Firsthand proof that MIT overtrains its runners - from MIT Confessions

No one cares

Your title says you have proof MIT overtrains its runners. Nothing in your complaints mentions overtraining. Running on an injury is not good but it is not overtraining.

That's how many DI schools are. If you don't like it, find a different school. There are plenty of DII and DIII schools that balance academic and athletic priorities better. Nothing wrong with any division.

you must be a legacy admit if you think this anecdote constitutes 'proof'

Broseph wrote:

That's how many DI schools are. If you don't like it, find a different school. There are plenty of DII and DIII schools that balance academic and athletic priorities better. Nothing wrong with any division.

MIT is D3. It may surprise you to learn top d3 schools train as hard as D1 schools.

this part is the most egregious: "Pressured me into sacrificing my academics to dedicate more time to track." It's DIII not DI. It's MIT not Keene State. Obviously academics should come first.

Yeah I have a friend who ran for MIT and quit recently (the initials BB should give you enough info if you were on the team) and I remember he seemed to really enjoy running and enjoy life because of it...I was sad to see him quit.

I went to MIT for a recruiting visit my senior year. Communicated with the assistant coach (Pete Sampson) who was very friendly and excited to have me come visit. Pete actually regularly called me during my senior year to check in.

Met with Coach Taylor on my visit and he was essentially like "who are you? I guess you can be on the team, but we're not officially recruiting you." Put a sour taste in my mouth- I used my money and time to fly out there just to hear that the head coach wasn't even interested. Still was in love with MIT academically and would definitely have attended if I was accepted, but I happily ended up in very supportive environment that ended up being exactly what I needed for my personal development. I have my doubts that MIT XCTF would have been a good place for me.

I ran for MIT under Coach Taylor many years ago and can shed insight on an alternative perspective. To the original OP (#24239) she is probably recounting how she felt, but not what actually transpired in a factual sense. Honestly, reading between the lines it sounds like this person was a total neurotic head-case. I knew tons of people like this at MIT, both on and off the track team.

Pressured me to continuously run/compete while injured, prolonging and worsening my injury

Translation: "I wasn't fully injured and wanted to finish off my season, but I blame the coach for communicating that I was capable of competition."

Pressured me into sacrificing my academics to dedicate more time to track

Translation: "Tried to work with me to balance academics and athletics, as countless athletes have been able to do before"

Berated me after bombing a race at nationals, not empathizing with the fact that I was extremely nervous, burnt out, and upset myself

Translation: "I bombed and am so emotionally unstable that I cannot accept criticism. My teammates, coaches, friends, and family were all supporting me and I let them down and don't want to accept accountability"

Told me I didn't have the test scores to get into MIT and got in off of his support and the major I selected alone

Translation: "When I said I wanted to quit, he emphasized and reminded me that I was a recruit and that solid athletics can help boost the credibility of a well-rounded application. He had invested a lot of time and effort into me, and wanted me to understand that I'm part of a team"

Insulted me in one-on-one meetings after every bad race, claiming I was not focused/dedicated/good enough

Translation: "When debriefing after a bad race, the Coach would encourage me by explaining how high my potential was, and that I was capable of much more. I wanted to wallow in sadness after my bad races, and cannot take constructive criticism or motivation."

At this point I'm not hung up over the experience, but when I made the decision to quit, I felt super alone, and thought I was letting down a bunch of people

Translation: "I let down a bunch of people and don't like that they judged me for my actions that they didn't agree with. I don't like being held accountable for my actions, and believe that I exist in a vacuum."

--------------------------------------

Let me tell you a story about Coach Taylor. Like this person, I was a "recruit" but during my freshman year I got caught up in the college life, probably partying a bit too much and not balancing academics, athletics, and life in a healthy way. After my first 1500m of the season, I ran an abysmal race... on par with where I was as a sophomore in high school. I hunched over to catch my breath, probably subconsciously trying to make it seem like I gave a good effort, and felt sorry for myself, thinking I should drop out and that this wasn't for me. Coach walked over to me and said: "I'm not going to give up on you until you give up on yourself." I cannot tell you how much those words stung, but it lit a fire in me to try and clean up my act. By the time I graduated, I improved 33 seconds in the 1500m to break the school record and become the national D3 leader.

If you're looking for a coach that takes a no-nonsense and holistic attitude towards helping you achieve your athletic goals at an incredibly rigorous academic institution, then Taylor is your guy. If you aren't internally committed and need to be coddled after bad races, then go to Harvard or Princeton where they'll hand out As just for showing up to class.

