How young is TOO young?

Same thing that will happen to Grace Ping. Amazing runner at a young age but will burn out and will never hear of her again.

Briana Jackucewicz ran 16:43 in seventh grade and then after being injured for most of college she ran around 18:00 in XC as a senior. It's hard to argue that the training and racing at very young ages helped her overall development

Divided by 2, plus 7

Lol, this went downhill fast

Hi James,

Dr. SHEPHERD

I would guess there are boat loads of 12 year old Kenyan and Ethiopian kids running right now 10k to school and back....thinking about LA 2028.

i personally think (a) it shouldn't be too serious until around junior high. you need to develop love for sports in general and the thing you are doing to put in the hard work later.

(b) kids haven't matured and until that happens the pecking order is fake and unpredictive. i knew U10 soccer juggle kings who couldn't get varsity minutes in HS much less select. look at USATF's youth records and figure out the point at which future pros start actually showing up, which is generally 13/14. i find it horrifying how american parents treat some 8 year old pre-puberty kid makes an error in tee ball.

(c) i think kids should be playing multiple sports so they develop multiple areas. i think what you turn out better at can be surprising. i think it provides you psychological balance if one goes off kilter for a period.

(d) i also think multiple sports going wards off the obnoxious "marinovich" excesses. dad cannot use tuesday to overwork their poor kid at sport A if they are on to practicing sport B.

re the raevyn rogers comment, you will find there are some future gold medalists in the youth records list, but very few. there are some one hit-wonders who went on to ok college careers then nothing. there are some kids only the most nerdy TF people might remember. it is definitely not a list of youth record holders matching the adult elite like it's very predictive at all. not everyone participates in our USATF youth system. we were given little or no information about TF outside of the school system. in XC we basically knew foot locker existed and some went to that.

IMO early youth success says they might be good though maybe early HS. early HS and later junior high might say who will be good end of HS. end of HS might hint at college. college hints at pro. U10 doesn't say who will be good pro. that fast time for that age is only as predictive as you can compete with that time. a 12s 100m is good for elementary. by HS that won't even get you in a varsity final.

Basically nobody does youth track. Hit middle school/high school and all the talent shows up. If everyone started running track races at 8, the lists would be a lot more of a who’s who. See swimming where kids training hard at young ages results in all time lists where you recognize half the names. Kids still drop out/don’t make it.

In the end it all comes down to what a kid is doing. Doing like 3 distance(30 mins)runs and some sprints? Sure let the 8 years have some fun and he will be in good shape for soccer. Start some 100km/week program? Probably taking it stop seriously…