What are the most important things to improving besides running?

Kindness

Inner strength and self-control beyond running

Intellectual development

Personality

Good Luck to you.

Thanks but how will personality and kindness and intellectual development help me? Genuine question

strong abs.

So core then, I completely forgot about that Ill add it in with lifting and Ill just call it "strengthening"

If you are proceeding from the standpoint that you will do only those things that clearly and demonstrably benefit you, what is your expectation in requesting help from others?

You don’t want to end up like Cade Flatt.

I didn't mean it like that, sorry, if someone asks me to help them with something I have the knowledge with I definitely would! I enjoy helping people, I just meant it mainly from the viewpoint of improving my times, because I really like running but I have pretty minimal talent so I want to do everything I possibly can to get faster, which is why I was asking about the physical parts of it more than psychological, besides mental strength

Yeah that's true, I am pretty far away from becoming like him though, at least I hope

My vote is for nutrition.

Are you a boy? Eat until you get fat

Are you a girl? Eat until you get even fatter.

the bigger-boned girls always have more successful running careers.

You want to build a summer program that you can replicate once the school year starts. So if you’re doubling make sure you can double during the school year. Make sure your core routine and weights are structured that you can do it efficiently once school starts and you’re pressed for time. Many kids make the mistake of a summer structure that they can’t replicate during the season so they don’t understand why they aren’t getting better or not as fit as they were at the start of the season. My opinion the keys to a successful summer: milage, long run, moderate threshold, wickets, core, and upper body routine.

I can’t replicate 1hr of cross training every day during school because homework, practice, other stuff. But I thought it was a good idea to still do a lot of cross training during summer to help avoid injury later and build up some endurance with it too,

as the season progresses to the start of school the plan is to drop it down to a couple sessions per week, as my base aerobic phase would be over and I would be focusing on maintaining mileage/adding speed work and it would be less of a concern to swim and bike as a much. Would that be bad since I’m not replicating it like you said? Also from the summer of malmo training he suggests to double a lot and I thought it would be good since I want to significantly up my mileage but avoid injury, so doubling a lot in the summer but doubling less during the regular season would be bad as well?

By far recovery. Knowing when to not run and take a day easy is just as important in my opinion as knowing when to push it, and I think too many people don't realize when to dial it back. Not to say to not push yourself, but listen to your body.

Sleep

Hydration & nutrition

Strength work

Great question.

I have a good answer for you:

Start to learn to cook basic meals. Learn a little bit about nutrition and food labels.

This may sounds weird but I consider that the best skill I learned. It made me the healthy person I am now. This will help your running too as it did with mine.

Nutrition is an important part in everybody's life but a lot of people get it wrong.

Learn to cook basic meals with basic ingredients from the grocery store. You might want to start with a pasta with a sauce made from onions, peppers and garlic you cut up yourself and fried it in a pan, for example.
Once you can buy and cut up vegetable you can expand your cooking skills as much as you like. But the main lesson is, that you don't rely on expensive prepared sauces anymore. You can prepare your own meal and that's the important part.

Losing weight as body fat helps a TON with times. Of course, you don't want to be too skinny and become malnourished and unhealthy which is not fun. You dont even have to worry about calories or anything. I suggest just sticking to a strict whole-food diet and eating as much as you want you will shed pounds like crazy. Cut down until you have visible abs then just try to maintain weight. This is all assuming that you have a few layers of fat on your stomach and that you're male.

It's well-known on here that athletes perform better while running on pure hate.

Successful running is 40% neck-up and 60% neck-down. If you can't understand this, take up knitting.

8.5 or greater hours of sleep per night

Thanks for all the replies guys, so yes I definitely will take sleep serious but I have a few more questions from what a few people have said, if you see this and could answer it would be greatly appreciated.

1: How will learning to cook basic meals help me? I'll take the advice and start cooking (basic level) this summer, and I know putting the right thing in your body is is "good," but is it really worth the effort of constantly doing that? And if so, does that also mean that eating unhealthy food could slow me down a lot. I'm not talking about having a huge dessert before a race and getting a cramp/throwing up, but just in general
2: It seemed like people liked the suggestion about personality and inner strength, what specifically can I do to get more inner strength? I questioned it cause I didn't know how personality and kindness would help, but I definitely need the inner strength. My mental strength is pretty bad and I think that this is a big thing for me, not giving up when it gets hard, could anyone suggest any specific techniques to work on that?
3: Lastly, could anyone answer the question about the benefits of cross training during regular season? Besides helping me stay safe when I up the mileage, could it legitimately help me making running gains too?