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Replying to Thucydides (post #36). View original post.

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Replying To:

Ping...Ping...They go 1 and 2 at Minnesota 3200m

Thucydides

pericles wrote:

poor debate tactics wrote:

A poster disagrees with another poster. A poster then makes personal attacks. That is proof you are not confident of the merits of your argument.

The principle is simple: to understand the joy a child gets out of an activity requires that you have experienced the joy of winning as a result of your own efforts. Examples abound and include computer games. If that offends you, it demonstrates the experience of winning has been absent from your childhood. Let me tell you. It feels great. I want my own kids to have that experience.

But there are those such as you who attempt to prevent others from experiencing winning simply because you are incapable of winning and have probably never won anything.

What's your obsession with the Pings? You claim to know them. Are you one of those who community organizers who harass them at the local track or on the park trails?

I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other about the future success of the Pings. But the accusation that posters who are being critical of the Pings’ training are trying to deny them the joy of winning is not a valid argument. The Pings have been good enough to win many, many races in middle school even if they trained at a less intense level. So the option was there for them to experience a lot of winning but still hold back and reduce the risk of early burnout.

This is not about denying the joy of winning to a talented child, it is about denying some degree of winning today in exchange for what may be the opportunity for more winning in the future. I think it is an interesting debate and one that is very useful for other parents of talented young runners, many of whom may not realize the risks of intense training at a young age. I don’t think anyone should be trying to silence people on either side of the debate by hurling personal insults about their own personal achievements. The debate is an important one, and should be rationally argued.

Grace Ping became famous for setting age group records, beating older runners, etc., not for winning the local MS track race. From that moment onwards, she was opened up to being a high profile case study on the intense training of young runners. Not a great position for a young person to be in, but inevitable. That in itself may be an argument against pushing too hard to early.

Back to this thread.