Do any of you still keep in touch with your high school friends?

Yep....feel the same way. Large proportions of college kids not involved in anything don't really fit the runners expectations of fun anymore. I have only a few friends left from HS that I still talk with (I'm a college senior). Most of my friends not are either people on my track team or people I'm involved with in school. It doesn't help that I live 4 hours from my home town though.

Nope. Never liked them that much to start with...they were just convenient to be around at certain times.

I have only seen 1 or 2 purposefully outside of school since I graduated, I am now a sophomore in college. I do oftentime run into them at college though, since a lot of them attended the same local state university as me.

I have a good friend group in college, just that over breaks we all go back home.

To keep in touch with my HS friends I'd have to go on Seancebook.

I wouldn't feel bad if I were you. You're in your second year of college, so I'm guessing you're about 20. This might seem sad to you now, but I assure you that the 30 year olds who are still hanging out with their high school group are far sadder.

It's the natural progression of life. What you'll come to realize is that you were never really friends with any of those people. Sure, you hung out and may have liked some of them, but the only thing holding you all together was a basket of similar experiences. You all went to the same school, had the same classes, same teachers, etc. You could relate to each other because you were all going through the same things. Take all that away and replace with different schools, different majors, different challenges/pressures, different priorities, and you find that there's not much left to relate to, except "remember when..." conversions. I believe it was Tony Soprano who said "'Remember when...' is the lowest form of conversation."

Like I said, it's natural. I don't want to give away the ending, but you shouldn't be too surprised when this cycle repeats with your college friends and with your work friends after you change jobs.

I'm a college freshman and already I haven't kept in touch with the kids I used to be friends with. From random facebook chats once in a while, it becomes obvious that the HS athlete-types I once was friends with have become obsessed with drinking, partying, and gaining weight- and that's all they talk about. To each his own, but I just don't find it appealing to spend time with these types of people. I do, however, still keep in touch with 2 other guys who I was really close with in HS, who, like me, went on to run in college. We're able to share similar stories and discuss interesting college experiences aside from alcohol.

I'm 28 and still close to several of my best friends from HS.

There is a lot of truth to what you say, however... There is something to be said of having long lasting, deep, meaningful friendships. If the only friends you have are a few people you work with, that's sad because just like HS, the ONLY reason you are friends is because you happen to work at the same place.

If your HS friendships grow as you grow it's a very good and healthy thing. IF your HS friends are "stuck" and the only thing you can talk about are HS days, well I cant imagine that wont lasting too long.

Finally, if you dont have many friends, either HS or college, it's probably a problem with YOU and not the others.

I would agree with EZMiler. I am a male in my 30s and I still keep in touch with some of my High School friends. In fact, while I lost contact with a lot of them during college (I ran D1), I found that upon entering the real world, I still enjoyed their company. Some I remained good friends with through college, even though they did not run.

Sure, some get weird and become sociopaths, etc. That is unavoidable.

Now that we are all married with kids, we have a lot in common. I live down the street from a good HS friend and we are in a totally new town.

Believe me, late at night after a few gasses of wine and a good meal, the "Remember When" stories begin and they are FAR from the lowest form of conversation. Monkeyman, you need to put that quote into context. The person saying it was a homicidal manic depressive. Do you think that has anything to do with his opinion?

I totally forgot to add this for the OP:

OP, if you are seriously running for the team and have lofty goals, I wouldn't worry too much. Still, you should make an effort to see these guys as long as they are not morons. If they are good guys that just like to drink, go grab dinner with them and head home early. They won't care.

I worked hard at running when I was in college and sacrificed a lot for it. I am glad I made those sacrifices b/c I achieved really impressive things. That being said, I sometimes feel bad about losing contact during those four years b/c a lot of my friends got into cool stuff (surgeon, music producer, etc) while I just thought they were screwing off. It would have been cool to see them pursue their passions too.

For good or bad, I had a couple of jobs in my mid-20s that took me out of town and consumed about 70 hours a week, and I pretty much lost touch with everyone. My one good friend from my high school is a guy I barely knew at all back then...he was a theater guy (he got the most beautiful girls in school) and I was into student government and sports. But he was publishing some really interesting books in his late 20s and I arranged to interview him, and we became very close friends and still are. We had far more in common than our scholastic circumstances would have suggested.

