if she is motivated let her run, if she runs for our five days a week she will be just fine! she doesn't need to do crazy mileage but twenty to thirty minutes by the end of the summer would be good... if she is motivated to do this she won't burn out, just don't push her too much so she gets to where she hates it, that's when kids burn out imo...
I agree with nearly everything advised on here but I want to add that after a few weeks of her summer running, it would be a fun idea to add in fartlek running, in my opinion. Once every couple weeks you could let her do these and break up the monotony as well as let her have some fun.
My advice would be to just call them mail box runs and have her run hard between random mailboxes (or stop signs, light poles, big tree, fire hydrant, etc) along her running route with random durations of jogging between. Let her control it by allowing her to pick the mail boxes, but keep it in check by controlling the rest portions yourself. Aka say, "ok, let's do another, which mailbox should we start with and where are we going?" But once your done say, "ok, I'll tell you when to pick the next one".
Make sure she's mixing in short (10-15 sec / ~80-100m) and medium and long (2-3 min / ~300-600m+) and is always back to conversation pace before she goes again. Typically the jogging should be 2-3 times longer than the steady/fast sections.
I think this type of workout will keep her athleticism, build fitness, be a lot more interesting and fun than constant easy jogging, and isn't intense enough to affect her long term development.
Make sure she gets a 5-10min warm up of easy jogging before you start and keep the run to normal distance for her -- 25min or so (so 15-20 min of fartleking after the warmup). Again, with about 25-35% of that time being fast/steady and 65-75% being easy recovery between. If you do this every other week for a couple months she's going to have a blast and start to look forward to the next one.
What happened with this girl? Was it one of the Montana 8th graders? Or someone else? Anyone know?
It was a troll post. Fabricated story. No volleyball or soccer mom comes on letsrun to read the message boards to find out about running injuries in youth. Not that it wasn't a topic worth discussing but clearly a made up scenario.
I highly doubt it's a troll- Probably not someone who regularly reads these boards though.