Too much running for a teenage girl?

Are you a high school coach? break 'er down and get the most out of her before college. then you'll get the cred

no regrets wrote:

Are you a high school coach? break 'er down and get the most out of her before college. then you'll get the cred

This is the way it is. Get the most out of her while you can. When she goes to college and never improves, just say the college coaching is bad and you are off the hook. That's how all the top programs justify their program.

Girls coach here (full disclosure: only a couple years experience). I don't have most of my girls go over 30 miles or so on six runs per week. Those are the average-talent girls who work for four years and become 21:30-23:00 5k XC runners by senior year.

For someone more talented like you're talking about, I would say you can build gradually to around 40 if she is the type of runner who responds well to mileage. So 25ish as a freshman (20 if no running background), 30 as a soph, 35+ as a junior, and 40 or so as a senior. So maybe her senior summer and XC season she gets up to 7 miles most days, 5 or 6 when she needs to recover and maybe 8+ on Saturday. An hour of running is plenty at that age, and many think they can handle that much but can't. Make sure the easy days stay easy (hopefully 3ish easy days per week). Where we've run into trouble in the past is girls doing 40 per week AND hammering every workout and also some of the easy runs. The hard workers often can't hold themselves back and the coaches job is then to reel them in, not push them harder.

The goal is to be slightly underdeveloped in high school. Seriously, it may not be ideal but it's a much wider target for the coach to hit than that razor's edge between undertraining and overtraining. And if they are undertrained in high school, they will continue to get better through senior year and into college. This is a huge confidence booster and should not be underestimated. The problem with getting good early is they get used to that feeling and if their performances start to level off or regress, they lose a TON of confidence. Some of them never recover mentally and their career is basically over.

Tons of people, guys and girls, run slower in college than they do in high school. Mainly it's because priorities and lifestyles change. You have to be much more self-motivated to run in college. I say run fast while you can. As long as the progression is sane, there is nothing wrong with running lots of miles in high school. Actually, the transition to college running will be easier if you do. How is mileage detrimental to an adolescent? It is actually the intensity required to run fast times that is more likely to lead to burnout.

couldn't disagree more. I love how many coaches believe running is harmful to runners! Yet we all ooh & ah over the kenyan girls who run 8 miles to school each way, 5 days a week & then hammer American girls who were busy running 30 mile weeks..

I coach a 17 yr old girl who has worked up to something like this in the off season:

3 long runs a week. Generally 75-80 min., 95-100 min., & 115-120 min.

3 shorter/stronger efforts. anything from 6 x 1000 @ threshold to 55 minutes at what Lydiard called 1/2 effort.

7 days/week with maybe 1-2 days/month off.

She's fit & strong and not over trained. 5k PR sub 20 off modest talent. She's also not built like a runner - 5'3 125. Looks like a sprinter.

We're training for this coming XC season - not some college season 5 years from now that may not even happen.

What if other sports did this - i.e. trained for 5 years from now, vice the upcoming season? HS football players wouldn't be allowed to lift more than their body weight, lest they 'burn out'. Baseball players would only be alloswed to practice once a week. Swimmers wouldn't be allowed to swim more than 1/2 mile..

you should treat a girl like 80% of a guy in a training sense. so if you think it's ok to let your top guy run 70 mpw in the summer, you should let the top girl do 0.8x70 = 56 mpw.

30-40 mpw is not going to help her. yes, she will have the ability to run faster in college, but she probably won't want to run in college unless she has a chance to be competitive in high school. also, going from 40 mpw max in high school to 70 mpw in college is going to kill her.

don't treat your girls like babies. they can handle almost as much as the guys. no reason to be limiting them to such low mileage.

Dude, The Kenyans are running well because they built a base which allows them to run well when they get older, they were essentially training for a season that was 5 or more years away, without even knowing it.

Not once did I see anyone say running was bad for runners. What was said was that going for broke usually gets you just that, broke.

I ran faster than 10:30 my senior year. I ran about 50 mpw during the summer and about 35 mpw during XC and track. I don't remember all of the details of my training, but since I was low mileage I ran pretty fast every day. In college I ran much more mileage, but had lots of easy runs. I improved a lot in college.

sad but true. wrote:

Dude, The Kenyans are running well because they built a base which allows them to run well when they get older, they were essentially training for a season that was 5 or more years away, without even knowing it.

