Why is it that kids or even young high school kids that are running great times never run past their teens

Rupp fan wrote:

Ummm, ever heard of Jordan Hasay?

run run run wrote:

Not kids dummy. The OP is making a false assertion that every fast kid burns out before adulthood. The way to verify is to look st the hundreds of Americans who break 14 and trace their running history. I guarantee that the majority of Americans who break 14 in a given year were running fast when they were 14. It is ridiculous how somebody can make a false statement and so many LR posters jump on the bandwagon. This one is not only untrue, it is completely opposite of what is true.

Sometimes I feel kinda dumb, but whenever I look at LetsRun and see stuff like this, it really boosts my self confidence.

OP didn't say that no fast kids ever progress past middle/high school, he just pointed out that a lot of young runners running really fast times don't pan out to be good collegiate/pro runners a lot of the time. No one who knows anything about track would say every fast kid burns out before adulthood. Off the top of my head, there's Webb, Ritzenhein, Hall, Rupp, Cheserek, Jager, Fisher, Brazier, Solinsky, and probably plenty more who progressed well after running fast HS times.

No. I am a person who bases my comments on facts. Threads like this should be taken down when the title is a lie. I checked the top 20 American college 5k runners from 2019. Guess what? Every one of them was fast as a freshmen in high school.

I am one of those statistics. Started at age 9. Ran a 5:06 mile in the 6th grade. Ran a 2:56 Marathon in 7th grade. Then went through a series of injuries. Others started catching up to and beating me. I quit in the 10th grade. I started again at 39. 8 years later I am still battling injuries and trying to break 2 in a half Marathon. I do wish that I would have accepted the injuries and losing as part of life and never quit.

ever notice wrote:

joedirt wrote:

Actually, your anecdotal example is not the rule. A lot of kids that run fast at 10, 11 or 12 turn into pretty fast adults. All kids are different.

For everyone you name l have 9 or so that back up my claim. In fact most are fat.

And of the kids that weren't fast at 10-12, how many of them are fast at 18 or 25? 1:100? 1:1000? 1:10 odds sound pretty good:)

To some extent I think a lot of us overrate how fast those youths are because we have no context. A 6th grader running a 4:50 mile seems blistering cause we can all remember how few of our 9th grade class mates ran that fast. But we ignore that that 6th grader has 3 years of training to our 9th graders 6 months... Most of these kids are just a lot closer to maxing out their potential. We all think that the east africans are a bunch of age cheats and not a bunch of people who hit 18 having put 10k miles on their legs and been training like a maniac for 3+ years while most US kids hit high school and take 2-3 years just to build a base to start training....

And the other thing is track and field is brutal in terms of being a winner take all game. The 50th best wide reciever in the NFL is making millions. The 50th best miler in the country is probably working at footlocker..... Makes it easy to drop out if you don't see your self at the top.

Many excellent high school coaches and programs.

Not as many in college ranks.

Actually has to do with the competition offered high schoolers --- loads of it ---bas compared to college system which lacks enough races. College coaches demand that their assistants put on one or more highly attended meets. Yeah, it's a demanding job but the college system is lacking in this regard.

sorry, College coaches SHOULD demand that their assistants put on a meet every year.... if enough college did that it would rival the high schools excellence.

For me it was bad nutrition and manorexia during my sophomore year in HS. My teammates came back Junior Yr as men and I remained a boy.

I doubt there are any kids that started training in 3rd grade and only 2% of college football players ever make it to the NFL, so it's not so easy to be that millionaire, 50th best wide receiver.

Why go through all of these reasons when the most logical and simple one is that they didn't feel like doing it anymore? The only thing I did as a teen that I still partake in regularly is whacking off.

I actually think this is a really good discussion and I want to give my perspective.

I graduated a school where our top guy was from a family of runners. This guy ran from childhood to college and ended up running I think 4:06 for the mile. Like I said, he ran through most of elementary school and all of middle school, qualified for state as a freshman, won multiple state titles, the whole 9 yards.

The thing is, he only really starting “trying” when he started track his junior year. He always took running seriously but never was fully committed to it until this time. He went on to run in college and kept training and made massive improvements in college and was an NCAA qualifier.

