Great Articles!
Michael Gibbons is the father of Winter Park senior and NC State signee Rafaella Gibbons. Gibbons won the 4A Cross Country State Finals in 2014 and ended her high school career recently with a state championship in the 1,600m run and was a member of the school's state winning 4x800m relays over the years as well as cross country podium finishes.
The subject of the frequently observed (but infrequently discussed) decline in performance over time of the female high school distance athlete is one that touches a great number of athletes, coaches and parents each year. In the hope of stimulating some discussion of the difficult subject, I want to share some personal thoughts and history (all reviewed by my daughter) in the hope that the discussion may prove helpful to other parents and female high school athletes.
It is a fact that many (though certainly not all) female high school distance athletes experience a period of time when their performances as an upperclassman slow when compared with their underclassman performances. Rafaella's success as an underclassman ensured that her struggle with this common phenomenon would play out in a more public and obvious fashion.
I remember a meet at Bolles during Rafaella's Junior year. There was a typically fast field assembled for the 1600 race in early March. The coaching, preparation and competitive spirit were all present as before but her new body was not ready to perform as it had in the past and she went backwards in the final 200 meters. Shortly after the race, Rafaella was sobbing on my shoulder. She was so frustrated and discouraged that she tearfully expressed, "I can't do this anymore!".
As a parent it tears your heart out and leaves you feeling helpless to see your child suffering so much from a sport you know she loves dearly. Suffice it to say that after sophomore year there were a number of races that left Rafaella feeling frustrated and disappointed as she found herself unable to recapture her former form.
As a parent, this was all unexplored territory with no maps available for help navigating the frequently dark and difficult terrain. With her high school career now over, it seems like a good time to try to offer an informal Parent Survival Guide for parents of female high school distance runners.
1. Keep it fun. Your daughter won't be running PR's each week and winning every race. Encourage her to focus on the journey, the daily practices with coaches and teammates, the shared grind, the road trips, the team meals, the team friendships. These are the critical relationships and experiences that serve to create lasting memories and foster joy and fun (along with the workout pain and burn). They will give your daughter balance and support over the inevitable highs and lows of the sport.
2. Avoid comparing the mature athlete with the immature athlete. Underclass females have been described by some as "lungs with legs". When you weigh 100 pounds soaking wet, it doesn't take as much cardiovascular development to power you over the XC course or track. As boys mature and their bodies produce more testosterone, they naturally develop more speed and power and their times typically drop year over year through high school. As girls mature and their bodies produce more estrogen, they naturally add body fat and the same amount of aerobic development/training regimen imposed on the heavier body will produce slower times. Help your daughter understand and celebrate the body changes as a necessary phase of development that serves to strengthen bones, reduce injuries and permit a higher training volume. Remind your daughter that the fastest women in the world are not pre-pubescent teens but fully grown and mature women. In high school, it can be easy for our girls to lose sight of this fact.
3. Stay positive. When declines in performance manifest, continue to offer encouragement and support for your daughter. In Rafaella's case, credit goes to Coach Mac for being consistently positive and encouraging of Rafaella even when she was struggling. Parents and coaches should be on the same page looking to build the athlete up and keep their spirits high even when the stopwatch says you're running slower.
4. Check the iron. Between menses and hemolytic loss of blood due to repeated foot strikes, your more mature daughter is losing iron each month. Iron in the blood delivers oxygen to the working muscles and an adequate amount of iron in the blood is essential to optimum performance in the distance events. Try to establish a hemoglobin and ferritin baseline when your daughter is running well and feeling good. Try to have her doctor order a blood test including a serum ferritin test at the start of each season and before summer training block. Recognize that what many doctors consider normal and healthy may not be adequate for female distance runners. You don't need a ferritin level of 60 or higher to be a healthy adult female but college coaches like to see their female athletes at such levels. Obviously, too much iron can be toxic so you need to monitor iron supplements and don't fall prey to more is better.
5. Check the hips. During summer training after her Junior year, Rafaella was struggling with a recurring hamstring issue that was affecting her training. I took her to an orthopedic who took an X=ray which proved negative. He referred Rafaella to a Sports Physical Therapist to address the hamstring pain. The Sports PT turned out to be very knowledgeable and immediately identified a weakness in her hip (one side more than the other) that caused subtle form compensation and led to hamstring soreness. The PT recommended a series of exercises for Rafaella to perform at home that over time strengthened and balanced a weak and imbalanced area of critical import for running form and economy. You don't need to see a PT though to find help on the hip issue. Coach Jay Johnson has a great video online demonstrating various hip related exercises for the female runner. Just Google "Coach Jay Johnson myrtl exercises" and you'll find the free instructional videos. Twenty to thirty minutes 3 or 4 times per week will help to strengthen a frequently neglected area of weakness for the female high school distance runner.
6. Pray a lot. Pray for patience for your daughter. Pray that she doesn't succumb to the siren song of an eating disorder in order to lose weight and drop time. Pray that the fire of passion and love for the sport that animated your daughter in earlier times continues to burn during down times, however diminished, waiting for the moment when coaching, preparation, desire and opportunity combine to reignite the flame.
This series of articles called, "Dear Younger Me" is pretty awesome. It showcases some of top runners, as it suggests, writing to their younger selves. It is a lot of good advice.
Take a look! Link
Note: Entrepreneur and former professional runner Lauren Fleshman wrote a letter to her younger self in 2017 for MileSplit. This is a reprinted version of the same essay, which sparked discussion and created an enormous amount of positive feedback.
