Advice on Summer Running for Daughter in Middle School

if a camp is basically a side coach experience. then 2 camps is 2 side coaches. coach A will maybe say do A B C. coach B will maybe say do D E F. it cancels out. if you are having side coaching you want a consistent message and singular directive, and to pick for either general quality or a specific approach.

re being a kid, you want your kid to feel like they got to be a kid. you want your kid to get their rest and stay healthy. and also, more cynically, to not burn out on the sport before the business end arrives. being sick of it doesn't necessarily hit now -- it'll show up in HS.

i ran and played soccer and thought they were a great balance for each other. soccer, making teams, earning playing time, can be subjective and political. running is more democratic and objective, but can be stressful. i thought going back and forth was great balance and promoted me being better at both.

Or find some summer track meets to run instead of organized track workouts. Run different event, just have fun with no pressure. Just get her to move

Sorry, did I pretend that she enrolled herself? I handled the arrangements, but it was her decision. She's also "enrolled" in an art camp and a medical oriented camp that she chose. Part of my job as a parent is to provide the opportunity for my children to enrich themselves and explore their interests. I see running as no different than any of the other interests my children have, and I will support it, as well.

I'm sorry that you are offended that I would try to get some advice regarding fostering my child's interest in running on a site dedicated to running.

as a coach there are things i like about summer camps, and things I dislike. I don't like the disruption in training plans at sometimes inopportune times, but I love that they are usually going to be there with other kids who are similarly self-motivated and actual fans of running. at least 80% of the kids i get in track are just passing the time between basketball, football, soccer, etc. It can be difficult to spend any time teaching them about what you are doing without distractions and loss of focus.

I love when my kids come back and start having conversations with me about things like threshold, diet, rest, etc. I love when they come back and start talking about the names of some professional runners or very popular high school and college runners. those conversations are not happening in school, with most of their teammates being completely uninterested. those camps give an opportunity to geek out on the sport and learn to love it a little more.

In most cases, I think the camps give general advice that won't interfere with one message to another. though im sure there are some bad ones out there that will give unnecessary and dogmatic advice, spoken as if it's gospel.

I'm not thinking about any specific track runs. Mainly easy miles. However, there is a park run 5k in my area that happens every Saturday starting in June. It's free and informal. My neighbor told me about it. Seems like that would be a fun way to get in some miles.

Don't let all the idiots on here get you down.

Carefully building up to 20-25mi is perfectly reasonable at her age. Supporting and helping guide your children to enjoy quality activities they want to participate in is being a good parent.

These people talk about soccer and what not... my buddies in Uruguay have their kids start training at 4 years old. FOUR. YEARS. OLD. Yeah, many of them burnout. But many don't. But there is a reason the US sucks at soccer.

You think 90-120mins of running/week is going to prevent them from being a kid? Seems like a pretty stupid take to me. I know I spent more than that doing soccer, golf, baseball, lacrosse and the rest and still felt like I was being a kid…

Now doing 2 running camps feels a bit excessive versus the run 3-4x/ week with 1 long (40-60 mins), one faster (say 4x4 at 10k/hm pace) and easy runs (20-35 mins) with a few strides/hill sprints.

when to start talking about some plan for a kid to run 40+mpw with 8x400 all out every week, we can talk about over doing it. That 10-25mpw though is great at getting the body used to running so you arent the kid who complains about shin splints all XC season.

And with all sports, it is up to the kid. If you have to tell them to run, than you should give up.

Thanks, R&R, for bringing me back to earth. I was beginning to think what I was proposing was crazy!

After mulling it all over and talking to my daughter, we're thinking of working up to something along the lines of 4x3 miles + 1x5 miles per week. 5 days, 17 miles total. There's no pressure to stick to the program, but I think it helps to have something to strive for. Without any sort of plan, nothing will happen.

Maybe I should have explained the camps a little more clearly because it seems that there is some concern that these might be excessive. Both of the camps are organized by her school and are affiliated with the Cross Country and Track teams (1 for each discipline). They are 4 days each and local to our home. So she'll be dropped off for 3 hours, 4 days a week for both camps. According to the informational packet I have the camps are "designed to instruct and motivate athletes through entertaining training sessions, games, and fun activities!"...and also, underlined and bolded: "The most important takeaway is to have FUN!"

I highly doubt she'll come out of these camps defeated and demoralized. I actually believe she'll enjoy "acting like a kid" for a few hours with some friends from school while getting in a few miles. :)

Hey Dad some good advice already given but I have coached a number of young runners who start out at around your daughters age and are still training with me and now they are in their early 20's as there are no school teams here. Here a few things that I think work:

*Have her meet up with some of her teammates for easy runs during the summer.

