Sara Hall: Don’t buy into the myth that kids can’t run a lot of mileage in high school or they’ll get hurt/bur

smugmug123 wrote:

You are dead wrong. Sydney Masciarelli is not an 18 yr old sophomore.

Get your facts straight before prognosticating personal details about supposed ineligibility.

Well, she just ran a 10k in Foxboro, they listed her age as 18.

Stand by my statement so you need to get glasses and you are even more dead wrong because it was her older sister SOPHIA Masciarelli who is 18 and who runs for Hofstra who ran and won 13-19 age group Harvard Pilgrim 10k at Foxboro. Read the results on Cool Running.

Sara Hall is bang on correct to tweet this and I agree with her 100%.

Primal human activity for survival is movement from one place to another, to various food sources, chasing prey, avoiding being hunted etc.

Mileage, as she said, should be SELF PROPELLED, not driven by someone else. A kid will know better than anyone else whether or not to stop - in fact take a kid out to play. No matter how much fun the activity is, they will stop when they FEEL like stopping. Good luck getting them to go again when they are pooped out.

Generally-speaking distance runners do not do enough by-feel running as it is.

A modern example: Kid walks to school at their own pace, plays at recess, plays at lunch, has PE, is on a soccer team and has practices and games and likely plays other sports and ends up running fairly high mileage anyway....indirectly. No one calculates that movement as "mileage".

By the way, "insane" is totally inappropriate language here. Makes no sense. Over-used word by someone who struggles with creative language.

-Athletics Illustrated

semenyagoat wrote:

Kids and teens should not run high milage. Instead they should work on speed, various different sports and distances to get a muscularly well rounded body. Also running form can be a focus. Then they will be prepared for higher mileage and are able to unlock their potential. Sarah is a prime example of this problem. The only thing she got good at from her mileage is marathon running. She is too slow and not versatile enough to be competitive in any other event

Fair point, but she got a scholly to Stanford, so there's that...

I averaged 83 milesduring the whole Summer leading up to my Senior Year.

I was not as good as many of you on these boards as I did not break 16, ran 16:05-16:15 10 times, seriously. I had no raw leg speed but I could go hard with 2-3 minutes left in the race.

But without the mileage I could not have competed with the others on my team as they had raw talent as freshman, but the lack of hard work allowed me to beat them my Senior Year. I improved more, about a minute each year, but I truly believe it was the mileage that did it.

Again, I'm a nobody and was not an outstanding distance runner as I'm sure a lot of you ran low 15's consistently.

I truly believe the mileage is what got me to the next level. Someone else may have gotten hurt so maybe I got lucky, I don't know.

Look, we all know high mileage works; greatly adds to the depth of competition at the HS level, e.g., turns donkeys into horses and horses into pronghorns.

I think the reason that there are still coaches preaching low mileage for high school athletes is because it can make running less inclusive. A requirement to run a lot is hard work and takes a level of commitment that most are unwilling or physically unable to make.

The caveat that I would add is that high mileage would do more harm than good for middle schoolers and immature HS Freshman. After that the more you can run the better and more competitive you’ll be - and that is what sport is all about.

The only thing worse than specializing in a single sport is specializing in multiple sports. What I mean by that is it doesn’t matter if it’s one sport or multiple sports, the same crazy parents that are responsible for training their kids like elite athletes in a single sport, tend the be the same crowd that would do the same in multiple sports. If they think it will make their kid the best, they will take them from club soccer practice, to their school team basketball practice to their private coach workout all while thinking they are avoiding specialization while they drive their kids into the ground to live their own dreams through their kids.

Parents are there to help their kids achieve their dreams and support them. If you have a kid that loves running and wants to be the best they can be, support them and watch for warning signs when they need to be reigned in.

Mileage doesn’t burn kids out. Pressure they can’t handle that makes them lose their love for the sport burns them out. Everyone has different thresholds. Don’t be judgemental on what is too much until you know the individual kid.

