How Amazing is 18:43 5K for an 11-Year Old Girl?

Carrie Garritson, under the tutelage of her obsessed father/coach, ran 35 minutes for 10k at age 11. This age also marked the peak of her running career. The whole (disturbingly large) family has a website at garritson.com. Not much running stuff mentioned now.

Yea that girl is really a man and now the time is really slow,i saw it.......wiggle

I remember reading an a story about the Garritson clan in Runner's World long ago. 14 kids. Nut case father.

It would seem that now they have moved on to forcing their grandchildren to run for Christ, or whatever...

http://garritson.com/videos/index.htm

And you are right, Carrie peaked at 11.

Emily Rusley (Tulsa, OK) ran 18:04 as an 11-year-old.

http://www.usatf.org/assoc/ok/5kaf.txt

"Girls get slower because they lose interest which is ok. Running is not the be all/end all many of you think it is. The ones that stay involved in the sport and increase their training as the years go on, get faster. There are just as many male burnouts as females. It is not a gender thing it's a youth turning into young adult thing."

Clearly, Derek C, you are not a girl, and consequently, I assume, you never went through female puberty nor menstruated.

Of course, there are exceptions, but, unless they train very conservatively, most young girls who experience early success ultimately burn out. In my experience, the best female runners have been the ones who make progress and step up their training after they've been through puberty.

Five years later, a lot of these girls are no longer running.

would be nice but... wrote:

that florida course is either short or really downhill.

Yep, those downhill Florida courses need to go. Just like the seaside races in Kansas and the events in the Rhode Island desert.

white people who are into running are weird.