Has anyone else had experiences with a weak team or a coach that doesn't know what they're doing?

Do your own thing. You sound a little like me. Being coached didn't work well for me.

My HS coach was an overweight special ed teacher whose only running experience was that she one ran a road 10K. Nice lady, but not too knowledgeable. I trained on my own in the offseason based on books and articles I read. During the season I did some extra running after the stuff she assigned in practice and on the weekends. Looking back I feel like I did at least OK with that program.

no. you are all alone.

Unfortunately that sounds all too familiar. At least you had long runs and even an occasional tempo run. Last long run our coach gave us was 9 weeks before the end of the season and we didn't have a single tempo run all season. And the last time we had any intervals longer than 400m was back in August.

Bad coaches can have a huge impact. I ran great off the summer training I did myself but the season was a huge disappointment after poor training and basically peaking in the beginning of October. You can make suggestions to your coach and hope they listen. Worst case is you have to sneak in workouts on your own, quit or move.

Nope . Have no experience with that . Must be you , not the team.

Talk to some athletes from other high schools and find out which of their coaches are competent and ask them to coach you, or write some workouts for you, on the low.

Talk more wrote:

Talk to some athletes from other high schools and find out which of their coaches are competent and ask them to coach you, or write some workouts for you, on the low.

One of the coaches posted his training. They run 30-50mpw. They won 5 consecutive xc tiles, including this year.

Okay, but I'd still recommend you talking to him and asking for his help.

Run your normal runs with your team in order to please your coach and the rest of your team. Ask the neighbor coach to suggest some additional runs or workouts you can do in the morning/evening/weekends.

If the neighbor coach thinks you should skip your current coach's absurd workouts, then do it. Your future depends on it.

Yes. This topic comes up all the time.

The answer is to run more on your own. I ran in high school a hundred years ago, and got in the majority of my mileage at home on my own. I'd do an extra 5 to 6 miles on my own every night. My coach was a low mileage advocate, but I figured what coach didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

Art Vandelay the fake one wrote:

Yes. This topic comes up all the time.

The answer is to run more on your own. I ran in high school a hundred years ago, and got in the majority of my mileage at home on my own. I'd do an extra 5 to 6 miles on my own every night. My coach was a low mileage advocate, but I figured what coach didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

Your coach probably thought your success came from his training

The track workouts are reasonable but the fact that we don't really do any thing except 20-30 minute runs in between is not.

The week the season begins we do 8-12x400. Then we build up. (5x800). (4-5x1000). (2x800, 1x1600). (6x800). (12x400). (6x800) (5x1000) (3-4x1600). There will probably be about 2-3 weeks where we don't do a workout and just have meets. We start with 400s then build up to 1600s then break it down to 400s, and build it back up.

We did tempos every 3 weeks.

Our tempos go like... 5 miles (First mile: tempo. Second Mile: easy pace. Third mile: Tempo. Fourth Mile: easy pace. Fifth mile: Tempo.)

Okay, but wrote:

Okay, but I'd still recommend you talking to him and asking for his help.

Run your normal runs with your team in order to please your coach and the rest of your team. Ask the neighbor coach to suggest some additional runs or workouts you can do in the morning/evening/weekends.

If the neighbor coach thinks you should skip your current coach's absurd workouts, then do it. Your future depends on it.

I second this. Just ask what they do in the off season. Maybe give them a sample of your training and ask them for their opinion on it. Ask them for advice. How much mileage, when to add speed work, tempos, what workouts do they do, etc.

Terger wrote:

Do your own thing. You sound a little like me. Being coached didn't work well for me.

Do your own training, the way that you want to do it.

I ran 2 miles before practice every day and also before races.

You can pace the workouts, and run a mile or two warm down afterwards.

This would give you 15 more miles each week, plus you have weekends to run more.

I have no idea what to do about the team aspect. It's hard. Sometimes it's there, other times it's not.

Listen to these other posters. Talk to coaches in the area. Train on your own

Same here wrote:

Terger wrote:

Do your own thing. You sound a little like me. Being coached didn't work well for me.

Do your own training, the way that you want to do it.

+1

RunnerGirlXC2 wrote:

The track workouts are reasonable but the fact that we don't really do any thing except 20-30 minute runs in between is not.

The week the season begins we do 8-12x400. Then we build up. (5x800). (4-5x1000). (2x800, 1x1600). (6x800). (12x400). (6x800) (5x1000) (3-4x1600). There will probably be about 2-3 weeks where we don't do a workout and just have meets. We start with 400s then build up to 1600s then break it down to 400s, and build it back up.

We did tempos every 3 weeks.

Our tempos go like... 5 miles (First mile: tempo. Second Mile: easy pace. Third mile: Tempo. Fourth Mile: easy pace. Fifth mile: Tempo.)

The workouts in this program actually sound pretty good to me. The problem is the low mileage, not the workouts. Talk to your coach about running 45-60 minutes on your easy days. If that doesn't work, run on your own to supplement. My daughter's coach is very similar, not caring about mileage. She is the only one on the team that ran on Sundays this year because he wanted everyone to have a day off. Guess who was the top runner?

RunnerGirlXC2 wrote:

The track workouts are reasonable but the fact that we don't really do any thing except 20-30 minute runs in between is not.

The week the season begins we do 8-12x400. Then we build up. (5x800). (4-5x1000). (2x800, 1x1600). (6x800). (12x400). (6x800) (5x1000) (3-4x1600). There will probably be about 2-3 weeks where we don't do a workout and just have meets. We start with 400s then build up to 1600s then break it down to 400s, and build it back up.

We did tempos every 3 weeks.

Our tempos go like... 5 miles (First mile: tempo. Second Mile: easy pace. Third mile: Tempo. Fourth Mile: easy pace. Fifth mile: Tempo.)

I already gave you the answer: go run more on your own. Coach doesn't even need to know about it.

One thing I have learned on the message boards in all my years is that no coach other than Lydiard ever knew what he/she was doing.