What was your summer mileages like, and what other activities are you doing? As a XC coach for middle through high school, I'm faced with many multi-sport athletes who are in two sports (such as XC and soccer right now), or are in 2 or 3 consecutive season sports (like XC, basketball, then track). Right now I have 2 of my top boys who are also into hockey and are excellent at hockey, and they are training on a skating treadmill. I'm fortunate enough to train them at both sessions, since my full-time job is training athletes, and I'm their trainer for the hockey treadmill training sessions they do. I'm constantly trying to monitor everyone as best I can. If you are doing a lot of extra miles after practice, or you just simply running too hard, day in, day out, you may not be making the performance adaptions you are seeking. There's a reason you have easy days and hard days, lighter weeks and harder weeks. Your body needs variations in intensity and volume to adapt to them. I hope your coach understands this and has adjusted the volume/intensity of your practices and incorporated the volume/intensity of races into your practice schedule as well.

There could be other factors that are affecting your current performance, such as rest and recovery. Are you also doing some form of strength training to keep your strength up? This is a major concern from my standpoint as a coach and performance trainer. If you don't strength train and keep your strength levels up during the season (just 1 to 2 short sessions a week is all that's needed), you will lose strength and suffer in performances as a result, or even worse, become more susceptible to overuse injuries.

There could be many factors affecting your performance but these are just a few of the 'big ones' that affect most runners.

Rick Karboviak, CSCS
Total Trinity Training
http://trinitytraining.bravehost.com

I may be out on a limb here, but I've seen short mileage programs work when you train at the right intensity levels for your runs. If you run too slow on much longer-than-race-distance runs, you may not get much of a benefit from it, you may only maintain what you have. Also, the intensity of your speed workouts will help your body adapt well, too. If you go too hard, too fast, and end up slowing down too much in your speed workouts, you may not get those sought-after benefits, either. I'm one to think you don't have to over-distance your race distance by more than twice its length. If you run at the right times/intensity level for that 2x distance, it should offer a good recovery for you. It just baffles me how some HS teams run upwards of 60+ miles in a week just to get a 3.1 mile time down, when running faster and raising your lactate thresholds will help you hold on longer than just churning out mile after mile after mile with no main purpose in sight. Newer research is showing that VO2 maxes can improve with shorter & hard workouts, versus longer & slower runs. My take on that? Why run more than you need to, if the short & hard stuff gets as good gains or better than long & slow stuff? Short & Sweet, Hard & Fast, Smart & Strong....that's my take on it as a coach & sports performance trainer.

Rick Karboviak, CSCS
http://trinitytraining.bravehost.com