Last week, I had surprising news from my prefecture athletics championships.
Three students from the same high school Ekiden team ran under 3'50 for 1500m. More surprisingly, one of them is only 15years old.
When I was in the team 12 years ago, if there was one student who runs under 4minutes for 1500m, he could have been the ace runner. Just for a record, the high school is a public school.
Now the team has 10runners sub-4minutes for 1500m, what's more, 21 students broke 15minutes for 5km.
I asked my high school coach what's happening there, and he was laughing. He says " There is nothing different in training than what you did here ten years ago. But one thing I assume that the high schooler's record gets more and more competitive is there is a bunch of well-organized time trial races which allow runners to run easier than races decades ago. I never believe that students these days are more talented than yours."
I have no answer why students record rapidly improving these days even they do almost the same training what we did. But I believe the relationships between the students and the coach is the one contributor.
When I was in high school, our team was always defeated by one rival team at an Ekiden race. So, we were somewhat doubly training like is this training effective or we can't beat them with this training.
On the contrary, the students have strong confidence and are highly motivated with their training.
When you struggle with your poor performance or plateau, you might think that problem is in training. How actively you work on training plays a crucial role.
Circumstances affect your mindset, therefore, whom you train and which team you train with is more matter than what training you do.
But don't get me wrong. The training method is essential, and I love learning it.
Find a place you comfortably train at and people whom you can share the joy with.