Dear High School Lauren,
I have so many things I want to tell you, but I'm going to start with the most urgent. Because of all the ways I've seen athletic stories unfold over the years, this is the No. 1 destroyer of dreams.
You're a young woman, but the sound of the word "woman" makes you cringe. Well-meaning coaches and parents and aunties and grannies and inappropriate uncles comment on the changing bodies of girls--not yours yet but those around you. It's coming. You know it's coming.
You notice what happens sometimes to female athletes. She hits puberty; her times get slower or plateau. She is confused; she is working harder than ever. Clueless adults who are overly invested in her "performance" will grieve, as if her worth is based solely on PRs. This makes you scared of growing up.
Seeing girls go through this is confusing because there is a story once told to you about running: "You get out what you put in." You've heard there is a direct line between effort and improvement, between wanting it more and winning. This is a "truth" written by men, based on the experience of boys and men. Your male teammates are bathing in testosterone, a dramatic performance enhancer. You will not. You are about to bathe in different hormones, hormones that, more often than not, temporarily interrupt that promised straight line of improvement. What you need are knowledgeable coaches and parents who know how to support you during this time, to let you know it is normal, to celebrate you through development, who can zoom out on the big picture, because it is at this time that many girls give up.
You'll see girls react to a changing body in three ways: give up, ride it out, or fight against it. With 100 percent confidence, I can tell you the best choice is to ride it out. The best is yet to come.
You will go on to race at a NCAA Division I university and watch several girls do whatever it takes to fight their changing bodies. But before you choose a school, you will go on visits. You will have meals with the teams and notice they do things differently. There is the school that has "salad with dressing on the side," the school where everyone orders "no gluten and no dairy," the school where the girls bring their own food from home to the restaurant... Go to the school where people order a variety of things: the burger, the chicken sandwich, the salad. Go to the school where you can order french fries and do it without shame.
Go to the school where the majority of girls look athletic and healthy, with hydrated muscles, and get their periods. Listen to how they talk about themselves--and one another. Listen to what they value.
Do they value effort or performance? What do they worry about openly? Fixations on their appearance? Or do they lift one another up to be good teammates and performers? Do they value themselves and one another by time and place and weight? Or by the whole package of who they are as people?
How do they treat the teammates who are struggling physically or mentally or psychologically? Do they isolate them? Talk behind their backs? Do they have empathy and compassion? Do they call one another up?
Like it or not Lauren, you are a woman. A strong one. Your body is at some point going to become what it is meant to be, based on a long line of strong women who have survived generations in a tough world. For most of the time, and in most cultures, what is happening to your body would be celebrated with ceremony. Women are powerful beyond your imagination. You cannot reach your power by making yourself small. And yet in competitive running, you will find yourself in a world in which you feel pressure to do just that.
Let me speak to the competitive dream chaser in you now.
You can be fast and a developed woman. In fact, you can only reach your ultimate potential if you let your body go through its changes. If you get to the dips and valleys and fight your body, starve your body, attempt to outsmart it, you will suffer. You will lose your period. You will get faster at first. And then you will get injured. And injured. And injured.
Depending on the methods you used to fight your body, you may end up destroying your relationship with food and sport for years to come. You won't go this far, but you'll see so many of your friends and teammates do this. In your age group, the mortality rate from anorexia is 12 times higher than any other cause of death. You will see some come close.
You will see this so much, fed by reckless coaches, fed by unhealthy team culture, fed by the desire for short-term success, that it will break your heart. It will break your heart so much that it will be difficult for you to watch many of the top high school and college races after you graduate. So many young athletes will reach out to you for help. You will learn how destructive and reckless so many coaches are, and you will want to find a way to change things.
I need you to know, I PROMISE you, that the ultimate star you are chasing is further ahead than any shiny thing you see now. The way you get there is to protect your health and protect your love of the sport above all, even as you reach for the shiny goals right in front of you. You simply do not know and cannot predict your personal path, but you'll get there. It will look different and brighter and richer and more multi-faceted the closer you get.
I need you to know, you have always been more than a runner, more than your times, more than your state championships, more than your school records. But you will get confused. You will forget. Luckily you will have teammates and family and friends who remind you. You will go on to do almost every single thing you could have dreamed of, not in the way you imagined, not on the timeline you imagined.
And when you retire from being a pro runner after 12 years, you will be surprised at what ends up being most valuable to you. Your medals will be in a box somewhere, and you'll never look at them. Your proudest accomplishment will be a race in which you finished last because in that race you were tested more than ever and you were brave.
Finishing seventh in the entire world in the 5K and having a bronze medal in cross country brings you a smile, the same smile as winning league with your team as a freshman in high school, the same smile as breaking 5:00 in the mile for the first time. The real life-changers, the memories that make the peach fuzz on your cheeks and the hairs on your forearms stand up, those will be braiding your teammates hair in the 15-passenger van on the way to a race; a random tempo run along a sidewalk past a gas station where you felt like you were flying while home on Christmas break; descending a forest trail at camp behind your best friend with your arms outstretched in flight; running at night with someone you are falling in love with; pushing your baby in a running stroller for the first time; passing under a canopy of trees temporarily blocking the rain on a cross country course you can't remember the name of, the sound of your feet squelching in the mud while chasing your rival.
Protect the opportunity to make memories like those for a lifetime. You're going to be OK being all of yourself. Make sure your teammates know it too.
Love,
Lauren