Not once did I see anyone say running was bad for runners. What was said was that going for broke usually gets you just that, broke.

I started running in college and got pretty ruined during my first season of college XC because of this. Had to seriously back off for a few years before I started getting faster again. Build a base. In general now I just think of the first four years of anyone's running career as "highschool," since that's what it usually is in the US and that's what we're used to. I adjust my standards accordingly.

I think as a coach it's your responsibility to consider the athlete's long-term running career, not her highschool career. It's a really tough balance but I'd err on the side of safety. If a girl wants to run that fast in highschool and is already training pretty hard, I'd try to convince her to really consider the small things: Strength training, mental training, sleep, nutrition (without encouraging a low body weight), form, range of motion, sense of pace, race strategy. All of those small things can really add up but won't ruin a young girl.

There's also always cross-training if you don't want her to ruin herself. I swam about 15 hrs/week in highschool and it didn't hinder my development or harm me in the long run at all. Low-impact and stuff. I'm sure some cross-training could be a good supplement.

Sh*t even the fastest girl from my old highschool only does 35-40 mile weeks, and she has been running since middle school:

Are you talking about Maddie Berkson, the girl who runs 4 races every meet? Be hard to train a lot with all that racing. The way she is doing it is way more detrimental to development than running a lot of miles.

I don't see how racing a lot is detrimental to development if your training load isn't excessive. Elaborate?

Too many high school coaches want the low mileage approach for boys and girls, thinking that they'll burn out at anything above 50 miles. Instead they do 30-40 miles a week with speedwork or races on 5 of those days, and then wonder why the kids are flat, unable to hold a fast pace, at championship races.

girls will get fat if you don't make them run 50+ miles.

It all depends on the girl. Anywhere from 30mpw to 80mpw could be too much.

What hurts high school runners is too much anaerobic work and too many races, not too much mileage.

US Border wrote:

What hurts high school runners is too much anaerobic work and too many races, not too much mileage.

So junk miles are the go?

That right there is why so many girls end up with eating disorders. Horrible statement--if you were trying to be funny, you are not.

I really hate the idea that's been put forth that high school girls should be under trained so that they can see a bigger improvement in college. This makes no sense to me. Would you intentionally undertrain a football player or a basketball player so they would have a bigger improvement curve in college? Of course not; the whole idea is nonsense.

As others have said, what burns kids out is not mileage, it's the constant barrage of racing and hard interval workouts. There are some high school kids who run upwards of 30-40 races a year. Do that for four years and of course you're energy and you passion for the sport has been sapped.

For a girl who wants to run under 10:30, I would say you need to be in the vicinity of 40-50 miles per week. Obviously you should progress to this over the course of a year (or several years) and if she typically runs 20 miles a week you don't want to make that big a jump. But that will give her a solid enough aerobic base but not burn out. 50 miles a week is 6-7 miles a day, plus a long run once a week.

I would also say that you can avoid burnout by limiting the amount of hard, "go-to-the-well" type anaerobic efforts throughout the season. Clearly you'll need a couple of these, but most of the workouts should be fairly moderate. I would also try to limit her racing. No more than 4-5 hard efforts during XC, may 6-7 if you do indoor, and then another 6-7 during outdoor. That's probably a bit less than ideal, but assuming she's on a high school team that seems reasonable and less than other top runners.

Hope this helps, can you give us any more background on this girl?

Give her as much as she can possibly handle. If she's not close to 10:29, and is going into her junior year, I would just plow through this coming XC season with mileage. That "low mileage ruins girls for college" stuff is crap. Plenty of things ruin collegiate women, but the number of miles they ran in HS ain't one of them.

The two danger zones that I've noticed are 80mpw and 105mpw. The first time she's at 80+ for a few weeks, she can break down if her recovery isn't locked down. There's a chance she just flat out can't handle it, and will have to be at 70mpw until she can commit to the recovery needed. At 105+, it has to be out of school. Six doubles is too much to do during a school week, there's no naps and sleep is severely compromised. Even the most spartan girl can't hold that for more than a couple school weeks.

If your girl has won the genetic lottery, she can run sub-10:30 on 30-45mpw. If she has not, she has to cheat by working hard to get there.