Health nutty wrote:

Allowing a kid to decide to run as much as they want. Running can be addictive. Running too much causes injuries.

Running in a lot of ways is self-correcting. You don't know how much is too much unless you occasionally go over that line. Bill Rodgers didn't realize 200 MPW was too much till he did it once. Than he backed down. Listen to your body. If a kid is consistently injured, mileage is just one part of the equation. Is he eating right? How about his workouts? Sleep? Is he doing his easy mileage too fast? Form? Etc.

Health nutty wrote:

Allowing a kid to decide to run as much as they want. Running can be addictive. Running too much causes injuries. Some girls use it like an eating disorder to maintain an unhealthy weight. Even adult professional runners have coaches. How could you let a 16 year old decide how much is safe if a 26 year old professional needs a coach?

Berglaufer has nailed it. You're catastrophizing. Low mileage runners get injured too. Lots of things can be addictive but that doesn't mean running always will be. Most professionals would be fine without a coach but retain one because they want to be more than fine. Ton Clarke once told me that he thought coaches were the root of all evil in the sport.

Running for an hour a day is not very much running except for maybe the newest beginners and plenty of high school kids did a lot more than that decades ago and were just fine. Yes, at some point, if your kid is cutting into his sleep and not getting his schoolwork done because he's running all the time it may be time to step in. But if he's got his life managed well and wants to run for an hour a day or more, and the emphasis is on "wants to' it will be fine.

I agree with Sara. Amazing how many people search for low mileage short cuts. Even more amazing how many kids are advised to not run as youths and do low mileage in HS, only to find they are not good enough to run at their college of their choice. We are mid level D1 and to walk on now, you have to run 1:57 or 4:28 or 9:44. What percentage of all HS distance runners are going to come remotely close to those times on the recommended “save yourself for college” 30-40 mpw these people advocate, are going to come anywhere near these times? Answer is about 1% of kids. Your low mileage/save yourself for college will work for about 1% super talented kids, but is disastrous advice for 99% of kids who have D1 aspirations. The vast, vast majority of people by definition are not super talented. You have to decide what you want to do with your life. Life is short. If running at the D1 level is a very important goal and you are not in the 99th percentile of talent, start running and running a lot and 1-3 times a week at a medium or high aerobic effort. Even if you want to run in DII or DIII, keep in mind only about 5% of all HS distance runners make it to that level. Again, if you are not in the 95th percentile in the running talent lottery of life, and aspire to run at the DIII level, you are not going to make it off their 30-40 mpw advice. There are plenty of 30-40 mph HS runners on college rosters, but unfortunately every one of those kids had 15 or more HS teammates who were not good enough to run in college. Don't listen to these "save yourself college" low mileage types, yes they are the vast majority of posters, but they are wrong for 95% of all high school distance runners.

70 miles/week is not that much, especially at an easy pace. Can easily be done without doubles. Sounds like justification for running their African children into the ground.

2nd part of the tweet:

https://twitter.com/SaraHall3/status/1150528785269133312

When we see the second part of the tweet, I don't see how it's event controversial. Maybe it's the part where she ran 70 mpw all throughout high school? Remember though that high school isn't where Sara Hall started running. She was an age group runner before that. She was farther along in training than most 9th graders and was able to handle more.

