The Summer Training Window: What Indiana High School Runners Should Do Right Now

By Coach Justin Roeder | Indiana

Spring track season just ended. You or your child crossed their last finish line of the school year. Maybe they ran a PR, maybe they fell short, maybe they left the season wondering what would have happened if they'd done a few things differently.

Here's the thing every serious Indiana high school runner needs to understand: the next 10 weeks will determine more about their fall cross country season than any workout they run in August.

I've watched this play out as an IHSAA State Cross Country Champion, as a NCAA Division I Head Coach, and now as a private coach working with high school runners across Westfield, Carmel, Noblesville, Fishers, and throughout Indiana. The athletes who show up to preseason camp in the best shape aren't the ones who ran the most miles in July. They're the ones who spent the summer being intentional by building aerobic base, cleaning up their mechanics, getting strong, and taking care of everything that falls outside of the mileage log.

This is that guide.

Why This Window Is Different

From now through mid-August, you or your child has something they rarely get during the school year: time and flexibility. No practice schedule to work around. No meets on the calendar forcing training decisions. No school stress competing for recovery and sleep.

This window is also when the physical adaptations that lead to big fitness jumps actually take root. Aerobic base building requires consistent, low-stress mileage accumulated over weeks which is exactly what summer allows. If your athlete waits until August to get serious, they'll spend the first half of the cross country season just catching up to where they could have been.

For runners in Hamilton County and across Indiana, this is the moment. Here's exactly how to use it.

1. Build an Aerobic Base

The foundation of everything in distance running is aerobic capacity, and aerobic capacity is built through consistent, easy mileage. Not fast mileage. Not heroic mileage. Easy mileage, run at a conversational pace, day after day.

Most high school runners get this wrong in one of two ways: they either do too little (a few runs a week with no structure) or they go too hard too often, turning every run into a race-simulation effort. Both approaches sabotage fall fitness.

What a well-structured base looks like:

The goal is progressive mileage increases of no more than 10-15% per week, with one intentional down week every 3–4 weeks to absorb the training load. The majority of runs should be at a pretty easy effort. One session per week can include a light workout or a moderate tempo effort to maintain neuromuscular sharpness. Long runs should be part of the weekly or every other week structure but never pushed to exhaustion.

If your athlete is a sophomore running 25 miles per week during the school year, a reasonable summer progression might build to 35–40 miles per week by late July but not 60. The goal is to arrive at August preseason healthy, fit, and hungry to train hard. Not broken down from overdoing it in June.

2. Address Running Mechanics Before Bad Habits Get Stronger

Summer is the best time of the year to work on running form, and it's the time most athletes completely ignore it.

During the season, there's little space to tinker with mechanics. Making a meaningful change to gait or posture takes weeks of repetition before it becomes automatic. If you try to change how someone runs two weeks before conference, you'll make them slower and more injury-prone, not better. Summer removes that constraint.

What to evaluate and address:

A video gait analysis will identify the mechanical inefficiencies that are either costing your athlete speed or putting them on the path to injury. Common findings in high school runners include overstriding (foot striking well in front of the center of mass, which acts as a brake with every step), forward trunk lean collapse, arm crossing the midline, and hip drop during the stance phase.

Each of these is fixable with the right drills and deliberate practice, but only if you identify them, target them specifically, and give the athlete enough time to rewire the movement pattern before competition begins.

If your athlete has a history of recurring injuries…shin splints, IT band syndrome, plantar fasciitis, stress reactions then there is almost always a mechanical component that a gait analysis will surface. Treating the symptom without addressing the cause is why so many runners end up in the same injury cycle year after year.

Summer training with Coach Justin Roeder offers Video Gait Analysis as a standalone service — it's one of the highest-value investments a serious high school runner can make this summer. It is also included in many coaching packages.

3. Build Real Strength. Not Just "Core Work."

Distance runners who strength train outperform those who don't. This is not a fringe opinion, it's one of the most consistent findings in endurance sports research. Yet most high school cross country programs treat strength work as an afterthought: a few sit-ups after practice, a circuit in the weight room once a week with no progression, or skipping it entirely during the summer.

The athletes who make the biggest performance leaps are almost always the ones who committed to a real strength program during the off-season.

What effective strength training looks like for a high school runner:

The goal is not to build bulk. It's to build single-leg stability, hip strength, posterior chain power, and the resilience to absorb 25,000+ foot strikes over the course of a race. This requires compound movements such as single-leg squats, Romanian deadlifts, hip thrusts, step-ups. Plus targeted accessory work for glute medius and hip flexor strength, which are the two most common muscular weak points in high school runners.

Plyometric work such as bounding, box jumps, hurdle hops will build explosive power and running economy. A runner who can generate more force per stride runs faster with the same aerobic output. These are the gains that often don't show up until October, when every other athlete's summer base looks similar and the one who did the strength work suddenly has an unexplainable extra gear.

Two to three dedicated strength sessions per week, structured and progressive, is the standard I use with my athletes throughout the summer.

