to me because he simply doesn't like to do longer runs, but I can't hook him up to a polygraph. He came back from the 6.4 miler complaining about a hip flexor, but was fine running the 100s the following day.