Ten ways to fail as a collegiate runner

In the two-plus years I competed in college, I barely improved from high school, when I ran 9:43 for 3200m and a 15:57 road 5K. My two most noteworthy races were an 8:55.2 indoor 3000m as a freshman at BU and a 26:48 8K at Bryant College in Rhode Island as a sophomore. I've started to pinpoint some of the possible reasons for my athletic stagnation:

1. I didn't sleep enough, my nutrition was erratic, and I drank like character in a Judd Apatow movie. This was par for the course on the surface, but I was significantly worse than most.

2. Our team did very little volume. 10-milers were considered noteworthy.

3. Our program included very little intensity. A sample "hard" workout: 16 x 400m in 75 with a slow 200 jog; 6 x 600 on a golf course at roughly 5:00 pace.

4. We were never given goals, as a team or as individuals, either before individual races or at the beginning of the season. The purpose of a given workout was never explained.

5. There was no discernible plan to our training within a competitive season. It was very much as if the coach made up our workouts shortly before telling us what they were, which is almost certainly what he in fact did.

6. We were not given any out-of-season training guidelines, other than the suggestion not to sit on our asses all summer.

7. Our coach gave us the silent treatment on the long van rides home after meets where we had raced poorly, which meant that we almost always rode home in silence, save for the barely concealed sniggering of a few of the guys secretly drinking and cutting up in the back. At the time we all just laughed at these displays of sulking, but in retrospect they were not precisely representative of a solid coach-athlete relationship.

8. It was really fucking cold a lot of the time. Training inside meant training on a concrete 176-yard piece-of-shit track that had been around since the Coolidge administration and was condemned by the NCAA after my freshman year.

9. We had very low standards of excellence. Anyone who sniffed 4:00-flat for 1500m 15:00-flat for 5K was regarded as a phenom. We were males, by the way.

10. The positive energy I brought to every practice, race and team meeting went roundly underappreciated, leaving me and numerous others disillusioned, unmotivated, and prone to blaming others for our failures.

I've left out a few things, but that's probably as comprehensive as any such list needs to be.