Girls High School Cross Country - Slower as you age

Hmmm..... wrote:

My daughter is a freshman runner on her highschool cross country team. She has some talent and finished her first two races as the second runner on her team in both races.

A lot of the upperclassmen are telling her to enjoy it while it lasts because they all got slower as they got older and it will happen to her too. Is this just the blabbering of jealous upperclassmen getting beat by a freshman, or do girls generally get slower as they mature?

Look at the national lists and you will see that most of the fast runners (not all by any means) are juniors and seniors. You see similiar trends at the state level. That doesn't mean your daughters friends are wrong. A lot of people get slower. Some get faster. And figuring out why is sometimes not obvious.

Hmmm..... wrote:

My daughter is a freshman runner on her highschool cross country team. She has some talent and finished her first two races as the second runner on her team in both races.

A lot of the upperclassmen are telling her to enjoy it while it lasts because they all got slower as they got older and it will happen to her too. Is this just the blabbering of jealous upperclassmen getting beat by a freshman, or do girls generally get slower as they mature?

Sounds like something some poorly coached underachieving kids would say. On average the top high school girls are seniors. Most girls, not all, do experience a post puberty bump in the road, but those who manage their way through that period come back stronger. A post puberty body is stronger than a pre puberty body. Managing through puberty often simply means you have to work harder, get mentally tougher, get smarter and you can no longer eat anything you want anymore. About 90% of the H.S. girls records are were set by seniors, none by freshman...that should tell you everything you need to know.

My personal experience was that I ran 6:08 1600 m as a frosh, then went through a really rough time going through puberty. My best mile time sophomore year was like 6:40 or something, and cross country junior year was a disaster (went from running 22 or 23 to 26). Then I turned it around spring of junior year and went on to run 5:50s in the 1600 m.

Obviously, i was average at best, but yeah, puberty sucked for a while. I went from weighing 95 pounds to 120 pounds. I'm 5'6, so I wasn't fat, but I had just been ultra skinny before, and it took a while to adjust.

My sister was an exceptional runner - runner up in the state in 8th grade. She ran well all the way through, but lost a little ground. She was still top 10 in the state as a senior, but she never really got any better. She worked very hard to hang in there. As a tiny eighth grader, she was able to coast on talent.

Very good!

Not speaking from the experience as a female athletes, but as a father of a female athlete and a coach. It's not super difficult at all, unless chasing PRs is all you care about. No matter what you do in life, you have to find meaning beyond constantly getting better. Nothing is a straight line always pointing up, there will be bumps in the road no matter what you do. Obviously every athlete always wants to get better, but you have to appreciate the process, challenging yourself and knowing that you gave it your all regardless of the end results, enjoying the social aspects of being a member of a team and contributing to that team in anyway you can. Genetics absolutely do play a part, especially in endurance sports and gymnastics, etc....somethings just aren't meant to be. I've done many things in my life; I've had continued success in almost none of them...that's life. I've coached several hundred young girls in my career and can not think of one athlete who remained committed were puberty was a death sentence.

sorry @trackcoach but have you ever given every thing you have in training and outside of it to do well in running and then failed miserably due to something you can't really control... thats not something you tell people to appreciate buddy

TrackCoach wrote:

It's not super difficult at all, unless chasing PRs is all you care about. No matter what you do in life, you have to find meaning beyond constantly getting better.

While I absolutely agree with everything you posted, some kids are not wired like that.

In our house, the parental response was, "This is getting too difficult.. " Remember, this is a kid that is driven by the PRs. "Let's find something different. Life is too short. Let's get some joy back." Which de-escalated things pretty well and then reset goals.

CoachH and TrackCoach have covered it perfectly. I came here with the intention of chiming in, but they've got it handled. Good stuff.

Based on your phrasing, I'm guessing you've already made up your mind.

Hmmm..... wrote:

Is this just the blabbering of jealous upperclassmen getting beat by a freshman, or do girls generally get slower as they mature?

I must note that virtually every single male runner I've know basically gave up on training after they stopped getting faster. A couple still do 50-60/week with a workout here and there, but it's a far cry from the 100-120 they did with workouts like 2x3 miles in 14:xx.

