college walk on training plan

Build mileage this summer and stay at peak mileage till mid November. Race as often as possible. Load up the threshold miles and work on top end speed every week. Hit VO2 every 9-10 days. Take a week off in December and do the same thing Winter/Spring except put yourself in track races with your college team and prove yourself.

What are your PRs (and when did you set them)?

which college are you attending/ hoping to walk onto?

Impossible and dumb. What does covid have do with it? If you trained through high school, your times are your times. Pick a D3 school.

OP said that the school has a good program, so it has to be NAU.

Definitely within possibility, but will be very hard to achieve. Need some training context here to provide any specific guidance.

• What is your current training like? (Volume, common workouts, typical periodization throughout a year, training age, etc).
• Realistically what type of performance do you need to achieve to get onto the team?

There isn't some magic quick fix for fitness, you just start from where you're currently at and grind out a lot of mostly boring work. That probably isn't straight into high mileage, it definitely isn't lots of racing right away. Without any context, I would say go read the Summer of Malmo threads and start with that style of training.

Another thing, if you don't have an internal motivation and love of running that is entirely independent of whether or not you make this team (and external results in general) I would not even bother trying because you will just be miserable and half-a$$ing training for a year that could've been spent doing fun college stuff.

On boring work vs. fun college stuff -if you want any chance of success with this the most important aspect is lifestyle (sleep, nutrition, stress management). Unless you're going to a school like BYU that means living a life completely different than basically all of your college peers. This requires more than just not partying like crazy, there are good odds that basically everyone and everything you are around simply doesn't support a high-performance lifestyle (especially in the dorms) and it can be exhausting to constantly do it all yourself.

if you care enough to want to train daily in pursuit of college track, even for a wannabe walk on role, then you want it as part of your college experience badly. if it is not part of your college experience you will regret it. go someplace that wants you to run.

going to a D1 "saying" you will try to walk on, without any encouragement, is a poseur move. if you have this much passion and willingness you don't want to be a poseur, you want the real thing.

my sense of folks in your shoes is you either didn't think through all the way what you wanted in college, or you let dad tell you where to go, or you otherwise lost control of the choice process. reboot. go someplace else for the fall, or apply for january.

i agree with the poster who said go D3. if you improve you might have some success at moderate programs, if you don't, you're not finishing last. you would need to drop double digit seconds per event, perhaps even minutes in some cases, to make a D1. it's not happening on the timescale to have a fun college track experience. to me there would be nothing sadder than someone spending their years at a college track desperately training hoping sensei will notice you, never get it, when you can go down the road someplace else and do it for real. period.