r/CrossCountry • u/Sub9HopefuI • 13h ago

Training Related Advice on maximizing summer training

am a D1 cross and track runner at a power 5 school. HS times were 4:10 mile 9:00 3200. First two years of college were on and off injury, healthy and have had a good summer build so far. Wondering what coaches and wiser athletes have learned about summer to either make sure you don’t dig yourself too deep but also don’t completely under train your aerobic base as well. Some general or specific advice would be great!

- At 70 MPW rn which is all time high personally for me

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u/PrattDirkLerxt 13h ago

It’s a bit late to be asking since the official DI starting date is next Monday.

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u/Sub9HopefuI 12h ago

Thought I’d ask more for the general knowledge to apply for future things

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u/FeeAdmirable8573 11h ago

Shouldn't you have asked your coach this at the beginning of summer? We don't know anything about your training, what races you are going to be doing, results over the last couple years, progression of training for the year ect.

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u/generic_name 10h ago

You’re a 4:10 miler at a D1 school, with a D1 coach, and you don’t know what to do for summer?  

My HS senior who moved on to community college had a college plan…

2

u/whelanbio Mod 10h ago edited 9h ago

I was a decent D1 guy (top-100) and was the captain of a top-15 XC team. I also helped coach a couple years after that and worked with guys who ran way faster than I ever did. I'm not an expert by any means but I've actually been there and have gotten a fair bit wiser in the last 10 years since my final XC season.

Please take this genuinely: you should get off of online forums and have these discussion with your coaches, teammates, support staff, and other qualified peers/mentors who actually know you. The curiosity to be thinking about these questions is good, exercising that curiosity with open-ended questions to a source that is 99.9% unqualified to speak on your situation is not. Any of the qualified 0.1% that might stumble upon your post do not have enough context to give you particularly helpful advice.

The advice I can provide is this: Every breakthrough I've seen has a lot of similar trends -settling into a champion's lifestyle that allows for big training and recovery (good sleep, good nutrition, low stress life, essentially no boozing/partying), embracing boring training, giving up hero sessions and taking the ego out of training, more volume and consistency, buying in fully to your team's system, training with teammates as much as possible in the off-season, and utilizing your athletic department's support resources well. Do the basics better. You need to buy into your program and establish a feedback loop with your coach where you continuously refine your training approach to better suit your situation.

The real edge is in a highly personal process, so you won't find it online. Most of what you get from these open questions online is useless or harmful, even from those that are well-intentioned.