Grudges

The first few days of indoor track were very exciting. Seeing a ton of new faces to the team, including my younger brother, and old faces to bring nostalgia. I have been desperately attempting to talk to my coach about doing intramural. I basically want to use indoor to keep in good running shape between cross country and outdoor track in the spring. But every one of my teammates immediately denies that they want me to and claim coach will not let me either. Even though there is one person who did cross country temporarily between football seasons, and is now doing intramural due to a slight hand injury. The main reason I planned on doing intramural is because I simply cannot run indoors. No, I'm not bad at indoor, but the air in every indoor track facility is so poorly fumigated. And every indoor meet in past years had me left with severe runners cold and asthmatic related issues. And the fact that I would then start outdoor track while sick would make me even sicker as allergens came into season. But my freshman year I did not do indoor, mainly because I found no interest in it because it was mainly a sport for sprinters. Not to mention that because of this and the changing of the seasons, I had never really had a "good" indoor track season. I was out for most of last year with a severe hip joint injury and I only ran three races the whole season. My first mile finishing in an embarrassing 5:21, my second race a 5:12, and I eventually got my time down to 5:01 at my third and last race, not my best but better than I was expecting. But this year is different, with many old faces not returning (for reasons unknown), there is nobody on the distance squad to keep the mellow pace of our usual long-runs. Now with Tyler and Jill at the top leading every run, we always go way too hard for a long time. Despite my coaches strict orders to keep it "nice and easy, it has become a practical joke for him and all of us to make fun of Jill and Tyler because they have no self-control. I must admit though that I respect their will to work themselves practically to death over a simple practice, but I don't like when it involuntarily involves us who are just trying to get through practice without dying. I'm not complaining about hard days because I know they are essential to improving. I just find it annoying because literally every practice is a hard workout now; I understand that a runner needs his/her fair share of hard days, but they need their recovery days too; and it has been a pretty long time since I have had one of those.