Views on my son's 5k time

Lex Luther wrote: »

Hi my son was 11 in June.
He recently ran a 5k road race in just under 22 minutes off no specific training and it didnt seem to knock a feather out of him.
(He's generally fit through playing lots of sport).
What I'm wondering is , how does taht time sound to people who know for that age ? Should I see about getting him into a club ( he'd have to ditch some other sport but if he has a bit of talent at running I want to give him a chance to develop).
Thanks for any thoughts.
Lex

That's very good running for an 11 year old.

I think the key here though is what he wants to do. If he doesn't want to run, don't push him into dropping other sports that he may prefer. All the talent in the world means nothing if he doesn't enjoy it as somewhere down the line, the cracks will start to show and it won't matter how good he is running, he'll pack it in.

If he wants to do it, sign him up to a club and encourage him. It should be all about fun at that age and he'll meet loads of new friends as well.

Chivito550 wrote: »

11 year olds should not be running 5k races IMO. By all means sign him up with an athletics club and let him try out all the various disciplines, and he'll find the ones that he likes the most. 11 year olds should be running 100s and 800s, and jumping into sand, leaping over a bar, and throwing a spear as far as possible, not slogging it out through miles.

I agree that kids should try out all the events and see what they like best.

Not so much on the slogging, that makes it sound really negative. When I was 11, I used to run 10k's and it didn't hurt me. We used to go out and play soccer on the green for so long during in the evening, weekend and summer that the score would often reach triple digits. I'm pretty sure I was running more miles and at a higher intensity as an 11 year old than I am at 25 and never felt tired. I'd recover almost instantly.

That natural fitness and all round energy is just incredible at that age. As Joe Vigil says, Kenyan youths are running up to 8-12k per day and have racked up almost 10,000 miles by the time they reach highschool. They are no different to any other kids, that's just a cultural perception.

If the kid is enjoying running miles and doing it under their own motivation, I don't see a problem with running long distance and the studies are there to back it up. A young kid is no more likely to suffer injury or physiological damage than a fully grown adult.

Ah lads, I think ye're being a bit harsh on the time. You're talking about an 11 year old who has done no actual run training and just jumped into a 5k fun run.

shiibata wrote: »

Did do 5Ks at a young age but he stopped as was told not good for that age.

A child should never be discouraged from a sport and anyone ruling them out that young really doesn't know what they are on about.

Three factors which need to be taken into account are natural talent, response to training and puberty as all have huge impact on performance at that age.

If the child has an interest in sport encourage but let them make the choice and facilitate that choice. Early specialization is not usually encouraged in distance running better to develop wide range of functional movement skills and visual sensory skills that have greater transference over a wide range of sports and day to day activities later in life.

RayCun wrote: »

Because athletes need to learn the skill of running. The more 'bad' running you do, the more bad habits you pick up, and that is particularly true if you are running long and slow. And if you have a kid who is very active anyway from other sports, there is even less need to worry about developing their endurance. Make them good runners and the endurance will follow in time.

But is the slow running ruins your form idea a fallacy? Most kids have great form(there are exceptions of course). When I think of kids who ran long distances young under their own motivation, I think of guys like Moses Mosop here:

http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/moses-mosop-samsung-diamond-league-eugene-19782776.jpg

He's a guy with sub-50 400m speed which would put many a sprinter to shame.

I think of Gerry Lindgren, John Treacy and every runner pre 1990. Many people point to the adoption of the Coe/Horwill low mileage, high intensity training by coaches in the early 90's as the death of distance running in Europe and America. Coaches only wanted the kids to run middle distance as they thought that was how you make an athlete and all these ideas of long distance running ruining form and kids ability to progress started to pop up or even that it stunts growth.

There is nothing to back up claims that long distance running impacts kids in any negative way. In fact, running hard intervals is far more damaging and at risk of burnout. There is plenty of evidence to back up that long distance running will not do anymore harm to them than adults.


The key thing is what the kid wants to do and enjoying it. As a guy who has first hand experience of running long distance as a kid, it didn't do me any harm, I could still go out and win 600m races which while probably my strongest event at the time, I never enjoyed it as much as running long. Obviously, my view is biased but I'd still like to know where you coming from Ray?

RayCun wrote: »

But whatever you do with an 11 year old, you should be thinking about how this is going to benefit them 10 years down the line. Improving their technique as a runner is going to keep paying off for the rest of their running lives. A steady 10/15 minute run at a controlled pace has its place in building strength. 800-1500m races, sure, and the future distance runners will enjoy them more than a sprint.

A 5k race? The fact that its a race means they'll be running as fast as they can, and they can't sustain that, so they are going to spend half the race running badly.* Where is the benefit?.

I think the problem with the looking out for their best interest in 10 years by running fast is flawed to be honest and I think it's a generalisation that all kids want to run fast. Bad pacing has the exact same consquences in any race from 200m up, fast running will actually expose more flaws in a runners technique. To see that, all you have to do is look at 400m runners coming down the stretch who went out too fast. If a kid can learn to pace an 800m race, they can learn to pace a 5k in my opinion. And I really don't believe once off races ingrain bad technique. As long as they are doing some sort of speed drills or workouts, long slow running will not have a damaging effect on their form.