Well I go to college with people I knew in high school but wasnt really good friends with them like I am now. And beside one person I knew from high school, I couldnt care less what everyone else is up to.

I never meant to imply that there weren't benefits to having real friends, quite the opposite in fact. All I was trying to convey is that the vast majority of one's friends usually turn out to be "friends". If you can have a good time with someone you neither go to school with nor work with, then that's a great thing. Rare, but great.

I just remember being in high school and thinking I had a lot of friends, but looking back on it now I realize the only thing I had in common with 99% of those people were the common experiences.

"Finally, if you dont have many friends, either HS or college, it's probably a problem with YOU and not the others."

Eh, I'll give you a 'maybe' on that. Sometimes true and sometimes not. There was a book that came out around 2000 entitled "Bowling Alone" (http://www.bowlingalone.com/). In summary, the author asserts that improving technology (among other factors) is contributing to the decline of friends amongst adults. Clubs, societies, and other organizations (where adults typically meet other adults with common interests and make friends) are fewer in number and size than they were 30-40 years ago. Adults are working longer hours, have less free time, and technology offers faster, easier ways to interact with people rather than having them over for dinner. Course he focuses mostly on adults as the fundamental social structure of high school and college really haven't changed all that much over the years.

It's just a theory and I'm not saying the guy is right or wrong. I'm sure you can poke some holes in it. It does seem to me though that trends are changing. It seems today if you want to know how someone's doing, you don't invite them over or call or email, it's quicker (and less intrusive) just to check their facebook. That's fine, I suppose, but it doesn't seem conducive to forming meaningful, long term bonds with people. In my opinion, if you're only friends with someone on the internet, then you're not really friends with them.

What shines through this thread the brightest is how sad most of you must have been in HS. No real friends during some of the most carefree times of your life?

Very sad.

Bubba Kush, Senior Citizen wrote:

To keep in touch with my HS friends I'd have to go on Seancebook.

POST OF THE YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is sad. I went to kind of a small high school (graduated with 65) so maybe we were more close knit, but I still have a good relationship with several people from my class and the classes above and below me, and I now live 1,000 miles away from home. It has nothing to do with homesickness or loneliness, as I'm having the time of my life where I am now and have made a ton of great friends in the process. I still talk to all my high school friends every couple of weeks, and we always hang out every time we are back for the holidays.

I don't keep in touch with my high school or my college friends. I think I'm facebook friends with four.

I'm 22 (one year out of college) and I'm still pretty close with 5 people from high school (I graduated with 300+). I think that it is very possible to stay close with people from high school and still be friends with them much later on in life. However, some of it can be affected by luck of who you became friends with in high school. A lot of people could have been cool in high school and then completely changed in college into someone you didn't have interest being friends with. There were maybe 7 people I stayed in contact with about a year after high school, but 2 feel into that category that I don't anymore.

It is important that you can have conversation deeper than "Remember when", however that has it's place. There has to be common interests beyond shared experience. My friends from high school all went different routes - I went into finance, a couple went into engineering, one went into law, and one into computer science. Only two of these were people I ran with in high school (one of which was a sprinter). But even with all these differences of career and such, we still have a lot in common to talk about. Sure, "remember when" comes up all the time - but it's by no means the basis of our conversations.

These people are spread around also - I'm in PA, a few are in NJ, one in NC, and one in TX. But whenever we're back around our hometown we meet up. We don't keep in contact super regularly but we talk at least every few months. I visit them, they visit me. We take weekend trips to go hiking and such. It can all be done if you made the right friends.

Now what I think is sad is a couple people I knew from college who primarily hang out with 10-15 people from high school and view that as their main friends whereas anyone they met in college is automatically secondary because they're so obsessed with their high school friends.

I think you can have carry friends from different stages throughout your life (high school, college, work, various activities). More people will remain from some stages more than others - but there's no such thing as it being sad that you've had a certain friend for x amount of time

"Idont have friends because I'm SO dedicated to running thousands of miles."

No you dont have friends because you are a dork and people dont like you.