Now he had a brother who was also very talented and ran in high school with me. The brother also ran in middle school and elementary but took running training more seriously his freshman year.

Another kid did some competitive swimming before high school and was similarly as good.

I don’t have specifics on their mileages but I don’t think they ever went over 60 or so.

Let’s say you have a 5th grader who can run 30 miles a week without injury. Is it wrong to have them run 30 miles a week? 25? 20? I’ll explain more on this later.

Every couple years there are teenagers in Ethiopia or Kenya that make world teams or run blitzing fast times. Selemon Barega, Yomif Kejelcha, Nicholas Kimeli, Jacob Kiplimo, etc etc. Of course there’s the argument that these guys are all age cheats, but people were saying the same thing about Kipchoge when we won world champs at 18 years old.

The reason why they are good at these ages is because they start running as kids.

If you took all the finishers at NXN, I would wager that the vast majority, maybe 80% of kids, run before they get to high school. But how many top 10 high school finishers become top 10 pro finishers?

There is A reality in the United States that to compete as a professional, you need to compete in college. I would say that is true of 99% of pro athletes.

The issue with this is you get kids who start running in high school and think “I want to run in college” but in doing so push themselves too hard. I know because I’ve been there. Now I’m not saying that a kid who starts running freshman year has 0 chance of running in college, plenty do. But the kids that start earlier with aerobic development have a much higher chance.

Another aspect of this is the division system of college sports. What kid grows up dreaming of running NAIA? I hate making generalizations but for the fast majority of colleges D1 schools are the main state schools along with some more well funded private institutions D2 schools are generally less funded, schools like northwest X state or southern whatever and they typically lack the academics of many d1 schools. D3 has many of the top liberal arts colleges and not a lot of sports funding.

If you told a kid they are picking between 3 schools to run at: Oregon, Adams State, or Haverford how many will pick Oregon?

So getting back to my example. If you have a elementary school kid and have them run mileage that they can handle and slowly progress to their senior year they will most likely be very good in college and beyond if they are committed.

People make such a big deal out of mileage it’s crazy. A kid can not get “burned out” doing pure mileage. They might get injured, but it’s the coaches responsibility to do enough mileage where they are maximizing benefits and minimizing injury risk.

Of course there’s a limit to how much mileage you can do. For some it’s only 60 miles a week. For some it’s 140 or 150. Once you get to that point you have no other choice but to maintain it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

People always bring up this theoretical of who is better, someone who’s been running for 7 years and broke a 4 minute mile, or someone who has run for 4 years and done the same thing. Questions like these fail to neglect the reality that a long term approach is much easier on an athlete.

Kids get burnt out from pushing themselves too hard and not being realistic. If you want to run for a power 5 school just be patient, nothing wrong with walking on your sophomore or junior year.

I would like to add my 2 cents based on my experience as a youth runner. I started when I was 4 years old running with my hobby-jogger father on his cool-down runs. It was never competitive, but rather a time for father-son bonding -- "dad and lad" time as he called it. My training would be best described as Maffetone style and off that I ran under a 3:50 marathon at age 7. I later joined a club team that followed a Lydiard style program and I improved to a 63 minute 10 miler and 5:34 mile at age 9, and a 2:58 marathon at age 10.

What happened next? Well, the main motivation for me was the social aspect of the running -- being able to run with others made it fun. However, when I was 10 my family moved and I was unable to train with anyone. My father worked a massive number of hours at work and I did not have the motivation/maturity to train on my own. I went through the motions but my heart was not in it.

I did come back to running after I graduated from college (I tried to walk on the XC team my senior year but failed miserably) and did eventually run a 2:27 marathon at age 31. Now I an 53 (in 3 days) and while I have the motivation to be competitive, my family life, the fact it is over 100 degrees when I get home and the smoke from the wildfires lingering in the air has made it very hard to train. I will get back to it and get back to the 1:25ish HM times.

The lessons I learned from my youth I am imparting to my 2 kids, aged 11 and 12. We go out for fun, social runs when possible with no pressure and I keep it light and fun. I have heard the horror stories of parents pushing their kids to burnout and that is the last thing I want for them.

People's priorities change. Since you're the only one still running, the more relevant question might be why are you still running?

