sup, former extremely avid runner with PRs of 1:59 and 4:30 in the 800 and 1600 from my junior year in high school now getting back into it. back in the day I ran 2-a-days and 60 miles per week in season touching on 80+ in the off season, now 5 years and 30 lbs later I'm running 15-20 miles per week. boy how the times have changed
guess I'll post relevant progress in here if I stop sucking. I ran a mile in the 5:40s a few weeks ago, so that was pretty cool. didn't really expect to break 6. I'm hoping that over the next few years I can scare my old PRs but it's a long shot!
re: doubling, I can say definitively that doubling is what turned me from a really shitty runner into the average runner that I was by junior year of high school (got injured senior year). between seasons I dropped 15 seconds off my 800m PR, 40 seconds off my mile, and minutes off my 5k. it wasn't an accident, it was 2-a-days and higher mileage. doubling has a TON of benefits. the first is obviously that you inevitably run higher mileage than otherwise (duh). the more aerobic training you get without getting injured, the better. but the benefits don't stop there. physiologically, doubling with an easy run the morning of and the morning after a workout can help you run the workout better and recover from it better due to increased blood flow to the legs. the usefulness of an extra shakeout run after a very hard workout for getting oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood to your recovering muscles and connective tissues cannot be understated. finally, doubling is a great way psychologically to convince yourself that you're dedicated to running fast. once I started doubling, I lived more "like a clock" as john L. parker puts it, and everything else around my life sort of just fell into place. on the other hand of that last psychological point, it is an enormous commitment and now that I have nothing to compete for I definitely wouldn't even consider doubling. I don't know if mandatory doubles are really the way to go in a high school program, but at a bare minimum it should be an option and if you have a good program maybe mandatory for varsity. I don't think you can really say you're doing everything you can to be as good as you can if you're not doubling. the benefits are just too significant to pass up. every morning you're not getting out there is a morning you're losing to your competitors who are.
re: pushing through pain, over time and a lot of training you know what your body is capable of. a lot of the pain early on can be mitigated by pacing intelligently so as to even split rather than massively positive split which is usually a lot more painful than evenly splitting. of course if you're running at PR capacity whatever that may be at the time, you're going to be hurting a lot near the end. for me, I always ran through the pain a lot better if I had someone to chase. our coaches also frequently had "going to the well" workouts that were designed to break our spirit so that racing seemed easy. I disagree with this training philosophy physiologically but boy did it work for making us tough mentally. stuff like mile repeats at 5k pace, 400-600 repeats at mile pace with short rest, 300-400 repeats at 800 pace, etc. will turn you into a man (or woman). toughest workout for me was probably 4x90s (at the time nearly 600m) at 800m pace with long rest, though we had a bunch of killers like 10x2x400 at mile pace, on "1 minute" rest between reps and 3 minutes between sets (essentially 20x400 but split up with a dumb recovery scheme designed to get you to race every 2nd 400 even though you shouldn't be), and 5x300 all out (I did them in 36-38 seconds with a 400m PR of 52.high at the time). all of these will grow hair on your balls in extremely short order