High mileage is a term that is largely based on perspective. I started running in 8th grade and ran about 15 miles per week. My friends who didn't run thought it was crazy, and for that reason, I thought I was a badass for running so much. Going into freshman year my coach wanted me to run 30 miles a week and I thought that was crazy. I was so proud the first time I ran 8 miles in a day because it seemed ridiculous that a person would do that. I remember my sophomore year when I made a decision to run 50 mpw I thought that I was pushing boundaries. I only ran 6 days a week, so in a year I went from being impressed with myself for running 8 miles in a single run to averaging more than 8 miles a day. I ran faster than I ever had and qualified for races that I could not have gotten into prior to that. And when I talked to the other guys in those races, I found that most of them were running 50 miles per week. I finished high school running about 65 miles per week and felt good about doing it, but that no longer felt like high mileage. I went into college running about 75 mpw and topped out in college at over 100 mpw and that was just what we did. So at what point did it become high mileage? Or did it? If I polled everyone who has posted in this thread, I don't think anyone would call 15 or 30 mpw high mileage, but I bet a few might say that 50 mpw is high mileage. Especially when they attribute it to a sophomore. Then again, others would say that 70 mpw is not high mileage. These opinions are going to be shaped by how much mileage people have ever done and what their experiences were with their highest mileages. For instance, I probably did 100 mpw 6 months or a year before I really should have. That season felt like that number just was not productive and my race times reflected that. I dropped down and ran better. But the next season when I got back to 100 mpw it was sustainable and I ran well. It no longer felt like super high mileage. It was just the routine.

Sara was great in high school and really good in college, but remember that she did suffer through some adversity. Maybe that adversity was due to mistakes in training that she learned from. I don't really know. But over the term of a long career, her build up worked. She's been very successful.

Now, if the gripe is that some people can go about building mileage in a destructive way, I will not argue against that. The methodology that some coaches and athletes use to arrive at their training can be downright stupid and unhealthy. The more training an athlete is going to do, the more careful they have to be and the more precautions they have to take. But I don't think that the point of the tweet is to say that kids should just go out the door and run a ton of mileage without thought, but rather that if a kid wants to take the next step in his or her training, it can be done without being inherently unhealthy or an inherently oppressive experience.

Running 70+ mpw in high school is obsessive, unhealthy and unnecessary. Of course it can be done. Of course it is done. But should it be done- even with proper nutrition, sleep and recovery? Probably not. Kids are more likely to burn out, get injured and suffer from over training with that type of mileage. So, I'll say with confidence that the vast majority of parents/coaches/responsible adults would not want their kid subjected to that type of training.

All of the above doesn't even touch on WHY a parent/coach/athlete would want to run that type of mileage. If one is that obsessed with excelling that they would ignore the obvious risks, then they should be seeing a therapist.

what is it good for, absolutely nothing say it again wrote:

Running 70+ mpw in high school is obsessive, unhealthy and unnecessary. Of course it can be done. Of course it is done. But should it be done- even with proper nutrition, sleep and recovery? Probably not. Kids are more likely to burn out, get injured and suffer from over training with that type of mileage. So, I'll say with confidence that the vast majority of parents/coaches/responsible adults would not want their kid subjected to that type of training.

All of the above doesn't even touch on WHY a parent/coach/athlete would want to run that type of mileage. If one is that obsessed with excelling that they would ignore the obvious risks, then they should be seeing a therapist.

Judge much?

I guess nobody should ever strive to be their best...

To whoever said she did not burn out, that is >>>False. I don't have anything against her or her Dad and have never even posted on any thread about her, not once. But...if she had been more successful with running/racing she would not have stopped. She had more than a few bad races after her success, combined with injuries, so she hung them up for awhile. She still would have hated the trolls and such, but that's absolutely not why she quit.

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

She is an EXTREME slow-twitch athlete - these tend to prosper on high volume training. Like one guy said, she literally had no kick at all - no one ever considered her a threat during the last 200m of a race.

LOL, okay, go back and watch the finish of the 2000 Footlocker XC race and tell us how slow twitch she is.

Having Faith wrote:

This strategy works when you have Jesus in your heart.

Yes, but you need to micro-Jesus so you don't get caught.

Truth Only wrote:

This is why her husband is no longer a runner.

Fully agree with this. Her husband sacrificed his career for her. wHILE he was bringing home the bacon she was racing whatever distance she felt like. She got to 'thons LATE.

more tweets wrote:

https://twitter.com/SaraHall3/status/1150859668748587008

What does this mean?