S_poster wrote:

Why go through all of these reasons when the most logical and simple one is that they didn't feel like doing it anymore? The only thing I did as a teen that I still partake in regularly is whacking off.

This, like a few others have said, is probably the #1 reason. I'm not sure that there's any corellation between being good at something and (truly) liking something.

People who like it (like most on this board) come in all flavors of talented. And highly talented people come in all flavors of liking it. As said, a lot simply don't like it enough to continue. Although the being good at it almost certainly helps to "mask" fairly low levels of interest, at least for a while.

"Do I love running? Nope. Am I at least somewhat enjoying kicking everyone on my team's a** running 4:32 on 30 miles a week? Yep. Will my interest last past HS? Very possibly not."

Adjust as you please for every other level of relative age-group/HS/college success (and yes, some of those who don't terribly like it ALSO put in lot more work than 30 mpw).

And yes, it would be nice if some of them could lend the rest of us their cardiovascular systems. I would certainly have taken a better one.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

I doubt there are any kids that started training in 3rd grade and only 2% of college football players ever make it to the NFL, so it's not so easy to be that millionaire, 50th best wide receiver.

It isn't easy being that 50th best wide reciever. But it is a heck of a lot easier than having to be the best....

Here is a kid who started training at 6

Rheinhardt Harrison was running and setting age 8 records.

And so on. There aren't many of them which is one of the reason we dont have a good feeling for what exceptional times are for those age ranges.

Rupp fan wrote:

Ummm, ever heard of Jordan Hasay?

Hasay keeps running though. But from that generation you're looking at Ebony Collins, Ashton Purvis, Ryann Krais, Gabby Mayo maybe?

My opinion: I think most burn out. And the fact that in this sport, the initial gain/progression is HUGE. It draws you into the sport but then that progression becomes smaller (speaking in terms of PR time, of course). Especially at a young age, when runners devote a large portion of their time into training and see times improve minimally compared to the large improvement when they first began the sport, that causes a lot of discouragement. It's not an easy sport, physically and mentally, but I believe that the pattern in those that are lifelong runners is this: Never being satisfied. Run a PR and you're still hungry to take more time off and/or become faster. Run a bad race and you're hungry to come back in order to overcome the bad race. That mindset creates the lifelong runner and it usually transfer over to other areas of life, leading to success. But it also leads to bad traits too, especially having an additive personality which I believe many runners have. I do and I wouldn't have it any other way. LOVE THIS SPORT at 30 years old and have since I was 12 years old. There's nothing like it!

Pretty small sample size. Not really a good retort.

As someone whose career has been the inverse of this common trope, I have this to say:

I started running at 13. My aerobic engine was, pretty good for someone that age, honed by a youth which included significant time at altitude. My strength and form were atrocious, which is what led me to distance running in the first place. I had smart coaches, and for awhile I couldn't stand it, because they didn't have me run much at all. My first year I ran maybe 8 MPW in 4 days/week. I raced four 1 mile cross races that fall, finishing 12th in our middle school league, and ran five 400/800 doubles that spring, finishing with a 2:27 PR.

My first year of high school I didn't take anything about running that seriously, ran less than 25 miles per week over 5 or 6 days, went under 5:00 for the mile, but was really disappointed to lose the underclass 2 mile race. The summer going into sophomore year I started running maybe 35 miles per week over 6 days consistently and I improved a lot of myself, going under 10:00 in the 2 mile. Nothing special for a 16 year old but you have to consider the fact that this was my 8th grade 800 PB times 4 just 15 months later. The last 2 years went pretty similarly in terms of improvement, but there were definitely times where it was hard to be patient because the HS "mileage beasts" were pulling away.

I wound up going to a college that I was a bit underqualified for on a raw time basis, but was headed by a coach who appreciated the long term developmental curve I was on. Never had a *major* injury, never a season without a PR (and they were usually big ones), had learned by then how to be at my best come season's end. Most of my teammates had similar stories - our college coach was awesome.

Our women's team was headed by someone else, and though she was well-liked and wrote decent training, she'd always end up with these NXN/Footlocker types who had nowhere to go but down. Eating disorders, injuries, big state school distractions and the like often got the better of some of her best recruits, though the team survived because at least a couple of them would hang on and they'd inevitably make natties.