Does it take a decent amount of talent for a high school girl to be able to run under 7 minutes in the mile?

as a guy who just graduated h.s., I would say that a girl wouldn't have to be very talented, just in pretty good shape. But my view is kind of skewed since I run track

majority of high school girls who are not runners will not break 7 in the mile...but it's extra credit so why not. the good ones will get extra credit

In this country getting your average HS girl to get off her buns to even run a mile without stopping is an achievement. Perhaps that's an overstatement but not by much.

As distance runners or coaches most of us DO have a skewed perspective of what the average person is capable of (witness that thread on here a while ago where several people thought an average male could run sub 15 for 5k with the right training).

Is this test at the end of the semester and will the girls have a chance to work towards this goal? You want to reward girls who put in the effort too even if they start off with little talent or are in bad shape at the beginning. Perhaps you could have a sliding extra credit scale where a sub 8:30 minute mile gets 5 points, a sub 7:30 gets 7 points and a sub 7 gets 10 points.

Does it take a decent amount of talent for a high school boy to break 6:10?

P.E. is and always will be a f***ing joke. Unless it is obscenely slow, the mile run tells you almost nothing about a person's level of health. Just scratch the fitness testing and let the kids play basketball and ultimate frisbee

our gym has the presidential fitness standards posted. for what its worth the A standard for boys is 7:00 and is 8:00 for girls.

No, it doesn't take talent to run under 7:00. Almost every girl I've ever coached has been able to break that mark. What it does take is training, something the girls will not get in P.E.

What it does take is training. I think that it would be highly unlikely that many non runner girls would break 7:00. There might be a couple of soccer players in your class. They could probably do it, otherwise, no joy mate.

Coincidentally 7:00 is a sort of magic number for me. If a boy has broken 7:00 for the mile in jr. high P.E. It seems like he usually will be able to do OK in cross if he puts his mind to it. For girls, the number is more like 8:00-8:15. I had a girl who never broke 9:00 in junior high P.E. end up as my #2 girl by her senior year.

Been coaching HS for 15 years and been a teacher at the hs level for 12.

Ever thought that the girls who come out for HS track are ones that are more talented than most? Self-selection.

I'm a sprinter, and it took a considerable amount of training for me to comfortably break 7 by my senior year. Granted, I never actually raced a mile.

Even though I did fine in high school PE, I always felt like some of the other girls were cheated by physical fitness tests. "Running" one mile for a fitness test did not help the girls get motivated to exercise regularly. Most just resigned themselves to being slow/overweight. As a consequence, they failed that part of the class. Not fair to punish those whose families didn't raise them to live healthfully.

Also, as a sprinter, I hope you're also giving extra credit to those who can break 14 in the 100m dash :)

bump

CoachB wrote:

No, it doesn't take talent to run under 7:00. Almost every girl I've ever coached has been able to break that mark.

Is it possible that the only girls who decide to get coaching are ones who have some sort of talent in that direction in the first place?

Non-running, non-athletic girls will have a hard time to run a mile at all.

I was pretty athletic when I was young and when my sister ran track (before I started running) I remember going out to the track and running a mile "as hard as I could" and I was over 7 minutes by a few seconds. In 6 months, I was down to 6 minutes and 2 years later I ran 5:0X, but still without a running background, running 7 minutes is not very easy. It also takes more "GRRRR!!!!!" and motivation to run hard which, sadly, many girls just don't have,

the slowest girl i've ever coached could still run the mile in 7:20 in a race, and although she was a great girl and worked her tail off in practice, she was very un-athletic and track was probably the only sport that she could have actually got "playing time" in.

Why don't you make it 8:00...that is 2 min per lap, any girl who is in some sort of decent physical condition will be able to run under 2 min per lap. All of the chubby girls with thick legs and cellulite at age 14 won't get the extra credit and all the girls who have even thought about playing a sport should be able to break 8:00.

But seriously- has anyone noticed how much chubbier high school girls are getting? Even some of the "athletes" are chubby now.

In high school, there were just 3 girls in our class (including me) who could break 7. And that was an anomaly, since I ran track as well as another girl in the class. The third girl who was around 6:5x played soccer.

Breaking 7 minutes is not something most hs girls could do these days.

garlic wrote:

majority of high school girls who are not runners will not break 7 in the mile...but it's extra credit so why not. the good ones will get extra credit

The track camp that I worked at (grades 1-7) had a few girls go under 7 mins and one under 6 (5:56) - she was in 6th going into 7th grade. Based of that I would say that a good percent of athletic girls CAN break 7 in the mile. This was a normal track camp in a small city (30,000). I'm sure at a more populated place you would have many more going under 6 mins in middle school. never mind high school. Of course some girls get fatter as they age. Most girls in fact so I can see your point. Personally my wife was 126 pounds before she started crossfitting her way to a 99.9 lb.

Cheers.

The 85th percentile for a 17 year old girl is 8:15 according to the 2010 presidential fitness standards.

Link? Just curious to see the standards. So a girl running sub 7 would be in the top 3% or so?

Never mind I found it. They just have 85th percentile, nothing past that.

As a long-time teacher, as well as a distance coach, my first question would be "What are you trying to accomplish with the extra credit offer?" regardless of the standard you set.

If, like tests many of us encountered in PE classes of yore, college included, your physical fitness test is given as an end in itself, unrelated to the activities that routinely occur in class, any rigorous standard simply rewards the talented for being talented, just as being elected Prom Queen simply rewards the pretty and popular girl for her good genetic fortune. The trouble with such reward systems are that they reward that which is intrinsically rewarding, i.e. being genetically gifted in one way or another, without necessarily motivating desirable goal-oriented habits on anyone's part. The average kid, watching the pretty girl being singled out for her looks and the swift kid getting easy medals, learns little except a cynical acceptance that the rewards in life are passed out to the genetically lucky, and since that is not him, effort is pointless. That is a lesson we should be careful our rewards systems do not reinforce.

I had two college weight training classes where the final grade depended on a mile time trial. The term I lapped the entire class was the one in which I tore a shoulder ligament, and consequently spent the bulk of every class session on the track. The question one might ask is, if I deserved my "A" by running a sub 6-minute mile, why was I the only person in the class spending class time preparing myself to do so, and if the point of the class was to reward diligent pursuit of whole-body muscularity, why were the reward systems designed such that I could earn the highest grade without doing that? The moral to that story is that our reward systems should be congruent with the behavioral habits we wish to reinforce.

I would argue that whatever you measure that has an impact on final grade should have a SERIES of graduated standards that offer something achievable for everyone who trains diligently to achieve them. Then, of course, your class activities should offer structured opportunities to intelligently train to meet those standards.

As a coach, I'm sure you realize that a girl who begins the season running 15:09 for 3000m and improves to 13:15 has achieved something to be proud of, but that same standard would not motivate a girl who had run 11:28.

The trick is to keep challenging but achievable goals in front of EVERYONE, along with a reward system that keeps everyone motivated to strive for them.