![]() It is very common to see young runners starting out workouts too hard. Oftentimes-again, especially with younger runners-this means that they need to run at a pace that is easier than they want to, especially at the beginning of the workout. “Do your best” means to do the workout how the workout is designed and the way in which the coach tells you. Running your hardest in every workout will not only achieve suboptimal results, it can lead to both short- and long-term injuries and burnout. It’s easy to interpret this to mean run your hardest in every workout, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We spend a lot of time explaining what “ do your best” means. This is much more nuanced than having fun and one of the hardest things for youth runners to do properly. If runners embrace the other aspects of the running process, better times will generally be achieved but when they are not, the runners can still enjoy all of the other aspects of running so that they do not feel like they failed. They need to understand that fast times and strong performances are not the only goal in what they are doing: they are outcomes of all the other aspects of the process. Young runners need to be prepared to enjoy the other aspects of running when they are not constantly improving otherwise, performance setbacks and injuries can become debilitating. Many youth runners enjoy seemingly endless linear improvement…until they don’t. (One will almost always learn more from their “failures” than from their “successes.”) Young runners need to be prepared to enjoy the other aspects of running when they aren’t constantly improving otherwise, performance setbacks and injuries can become debilitating. Enjoy your improvements and your successes, and enjoy what you can learn when you do not achieve your goals. Enjoy seeing how your body adapts to training. Enjoy getting more comfortable with the fact that running hard can be hard-very hard. If at your core you do not enjoy what you do, it will be hard to excel at that activity for any extended period of time. Understanding what having fun means is easy, and it is foundational to almost every successful runner. The workout philosophy in this article is what the racing team uses, where the runners are predominantly ages 8–14 and the middle school-aged runners generally train with their middle school teams for 6–8 weeks before rotating into the club for the USATF championship part of the season.Īt the beginning of each season, and with each workout, we always have three goals: Our club has two distinct groups: a recreational team that focuses on general fitness through running and a racing team that is competitive. And, what exactly is “too much?” Do we use Judge Potter Stewart’s guidelines: “I know it when I see it?” There is significant literature on this topic, so instead of reviewing that material, this article will focus on the types of workouts our club does that help young runners maximize what they get out of the workout without having to run more than necessary. It’s easy to say, “kids should not run too much,” but that depends on the age, the physical development of the runner, the running surfaces, the quality of workouts, and more. We regularly tell the youth runners who we coach (and their parents) that one can assess the quality of a coach not by the success of the runners while running for that particular coach, but by how successfully the runners transition to the next level(s). culture, especially sports, of ‘more, more more’ and ‘no pain, no gain’ are particularly dangerous in the world of youth running. ![]() The sport is littered with runners who were stars in elementary school, middle school, or high school but do not improve-or worse, never continued to compete because of recurring injuries or burnout. culture, especially sports, of “more, more, more” and “no pain, no gain” are particularly dangerous in the world of youth running. Middle distance and distance running is no exception and perhaps has more challenges than most sports. Training youth athletes always comes with numerous challenges.
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