Milesplit has 45 sub 5 7th graders. And I’m sure there’s many others on athletic.net or in states that run the 1500 like OR. There are even a couple sub 5 fifth graders this year.
Happy for your kids but not sure why this got a post.
Do these Belen kids ever continue to progress in college? Obviously in FL they are quite the HS powerhouse, but do the run them ragged like many elite programs so that they fizzle in college? It doesn’t matter (IMHO) if you run 4:40s in 7th grade if you’re running 4:30s at age 20.
This soft attitude is why US runners have sucked internationally so long. If running is what they want to do, then they should pursue that by all means. Jakob was running 80 mpw by that age, the East Africans are running similar amounts just going back and forth from school. The idea that you will burn out if you training even remotely hard before getting to college is absurd and needs to die in the US.
That Belen program is something else. They train their athletes to be machines. But they run all their athletes into the ground. It's a well known fact in South Florida. Belen runners are not highly scouted because they have nothing left after high school. Very rare to see a Belen long distance runner have any success in college.
Can’t find a single NCAA qualifier in two decades. The coach knows what he’s doing to keep his job at the high school level. Just bury them and be great in the state. That’s all. So many burn outs.
I went to a football game at Belen to watch my friends kid who played for Columbus. This was like 15 years ago. I remember watching in awe as the cross country team practiced around the field, about a dozen boys, running in 2 lines of 6, side by side, It was incredible to see. When I asked some Belen parents in the stands about the program what one of the dad's said stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing, but what he said was a long the lines of "their amazing, but those boys have no life other than running. They run in the morning, they run after school. They run on the weekends, Saturday with the team and Sunday on their own. They run in the off-season. All they do is run. No summer vacations, They are really dedicated to being the best. This is their Olympics."
I remember replying "THIS is their Olympics?, poor kids" And this program is incredibly consistent in churning out winners at the high school level. But based on how much they seem to run, burnout must be a real problem.
Marcelo Mantecon stepped back into the middle school category (as a club runner, not a Belen Jesuit runner--their team still took #3-6 (for team points, #2-5) and won very easily) and smashed the state middle school xc course record by about 12 seconds in 9:30 and won against a strong challenger by nineteen seconds. That record was being approached by a # of runners in the past year, but it was Rheinhart Harrison's 8th grade record (he of the sub-4 mile this year), not too shabby at all. The thing I noticed was that his form was really smooth, the kind of form you can easily project to a high level in the future.