my best race everrr

The 1996 San Francisco All-City Championships was my last chance for greatness.
I spent most of high school as a mediocre two-sport athlete. For the winter season, I was an under-sized and under-skilled basketball player. For the fall and spring seasons, I was a pretty slow long distance runner.
Before my senior year, I decided my only chance at greatness was to focus on one sport. I chose running.
An important factor to this story is that I was running in the public school district of San Francisco.
The rest of the country is dotted with great coaches and districts. For example, I have a friend who ran for legendary high school coach Joe Newton. Coach Newton recruits kids out of freshman PE class with the promise that their first day of cross country practice will consist of merely 90 seconds of running.
Then over the course of four years, Newton’s runners build on that first day of practice, which for most people would cover 1/4 of a mile, to the point where most varsity runners are logging more than 100 miles per week. His team, the York Dukes arrives at the Illinois State Meet each year in limos, followed by the school marching band, in order to absolutely destroy the competition.
In comparison, the coaching philosophy in the San Francisco public school district was a bit more lax.
Not a single coach of any of the dozen high schools encouraged significant running in between the cross country and track seasons. As a result, the vast majority of participants lost all their fitness between seasons and never built a base that would allow them to run more than 30 miles in a week.
Consistent training was the key to success in the San Francisco district, but in order to get it you had to become your own coach.
For the summer before my senior year, I put myself to a strict regimen of 40-mile weeks with a long run of 10 miles and a single hard workout of hill repeats.
Many of my teammates, and possibly my coach, thought I was crazy and going to hurt myself.
Serious training in the off-season was definitely against the team culture.
Come cross country season, I could see the benefits of my first off-season training. I knocked two minutes from my 5k time and qualified, along with the rest of my team, for the state cross country meet.
By California standards, the San Francisco public schools are one of the two weakest districts in the state, matched in futility only by the Oakland public schools.
In California, each district sends at least one team to the State Cross Country Championships. So San Francisco was guaranteed to send a team, no matter the quality. That’s how I made it to State.
At the State Meet, I beat three of my teammates and two kids from Oakland, while losing to 182 other kids. (The following year, the team from the Oakland district managed to complete a reverse perfect score, with all seven of their runners finishing behind the entire field.)
I mention the strengths of various districts as a way of explaining that my quest to make a name for myself off of just a single season of training would have been unreasonable folly in most districts, but was in fact a very reasonable goal in San Francisco.
To my benefit, I kept my off-season training up in between the cross country season and track.
Our track season had two components. On weekends we’d travel to invitationals around the Bay Area where we’d compete against really good runners. On Thursdays, we’d compete against other high schools in our district, mostly full of not-very-good runners. These district competitions culminated in our final race of the year, the All-City Championships.
During the invitationals, I dropped my personal best times in the 1600m from 5:13 to 4:46 and in the 3200m from 12:03 to 10:29.
A year of training had done a lot for me.