This post is a long-time coming. I waited to write it until my daughter was completely done with running her senior year of high school. Now that all the races have been run, the last track banquet is over, and she has all of the letters and accolades she will ever get in high school, it’s time to analyze the experience.
Honestly, her career as a high school runner has been one of the most humbling and heartbreaking experiences I have ever gone through as a parent.
And a lot of it was my fault – because I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I trusted doctors and coaches to have my daughter’s best interest at heart.
Yet, there has been some value to it. We both learned a lot about flexibility, resilience, and priorities. Her many injuries and health issues lead her to an interest in her future career path of physical therapy. It wasn’t the experience I thought we would have, but there were good things that happened because of it.
Still, I think there are things worth sharing with parents of girl runners. These are things that I learned through experience. These are the things I wish someone had told me. So I’m passing them along. Maybe they will help.
1. Be wise and wary.
High school girls’ cross country has the highest injury rate out of any high school varsity sport, according to a study done by Dr. Stephen Rice, the director of the Athletic Health Care System. I am convinced that a lot of that can be pinned on poor coaching. So as a parent, I urge moms to be wary of male coaches and inexperienced female coaches. Unless the coaches are seasoned, educated, and up-to-date on the current running science for successful adolescent female runners, they will have no clue about the differences in training girl and boy runners. This can be extremely damaging and even dangerous for girls.
Once puberty kicks in, boy runners will get bigger muscles and strong bones and will just naturally get faster if they put in the work.
It won’t be that way for the girls. Girls are going to be putting on a bit more body fat; their hips will widen and change their stride. For a girl, working harder won’t necessarily pay off in getting faster. In fact, she might lose time. An extra rest or cross-training day might be more beneficial than an extra run.
Words Matter!
A wise coach has to realize this and the training and encouragement for the girls has to be different than the training for the boys. If it’s not, the girls are going to get burned out and injured.
An even wiser coach will shut up and quit telling the girls “You get what you put into it.” That’s a lie for many female adolescent runners. Frankly, it hurts to hear that you’re putting in all this work and not making progress because you’re not working hard enough! – Queue the stress fractures and mental fatigue and anxiety! That kind of rhetoric is going to be very discouraging and take some girls out of the sport entirely.
That has certainly been the case for the local team Rosie ran on. In Rosie’s junior year, most of the girls on the varsity cross-country team had some sort of overuse injury. Rosie suffered a severe tibial stress fracture that took her out of the competition for months. This resulted in a much smaller team for Rosie’s senior year. Only a handful of girls remained on the team after that year’s senior class graduated.
The horror stories for the rest of the school did not bring in a lot of fresh underclassmen. The legacy of three years of devastating practices for the girls’ team by coaches who promised to get a team to the state meet (something that never happened) will be felt for many years to come.
2. Don’t get too excited by your fast little girl runner. Here’s what happened to my family.
At the end of first grade, Rosie ran her very first 1-mile race. I let her run it because her siblings were running a 5K and she begged to be in her own race. When she was lining up she turned to me with earnest eyes and said, “But Mama, what if I don’t win?” I smiled and replied, “Don’t worry baby, you won’t win. Just do your best.”
She took off and I pondered what had just happened. When her siblings ran their first races they wondered if they would be able to finish! She truly had a different attitude and approach to the whole competitive running thing.
That summer, and all through elementary school, she went to practice with her brother and ran with the boys’ high school team just for fun. Some of them called her, “Little sister.” She couldn’t run with the fast boys of course, but she was easily beating some of the other boys that just came out to try cross-country running. And she loved it.
In 5th and 6th grade it paid off too. She was easily always in the top 10 girl runners in competitions. She had a friendship/rivalry with one of the girls on the team and they were always pushing each other. One was ahead of the other and then trading off every week.
On one particular hot race day, Rosie was running in third place. The first and second-place runners were super far ahead of her. She couldn’t see them and she thought that she was actually winning the race. She set a personal record, we cheered and it was a great day.
Looking back, that 6th-grade race was probably the pinnacle of her racing career. That all changed in 7th grade. She was taller, and about 15 pounds heavier in body composition. She still had absolutely no body fat, but the bigger weight load slowed her down. Mr. Pete and I couldn’t understand it, especially when her friend/rival kept achieving faster times and wins.
What no one ever told us was that body composition was going to make a difference in distance running. The girls in this year’s state track competition in the 3200 all had slim hips, very thin thighs, and lean upper bodies. They are built for speed and endurance.
My daughter’s body type is seen more in the mid-distance runners – think 400 meters, possibly 800.
While it’s fine for a bigger girl to run cross country for strength, endurance, and camaraderie, that is not going to be the competition that plays to her strengths.
As my girl fell further and further back into the pack, it would have been nice for a coach or even the sports doctor to explain to us that anatomy and physiology were definitely playing a part here. An even wiser authority perhaps could have encouraged more enthusiasm for the mid-distances in track and downplayed cross country.
I wish I had known that.
3. Cross training – it’s more than just push-ups and sit-ups.
Despite a lackluster end to her middle school running career, Rosie persevered and started practice with the local high school team. After the first summer, it was clear that she was going to be a good fit at the varsity level. Indeed, her very first race was awesome. She set a personal record, was a top scorer for the team, and even came close to her old rival’s time. It felt as if the competitive runner was back and that she had indeed turned over a new leaf.