I have tremendous respect for Coach and we had a fantastic and collaborative coach/athlete relationship where I was able to reach a level of performance that wouldn't have been possible if I had been dismissed as a D1 walk-on. I followed his instructions, he listened to my input, and if I had the chance to be coached by him again I would.

MIT has been runner ...

Your interpretation appears well grounded but you may be overlooking some things.

1) In the college application process, applicants are encouraged to overly dramatize every experience, no matter how insignificant. We need heroes. If you don't have one, make it up. You cannot write a good essay without believing it, so you have to get to believe what you write before you write it. That's what kids are told to do when they apply to college. Do you think that ceases to exist once the application season is over?

2) If you look at the finish line of a HS XC race you would think the Mad Cow Disease affects XC runners more so than cows. Why is that sort of culture promoted or allowed? If all you do is act all the time, you forget who you really are. There is an identity crisis of sorts. Complaints arise simply from application of political correctness rules that were learned earlier in life.

3) Coaches encourage everyone to express their Heart-And-Soul-Of-The-Team (HASOTT) insignia thru over the top empathy as finishers cross that line at the HS level. I have seen a number of HASOTTs who lack character and are nothing more than big rear pains. That should serve as a forewarning. Disclaimer/bias: never met a HASOTT I ended up holding in high regard.

4) Have you ever come across a HS txc coach who does not regard himself as Godsent? How about those who do not blame the lack of talent in their own team for poor results ... year, after year? Yet these HS athletes are essentially expected to build emotional shrines to their coaches. Do they also adopt mannerisms in the process of building that shrine? The inability to take responsibility was acquired as a result of all that training.

I have a friend who ran at MIT as a Freshman, felt pressure to train harder than she should have, became injured, was pressured to train while injured, and was basically unable to run the rest of her time at MIT. I don't want to say exactly who she is but her name was on the all-time list as a Freshman. This is N=1 so let's look at some statistics:

Top female 1500m times from Athletic.net, top 20 times shown (from the past 20 years or so, probably since Athletic.net started scraping them):

MIT:

6 Seniors

3 Juniors

4 Sophomores

6 Freshman

(1 undefined)

Compare with Williams' women:

5 Seniors

4 Juniors

8 Sophomores

3 Freshmen

Compare with Stanford women:

11 Seniors

4 Juniors

3 Sophomores

2 Freshman

Compare with Colorado women:

8 Seniors

6 Juniors

4 Sophomores

2 Freshmen

Compare with Cornell (why not):

9 Seniors

4 Juniors

5 Sophomores

2 Freshmen

Some takeaways:

1. At least half of MIT's fastest 1500m times were run by Freshman and Sophomores, a trait shared by Williams but zero of the D1 universities

2. 6 of MIT's fastest 1500m times come from Freshmen, compared with 2 from the other schools (3 from Williams)

3. You can't blame this on female development, since many of the other schools had women running well as seniors

4. You can't blame this on the workload or weather, since other schools on that list have similar workloads and/or weather

The 800m is even worse, 7 of the top 19 times were run by Freshmen. Doesn't seem like a program that develops runners to me. I don't really see how you can think the coach is treating his athletes well if a *third* of his athletes are peaking as Freshman. Come on.

> I don't really see how you can think the coach is treating his athletes well if a *third* of his athletes are peaking as Freshman. Come on.

Since you can't see, allow me to help:

At the D1 schools, the athletes have a much higher budget, have scholarship money, and other incentives that encourage continued participation throughout their 4 years. At D3 schools like MIT and Williams, you run simply because you want to. Further compounding the issue of participation is that the academic demands of MIT far outstrip that of almost any other institution (zero grade inflation unlike some ivies and Stanford, for example) so you have people who quit for all sorts of other reasons (e.g. academics, startups, international programs, research labs, clubs, greek life, etc.). Most of the folks I know who quit by senior year did so not because they didn't like running, but because it was too much of a time commitment among all the other goals they have in mind. When I joined there was another guy at my level (in fact, he was a bit better) but by junior year his focus was more on med school and he basically stopped training. He's a neurosurgeon now so I can't fault his prioritization.

That's why you see a bimodal distribution of best performances (although the sample isn't statistically significant). You either have top-level talents who perform at a high level as freshmen and then get sucked into the rest of the university and decline to participate in sports thereafter, or you have people who stick it out and reach their peak performance at the end of their collegiate careers. (Off the top of my head I can't think of many teammates who made it 4 years and didn't have collegiate bests in their last season). Also let's be honest, the majority of people in D3 are doing it for fun - most have no shot at conference titles or making it to nationals.

