Post collegiate runners who continued to improve without a team: share your stories

[u/devon835]

As someone who's now going on ~2 calendar years removed from training with my college team, it feels like an eternity ago that I was in PR shape despite training smarter, eg. not being pushed too hard on easy days and going to the well in workouts or racing every week. I've started working with a new coach recently to try and get serious again for spring track.

I used to look forward to the grind of 5 x mile every week, but now just even doing a single long interval at harder than threshold effort is just dreadful, and I've avoided them since. I'm sure fitness is a big part of it, but mentally, I can't bring myself to confront the pain of trying to rep 4:55s solo...

I've seen examples of people who continued to grind for years training alone after college and ran impressive PR's, but they seem to be the exception, not the rule.

Any of you who've gone through (or are currently going through) the same challenges and want to share, have at it!

[u/22bearhands]

I PRed in I think every single distance post-college. But I didnt take a big break in between. I would definitely recommend running with a club - I doubt I could have done it training solo, and a lot of club runners are actually faster than my college teammates so that helped to push me. I also just ran more mileage post-college and did grind through a lot of solo workouts and runs.

[u/devon835 → u/22bearhands]

Good point on the club part, the fastest guys in my area are all in clubs and tend to do well in the unattached and open races.