Vinto wrote:

[quote]LoneStarXC wrote:

No that's wrong. I've made my biggest improvements from junior to senior year.

Congratulations, you had the genetics for it.[/quote

Yes, she did. Any success in running is heavily dependent upon having the right genetics, no matter the age or gender. Glad you figured it out.

Sad Recurrent theme here from you pathetic joggers:

"Puberty is BAD for girls,"

BlimeyMate wrote:

Sad Recurrent theme here from you pathetic joggers:

"Puberty is BAD for girls,"

I think the reoccurring theme is the opposite of that. We've talked about how it naturally can cause girls to stop improving or slow improvement down but that they are stronger and faster when they get through it. Many have noted that state and national lists are dominated by juniors and seniors.

Also to those saying genetics are all that matter in coaching elite runners. That may be true, but as high school coaches we aren't only focused making elite runners. We are just trying to make all of our kids better runners and better people. My stud girl who is trying to break 18 has had improvement and struggles in life just like her somewhat talented team mate who is trying to get into the 21s along with their teammate trying to break 40. Our job as a coach is to remain positive, try to get them to work hard and have confidence.

One of my students and I looked through the top 100 or so male and female seniors in the 3200 from 2016 using MileSplit, then tracked their results back through their HS careers. We didn't finish the analysis, but the preliminary findings suggested that male runners tended to progress pretty steadily through the four years of HS while female runners were all over the place. This suggested that puberty hits girls in different ways and at different points during that age range.

I would love to dive into the data more thoroughly, but what I came away thinking underlined a lot of what's been brought up here: it's got to be really demoralizing when a young woman thinks she's going backward, but if she can stick with an overall plan for strength and health through high school, she can come back stronger once she gets her "adult" body.

There's got to be some similar lesson to take away with boys, but we tend to obsess way more about women's bodies.

It is true that boys have strong and predictable improvements over the course of high-school, while improvement for girls is hard to predict, even with continued training. In general, girls can expect less improvement than boys but there is a wide range in actual outcomes.

It seems everyone agrees that if you kept training at the exact same rate for boys and girls for four years, in general, boys would show consistent improvement and girls would be all over the place. Boys tend to (not in all cases) improve as they go through puberty. Girls on the other hand are less predictable.

So, what I've noticed as a general problem with many (not all) high school programs is the lack of progression over the four years of an athlete's high school career. Again, I know there are exceptions, but I've seen a large percentage of programs that have the exact same training plan every single year. The varsity does A, the JV does A - some and the Freshman (if they aren't good enough to do A, do A - more than JV. For boys this can work because even though the training stays the same year after year, they physically improve due to puberty and tend to go through the phases of Freshman workouts, then JV, then Varsity (with some exceptions of the super talented who are on varsity as a Freshman).

Girls (because of the all the puberty issues everyone has identified), are more likely to be varsity caliber as Freshman, so their training stays the same for four years while they don't just naturally get physically better, but actually naturally have some potential struggles.

I think many coaches struggle with individualizing the progression, regardless of talent to safely raise the level of training year over year, which may help counter act some of the struggles puberty can cause.

Here is an excellent article by Perry King at milesplit NY on the year to year improvement for the top XC runners in NY. Data shows year to year improvement is much less common for the top girls than top boys.

http://ny.milesplit.com/articles/130667/rtn-001-running-at-the-top-how-much-faster-will-you-be-this-fall

It's all about hip strength. Extra weight on the hips during puberty, need the muscle to support it or else the gait changes. Some time for the nervous system to get more efficient to a slightly altered gait because of said widened hips.

Whack in some glute/hip flexor exercises and keep running!

Here's a summary of data I collected from TullyRunners. It lists average speed ratings by grade for NY Section One girls. Red numbers show where individuals had declines in their speed rating from the prior year. Most girls who had early success decline at some point in HS. Girls that had improvement each year either had low speed ratings to start with or are among the elite (like top 2).

https://flic.kr/p/YhA6FD