Another big issue has to do with rest and recovery in terms of reaching optimal performance. In my last and second-to-last seasons I did nearly identical training but was on a totally different level (top national seed vs. not qualifying). The only difference was that I had a lighter load senior year and was able to sleep 8-9 hours a day instead of 6. That's why there are all sorts of rules to prevent burnout and aid recovery. A few examples I can think of include "if you sleep less than 3 hours you have to skip practice" and "if you sleep less than 6 then you pool run instead of outdoor run." We also had zero impact days, and they purchased a zero G treadmill to that effect as well. Depending on the athlete, you might only have one structured workout per week instead of two. For female athletes, they would be encouraged to get their iron levels tested regularly because anemia is always a concern.

@ oroy __

Thank you for the additional insight, those are really interested observations and I've encountered more than my fair share of running head-cases. Part of being a captain on your team is playing pseudo-therapist to undo the neuroticism that seems to plague distance runners (or perhaps distance running attracts these people first, who knows).

BergLaufer wrote:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=0lzqRVuRqN0

lol, feel bad for laughing

MIT HasBeen Runner wrote:

That's why you see a bimodal distribution of best performances (although the sample isn't statistically significant).

The difference between MIT and Stanford has a p-value of 0.034 according to a Mann-Whitney U test (assigning integer values to class year). If I include 800m results it's p=0.016. Those values are typically considered statistically significant. I didn't check the others.

Many of the points you made seem reasonable, but prioritization and balancing academics with athletics is one of the things that an earlier poster was complaining about and seemingly shot down for. The question of whether you make it four years was also one of my initial concerns (injuries for instance would prevent you from doing so) and relates to burnout and these other sorts of issues. But you're right that we didn't know why these athletes didn't continue, and you're right that that might be more of a D3/D1 divide than an MIT-specific issue. Looking quickly at some other schools it does seem that the distribution seems to be more uniform in D3 than in D1 so maybe this isn't the right metric.

But your comment about not making it to conference titles or nationals -- I thought MIT was pretty competitive in its conference, and if we're looking at the fastest runners at MIT then most of them must have had a shot at making it to nationals (especially if they had improved past their freshman year), no?

Just going to throw something out there. MIT consistently has one of the best recruiting classes in D3, both on the men's and women's sides. Makes sense, as the school pretty much recruits itself. Despite this, the men's team has never even come close to winning a national title in Taylor's tenure, and while the women's team has been on the podium several times, they have never really challenged to win it all when you look at the point totals. Maybe there is a reason for this?

Maybe I'm totally alluding to the wrong thing. So tell me. Why hasn't MIT, especially the men, every really challenged for a title?

MIT HasBeen Runner wrote:

That's why you see a bimodal distribution of best performances (although the sample isn't statistically significant). You either have top-level talents who perform at a high level as freshmen and then get sucked into the rest of the university and decline to participate in sports thereafter, or you have people who stick it out and reach their peak performance at the end of their collegiate careers.

Can you explain why you think athletes who perform well early on are MORE likely to get drawn to other extracurriculars???

I understand your point to an extent- MIT is a pressure cooker, even without running- but this conclusion seems hand wavy and makes no sense to me.

Every collegiate program tries to get the most out of its runners as is possible (most runners want this for themselves). The reason it seems worse at MIT is because the school is so competitive academically that the students are probably getting less sleep and are probably more prone to injury. My brother went to grad school there. The burn out rate among the undergrads was pretty high from what he observed, and that is just the academic side (the grad school is a little more forgiving). Not every star high school athlete adapts well to college life. I went to a competitive D1 program and a number of highly successful high school runners did not adapt to college life / training. On the flip side, a number of less heralded high school athletes took to the training and excelled.

Life is full of choices. Sometimes people choose to focus on athletics at the detriment to their grades, others focus on academics to the detriment of their athletic performance (it is the rare soul that can accomplish both) and still others party too much and drop out. You have to make that decision, but I probably wouldn't blame the coach, as you don't cater the program to each athlete, but try to bring the athlete up to fit the training. The best college coach that I had was the one who had the highest expectations, the hardest training and built us into a perennial top 25 program. As a coach, some athletes need to be pushed more than others to reach their full potential.

Probably best that you dropped the running if you couldn't handle the training. If you have to choose one or the other, the academics are going to do more for you long term. It's not like you were losing a scholarship, and you already made it into the school. Besides, D3 is not that competitive anyhow. You'd really have issues at a D1 program.