4. Run Targeted Evaluations and Address the Weaknesses They Reveal

Structured training produces data. Summer is the time to look at that data honestly and design training around what it tells you, not around what you wish were true.

For high school runners, this means asking hard questions at the end of every spring season: Where did they struggle? Did they fade in the final 400m of the mile because of strength, pacing, or mental commitment? Did their 5K fall apart in miles two through three because of an aerobic base that wasn't deep enough? Did they pick up an injury in February that reveals a structural weakness that never got addressed?

Working with a coach over the summer means having someone who can look at your athlete's training history, race results, injury record, and movement patterns together and build a summer program that specifically targets the gaps. Generic plans don't always do this. The athlete who went 4:38 in the 1600m and wants to break 4:25 next spring needs a different summer than the athlete who went 5:05 and wants to make varsity cross country.

5. Get a Blood Work Panel Done

This is the one summer action that almost no high school runner takes, and it may be the one with the highest return on investment.

Comprehensive blood work can identify performance-limiting issues that training will never fix: iron deficiency, low ferritin (the storage form of iron), vitamin D insufficiency, and thyroid irregularities are among the most common findings in high-mileage adolescent athletes, especially female runners. A runner with a ferritin level of 5-25 ng/mL will feel chronically fatigued, struggle to hit pace targets, and recover poorly from workouts. They'll often be told to train harder. What they actually need is supplementation and dietary intervention.

The window between seasons is the right time to test. If a deficiency is identified in June, there's enough time to address it and see the physiological benefits by August. If you wait until the athlete is struggling through October workouts, you've lost an entire season.

I encourage every athlete I coach to work with their primary care physician or sports medicine doctor to get a full metabolic panel, CBC, ferritin, vitamin D, and thyroid function test once a year and summer is the ideal time.

6. Work With a Sports Nutritionist

Training creates a physiological demand. Nutrition either meets that demand or it doesn't. Most high school runners are under-fueled, and they don't know it.

The problem is rarely intentional. It's usually a combination of not eating enough total calories, not timing nutrition around training windows effectively, and under-consuming the specific nutrients that endurance athletes need most — iron, calcium, vitamin D, and carbohydrates. The culture around "eating light" and "staying lean" in distance running makes this worse, particularly for female athletes, and can contribute to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), which carries serious long-term health consequences.

Working with a registered sports dietitian over the summer, even for a few sessions, gives an athlete a practical, individualized fueling framework they can carry into the fall season. This isn't about building a meal plan. It's about teaching a 16-year-old how to fuel a 40-mile training week, what to eat the night before a race, how to hydrate properly in Indiana's summer heat, and how to use food to support recovery.

The athletes who figure this out in high school have a significant advantage in college. The ones who don't often hit a wall they can't train through.

7. Address the Mental Side and Take It as Seriously as the Physical

Elite distance running is as much a mental sport as a physical one. The ability to maintain focus during a hard workout, manage pre-race anxiety, push through discomfort at race pace, and recover psychologically from a bad result. These are trainable skills, not fixed personality traits. And like physical skills, they're best developed intentionally, not left to chance.

For some athletes, this means working with a sports psychologist or mental performance coach. For others, it means developing a journaling practice, building a consistent pre-race routine, or learning breath-based regulation strategies for managing race-day nerves. For athletes who are dealing with more significant anxiety, burnout, or performance-related stress, working with a licensed mental health professional is sometimes the right answer and it's never a weakness to pursue it.

The summer months, away from the pressure of the season, are an ideal time to explore this. I have athletes who've made bigger breakthroughs by spending time on the mental side of their sport than from any workout I've ever assigned them.

If you're looking for referrals to sports psychology resources in central Indiana, that's a conversation I'm happy to have directly. Reach out here.

Putting It All Together

For high school runners in Westfield, Carmel, Noblesville, Fishers, and across Indiana, the summer training window is genuinely the most important 10 weeks of the athletic year. It's also the 10 weeks that get the least intentional structure.

The athletes who use it well by building aerobic base progressively, cleaning up mechanics, training strength seriously, getting blood work done, eating to fuel their training, and developing their mental game will have better cross country season and future seasons. They build the habits and the physiological foundation that compound over four years of high school athletics and beyond.

That's not a small thing.

Ready to Build Your Best Summer?

If you're a high school runner in Hamilton County or anywhere in Indiana and you want a summer program built specifically around your goals, your race history, and your schedule, that's exactly what I do.

View the Summer XC Training Group →

Or if you want to talk through what a private coaching relationship looks like for your athlete:

Schedule a Free 15-Minute Consultation →

No commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation about where your runner is now and what's possible by August.

Coach Justin Roeder is a former IHSAA Individual Cross Country State Champion, NCAA Division I Head Coach, and former professional triathlete based in Westfield, Indiana. He coaches high school and adult runners from 800m to the marathon, in-person throughout Hamilton County and online throughout Indiana and beyond.