America’s Next Great Running Hope, and One of the Cruelest Twists in Youth Sports
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/sports/katelyn-tuohy.html
No, the real challenge is solving one of the cruelest puzzles of youth sports: Why do so many gifted teenage female distance runners fizzle out by their early 20s, unable to capture the speed of their youth?
since 1980, just one female winner of the Foot Locker National Cross Country Championships has made an Olympic team, compared with seven male high school champions.
Bill Pierce, a professor of health sciences at Furman University and the co-founder of the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training, said it was nearly impossible to project an elite girl’s future success in distance running because the female body changes so much during the teenage years.
Running fast over long distances requires great lung capacity, but also great strength relative to body weight, as do figure skating and gymnastics.
They are nothing but skin and bones and lungs in their early years,” Pierce said. Then, he said, the girls mature but don’t necessarily develop the strength required to move a larger body so swiftly.
It’s hardly a coincidence that many girls at the top level of the sport as juniors have struggled with disordered eating and other body-related issues. They include Melody Fairchild, who in 1991 was called the greatest high school runner ever. Fairchild dreamed of making an Olympic team from the age of 12, and she was such a dominant runner as a teenager she was certain it would happen. It never did.
Looking back on those years, Fairchild said she, like so many other young, talented runners, failed to understand that the ups and downs she experienced as her body evolved were normal. Nature was doing what it is supposed to do for young girls as they become women — add fat and prepare the body for reproduction. That otherwise healthy development, however, does not help an elite runner maintain her speed.
Fairchild was 5-foot-4 and 95 pounds and essentially prepubescent when she was dominating in high school. After her freshman year of college, she took a year off. She gained 20 pounds. She returned to school and competition and had to learn how to run again with a different physique. She called the bodies that so many elite female runners compete with in high school “a terrible tease.”
“That is not a sustainable thing,” Fairchild said in an interview from her home in Colorado, where she is a personal running coach. Even more dangerous, she added, is the message young women get when they are encouraged to fight to regain their high school physiques. “We want them to embrace being in a strong woman’s body.”
Given those dynamics, Fairchild and others say, women who aren’t high school champions may actually have an advantage. Karissa Schweizer of the University of Missouri is considered the top college distance runner of the moment. Schweizer never won a state cross-country championship in high school and didn’t even qualify for the national championships.