As for looking in their best interest 10 years down the line meaning focusing on speed now, I don't agree with that at all, Aerobic endurance takes a lot longer and has more of a performance benefit than speed training. Aerobic running will give them more opportunities to make a decision down the line on whether they want to run middle distance or longer distance because of how muscle fibers work.

Speed is controlled predominantly by muscle fibre type, you are born with only a certain amount of slowtwitch and fasttwitch fibres and they cannot be changed. There is another fibre type called the intermediate fibre which can be trained to be recruited by either fasttwitch or slowtwitch depending on whether you are training for speed or endurance. These muscle fibers can be changed to work for endurance or speed very quickly so while you may lose speed while endurance training, it's very easy to convert them back if you focus on speed so a runner has never lost their speed with the exception of ageing or medical problems. Speed is a far more limited avenue for improvement than endurance as the fiber type rules the roost.

The aerobic engine is far more difficult to build but still needed by both middle and distance runners abd the gains can be huge. Not to mind that aerobic fitness is the foundation of all running from 800m up and why periodisation is the way it is currently. You build a base first and you work on speed after and I don't see why that should be reversed for kids.

By confining kids to middle distance and speedwork, I think coaches are stunting the progress as they have specialised them early in their life because if speed doesn't dissapear fully with distance training, it only temporarily goes due to training focus, why not focus on something that takes a decade or more to build which is endurance first? Keep it aerobic but always keep that hint of speed.

Renato Canova talks about this at length on letsrun about his elite marathon runners (they aren't kids but the rules still apply in my opinion). He says that he could take one of his marathon athletes and turn them into a 10k machine in a few months if that was what they wanted to do. He says it's a lot more difficult to take a 10k runner and turn them into a marathon runner because of the lack of an aerobic house as he calls it and all of the lactate training they have done.

Speedwork is just roof on the fully built aerobic house. Thats my take on it anyway. Take it for what it's worth!:)

RayCun wrote: »

I wouldn't describe it as concentrating on speed, but as concentrating on form. In some ways its easier to study form when someone is running at a decent speed because everything is heightened, but you're trying to teach them things that they will apply in an easy-paced or steady run too. And maybe when putting together your training plan think less about the intervals they are going to run and more about the work you can do to improve their balance and coordination during those intervals.

You say it takes a decade or more to build endurance. Well, these are 11 year olds! They have a decade or more! They have plenty of time to run shorter distances and build up their strength, and the older they get the more capable they are of handling an increased load. But the older they get, the harder it is to change their running style, and the more they run the more that style becomes ingrained. So make them good runners first, and then they can be good sprinters or good middle distance runners or good endurance runners

(the distances they run aren't that short by the way, boys under 12 run 2k in the county XC so a lot of them will run that regularly in training)

I've to hit the road but I think aerobic development is a far more significant long term training ideal than form. Form cqn be worked on by running a few hills every week. Aerobic development is something that takes years of long slow distance. I don't think you understood the point I was making about a decade or more to max out aerobic capacity, theoretically it you can always improve it, I mean that it is the foundation of all running and the key to longterm improvement and why not start now when the kids are young if speed in middle and distance runners can be developed quickly later. By developing it early, you won't have to spend an extra 4-5 years developing it when you could be spending 6 months developing the speed on top on the endurance you have built. It's a lot easier to step down in distance than it is to step up is what I was saying so a kid who runs 5k's etc isn't as specialised and has more options available to them.

It's like when someone base trains for a 5k, they always run the miles to for a 10k but they up the speed and intensity and drop the miles for the specific/specialised phase. Running is a pretty simple sport at the end of the day and one of the biggest rules is distance first, speed later and I don't see why that rule doesn't apply to kids.Base training phase is always longer than the specific phase because it is the foundation. Speed training is always shorter than it because early peaking and burnout is likely. This is periodisation over one cycle but can be applied to longer Macrocycles (over a year) and running as an even longer and bigger picture. It's structure.


There's a reason Kenyan and Ethopia dominate running from 800-marathon. They all ran long as kids and developed endurance first, even the 800m runners.

Enduro wrote: »

If kids should be kept open to all disciplenes (which I agree with), should that not include longer distances as well?

I know in my day there was no sporting outlet for a slow-twitcher like me. Everything (athletics and ball-sports) was all about speed and sprinting, which put me off all of them (as I was crap, having less speed than almost everyone). It would have been nice to have had the opportunity to try out longer distance running (never done at my school), and would probably have gotten me into athletics a lot earlier.

god I couldn't agree with you more. I wish wish wish running hadn't all been about going out at 100% effort from the off. I hated running with a passion due to the fact that my poor little lungs and legs were in a world of pain within about 10 seconds of every race we did.
Memories still haunt me....

sorry, back on topic...