Days off?

^^^

What he said. 

Lots of folks are reluctant to take time off thinking they will lose their fitness. Yes you will but that is okay. Taking time off now helps you avoid burn out later. I'm on day 10 of no s/b/r. I'm sleeping better than I have in months. My body is feeling better. I know come May-July next year this down time will be key.

If you had a really bad cross season, look back and see why. Did you peak early? Did you burn out? Did you have an injury? Were your times just crappy? Overtaining? Loss of motivation?

Look at your reason, and then see what you can do to prevent it from happening again. If it was peaking early, don't do any hard workouts for the first eight to ten weeks. If you burnt out, don't train as hard. Injury, build up slowly. Times crappy, talk to a coach. Overtraining, tone it down.

If it's pretty much any of these, you need to give yourself a couple of weeks just clean off before jumping back in. Two weeks is not enough time to lose significant fitness (Roger Bannister took a week compeltely off before his first sub-4:00), and you'll have the entire winter to rebuild it.

So, err on the side of too much, rather than too little.

Crappy season, my fitness level - in practice I run great and with my times in practice i should be around 17:30 for a 5k.  Last year's PR was 18:28.  This year it is 18:48 but most of my races have between 19:20 and 19:57.  I guess it might be overtraining.  One of the practices this week, we did about 5 miles of running ( intervals, short and long) Then finished with a 5:54 mile.  Should be getting faster times than 19:30. 

 Any thoughts?

That does sound like a long workout for a Cross runner.

How are the rest of the guys on the team performing?  Were they feeling the crunch too?  

For my Interval XC workouts, we probably run about 7-8 miles TOTAL for a workout.  That's including our standard Warm-up + Steady + Intervals (anywhere from 800s-Miles (3-5 times)).

 The rest of the week consists of one easy run (or hill repeats/tempo depending on the upcoming race), a steady run on Saturdays (usually a bit longer), and a long run of about 70-90 min. on Sunday.

 Now, all that said, our team races NAIA and the standard male distance is 8km, so we need a bit longer practices.

To me personally, it doesn't sound like overtraining.   I would say take a few days for your sanity, I know that I would.  It's tough coming off a bad season (experience from swimming) and I just needed to clear my head for 3ish days.

Good luck!

Derek

I suspect the amount of time you'll need off will also depend on the miles per week you're running.

I dropped my 5k from a 10-year plateau at 20:30 to 18:00 in the past 2 years by switching to marathon-training with a much greater emphasis on mileage and less on speed. I averaged 66mpw, peaking at 80mpw for most of the past 2 years, and ran faster than I ever imagined possible given my prior plateau (on <40mpw).

If you are >50mpw training now, you should probably take some serious recovery time, especially if you raced all-out at the end of your season and peaked properly. I find that I feel like a rock star after finishing my goal marathon that I've trained 18 weeks for, but I got nearly all my setback injuries by ignoring the recovery period afterwards (including a recent stress fx that set me back for 12 weeks of no-running).

In retrospect, I'd definitely go conservative on the recovery, with slow and easy, but then plan for a tougher training season with more (significantly more) miles per week and similar speedwork.