But that didn’t happen either. The very next week … I mean just a few days after this race, during practice, she began to experience hip and pelvic pain. After a trip to the sports medicine doctor, it was clear that her inner gluteal muscles were weak and that was throwing off her entire lower body. For the next few weeks, we attended physical therapy at 7 in the morning while she started to build strength in her glutes and pelvis.
In retrospect, I learned that the workouts the school provided heavily benefited the boys on the team, but it wasn’t enough for the girls. They needed to have strengthening of the hips and pelvis and the muscles that support the knees.
Rosie continued those exercises even after she finished physical therapy. A year later, Rosie experienced an avulsion fracture of the ankle. Once more, Rosie had to sit out at the beginning of the season and wait for her ankle to heal. Physical therapy gave her some stretching and strengthening exercises, including work and she added those exercises into her regimen.
The reality is, girls need to spend a lot of time stretching, icing, rolling out their muscles, and working on strength from the ankles and knees all the way up to their hips, core, and upper body. This type of work is essential if the runner wants to remain injury free. Of course, this is time-consuming. Rosie did audiobooks for a lot of her literature work. She used the time she spent on other school work to ice and stretch. In retrospect, a lot of schoolwork was done on the floor while she was multitasking!
She held on to her varsity spot, barely, but the first race of her high school career ended up being her best race ever.
4.
A few years ago I wrote about women not listening to other women.
I am guilty of that as well. A few weeks into her sophomore season, Rosie started telling me that her legs were just burning when she was running her 5K. I didn’t know what to think about that. I thought maybe she was just out of condition, although that seemed improbable since she was running 4 miles or more six days a week. Then she started telling me about her heart fluttering, and I passed that off as hormonal. The kid literally had to vomit blood at the end of one of her meets for it to register with me that this was something that needed medical evaluation.
She felt her chest pumping, she got lightheaded and couldn’t catch her breath. One of the moms suggested iron supplements for her so I found one I thought would be easy on her stomach and she started taking it. Coming in for a big finish during one of the races she started vomiting blood at the finish line and her worried teammates began frantically trying to find me!
A very real financial and emotional cost.
A trip to the urgent care, and the gastroenterologist, approximately $800 later, it was determined that Rosie’s digestive system was fine, but that she was severely anemic.
I later learned that iron stores in the body are depleted pretty quickly in athletic girls. In fact, they are losing their stored iron every month and it’s even more if they are bleeding heavily during menstruation.
In Rosie’s case, we were sent to a gastroenterologist to be sure that she did not have GI bleeding. After that, she was started on a prescription iron supplement to rebuild her iron stores. We also started adding a lot of red meat to her diet and cooking with cast iron.
All of that worked but building up her iron levels including her ferritin iron storage took a very long time. She basically missed the last half of her sophomore cross-country season to give her a chance to rebuild those stores and feel better.
This is something I have thought about a lot. It would have been helpful to have a doctor mention this during her mandatory sports physical. But the coaching staff should also educate parents and athletes about the importance of iron supplementation and monitoring too. I certainly would have started her much earlier if I had been aware of the problem.
5.
The importance of Vitamin D was also something that both the sports doctors and coaches should be talking about to parents and athletes. Both of my running children, a male and a female, suffered stress fractures at one time or another. Here in Ohio, we have 6 to 8 months of low sunlight. A good vitamin D supplement and regular vitamin D and high calcium foods are essential to maintaining bone health.
Again, I never had a doctor or coach mention this. I learned from experience. And once I did, I had my child’s levels checked at her yearly appointments.
6.
It seemed to me that male coaches relished the idea of conquering difficult trails. Whether it was running on rutted icy paths in January or overgrown jungle trails at an old church camp, there was never any discussion about whether it was safe to run these trails or not.
My son twisted his ankle on such a path, and Rosie even experienced an avulsion fracture of her ankle running on an uneven path.
Hard surfaces and too many hills can also lead to running injuries.
I did refuse to let my daughter run a practice one time. She had just gotten back from running camp with the team and was exhausted. Her coach inexplicably scheduled the next daily run on a very hilly course. That made absolutely no sense to me and I kept her home and I don’t regret that.
7. Going forward
My daughter is going to start college classes in a few weeks. She decided on her own not to run cross country or track for the NCAA during her freshman year. She might participate in a low-level soccer team on campus. But she is concentrating on her courses, the new environment, and getting settled as a college student. I’m fine with that. On her own, she started training for a half marathon. Maybe that’s what she needs right now – to simply get back to the joy that running gave her and learn how to be her own coach.
As a parent, after every injury and setback, I tried to help her focus on the things she could do. We signed up for Bravewriter courses and she blossomed in the training they gave her and all of the positive feedback on her writing skills. She started playing songs she wanted to learn on the piano, and she grew in her faith by leaps and bounds. All of that was a positive way to move past and move on a part of her life that had taken so much time.
She still loves running. She says she will pick it up in her sophomore year since she is in a 6-year program for physical therapy. But even if she does not, it won’t matter. By making sure that her worth wasn’t just being a successful runner, she has come out of that experience as a healed and whole person, and that’s really the most important thing any mom could hope for!