*Parkruns are great! I would encourage she do them

*Run with your daughter! Hopefully you can get out the door and do this with her

*Drills and total body fitness sessions are fun and will see her overall strength improve!

*focus on minutes not total volume

*it's ok to have her do lots of run/walking ie 4x5min of running with 2min of walking in between

*Faster running promotes coordination and good neuromuscular pathways. I'm not a big fan of lots of slow running early in development but there might be lots on these boards that disagree/do this with your drill session and have her run 50-70m efforts that 90% effort.

*Enjoy this time with your daughter as it won't last forever.

Good luck!

Just have fun. Run around the yard, take her to road races around the town and let her get to know the running people in your town.

The biggest mistakes people make are taking the fun out of running. My town had a high school coach who wouldn’t let his kids race the local summer races.

They didn’t get to know anybody in town that ran. The characters. The people that make the sport memorable and inspirational. They became exclusive and reclusive and in the end… bored.

Make it fun. Make it memorable

I have a kid doing xc next year in middle school and did xc for the first time last year at 6th grade. I just ran with kid once a week in a fartlek-style effort for 10-15 minutes for like 6 weeks. The 6th grader did pretty well during xc season. Focus on quality over quantity. Running mileage is mentally tough for kids but smaller bursts of quality runs are manageable. It can just be once or twice a week.

Fast forward to this spring, the kid loves to run and already doing bolder boulder 10k tomorrow.

Don't listen to the garbage advice to "leave the kids alone to be kids and dont train them" IF your child genuinely likes to run. Any sustained aerobic activity is a huge advantage for them to continue being healthy into their senior years. The body develops, at that age, differently when given an aerobic stimulus.

Also, there are dozens of kids who do bolder boulder 10k each year. Their website even has a training plan for young kids. Check it out.

if you're getting generic advice it's a waste of time and money. the kid in question will already have XC and TF coach(es), maybe 1, maybe 2. that's a lot of input already. the purpose of such camps is (a) showcase and (b) fresh learning. this girl isn't fast enough yet to merit a showcase -- kind of a way of skirting visit rules. so the value here is teaching that you can't get from the HS coach. generic is not beyond the HS coach. you get that at least already, from most coaches. you want to be taught aspects of how to do it better. technique, racecraft, training ideas, etc.

i meant what i said when it's important it not clash with prior advice. you are inviting a second and third coach into the fray. occasionally some camp coach would tell us x when our regular soccer coach had said y. if i am bought into the regular program of y then being taught x is a waste of time. the other coach is going to try to take x right back out. so ideally your camp is an extension or complimentary of how you're already being drilled. one well chosen summer camp is a nice supplement. a couple is likely to result in contradictory advice.

i appreciate what you're saying about them coming back energized with a bunch of new ideas and language, but that's not really a generic camp, is it?

sorry but "let kids be kids" is not the same as "they shouldn't train." athletic kids' idea of down time is usually more like what we would understand as cross-training. pickup basketball, messing around in the woods, beach volleyball, soccer in the back yard, touch football in the street. you act like we were lazy bones doing nothing. my block had a juco all american, a D3 football player, and me, a D3 2 sport guy who was soccer MVP. we had friends who eventually played minor league baseball, or ran D1 level times but stopped in HS.

BUT at the end of a 50 game soccer season, the soccer kids were soccered out. the football guy didn't necessarily want to start playing football in the summer. so it tended to be something else. we were competitive, active, but not "training." we were fairly successful as athletes, one national championship, a few state titles, not messing around.

but if you want a sane kid the last freaking thing we are doing in summer is more of our sport. not if you want passion for the sport in the back end of HS when the money is on the table. that's the point when a college camp showcase has recruiting value, or you are looking for coaching nuggets for an edge.

i mean, i generally feel good about what i did, but i also thought about it at a point and realized due to playing 2 soccer leagues a weekend in junior high, plus track team, that i was absent from social life except the summer, for years. you better really love what you are doing.

and now this dude is like, my daughter doesn't need her summer, either.

yeah, good luck with that.

dude, you're not getting it about "demoralized after camp." the deal is not -- likely -- that she physically breaks down now from no rest, or burns out tomorrow. if she's anything like i was, she's going hard for months of the year, lives and breathes running. the deal is whether she burns out and falls apart in a few years.

part of your job is to be the adult in the room saying, nah, get some rest, play around. i think most people have a finite amount of disciplined dedication in them. you want to spend that when it matters. when you are running 8 minute miles and need to grow is not when to spend multiple camp money, neverending seasons, etc. to me the bad stuff happens when you don't get a break.