Here's what parents should consider before sending their little ones to the starting line.
Nicholas Sullivan ran his first race at age 7. It was only a mile, and it wasn’t enough for the now fourth-grader in Little Silver, New Jersey. “He just kept saying he wanted to run more, he wanted to run the 5K, 5K, 5K,” says Nicholas’ dad, Bob Sullivan, a former professional tennis player who now coaches.
So Nicholas spent the summer running with his parents, slowly , one half-mile at a time. By the fall, at age 8, he , clocking in at an impressive 28 minutes. The next year, at age 9, he ran it in 22 minutes. This past fall, at age 10, Nicholas crossed the finish line in under 20 minutes. “Over the last three years, he’s gotten to be very good – like off the charts good,” Sullivan says.
So good, in fact, that other parents in his neighborhood have suggested he try out for the junior Olympics. That’s when Sullivan pulled the breaks.
“As a coach, it’s easy for me to want to become overly structured with anything,” says Sullivan, who’s . “But given [Nicholas’] age, I’ve been the exact opposite. All I’ve been trying to do is keep it fun – fun, fun, fun.”
Sullivan’s approach is the right one, say experts who study and treat young athletes. While there’s no question that is critical for physical and mental health, as well as for developing lifelong , how exercise is presented and pursued matters, says Skye Donovan, a physical therapist and associate professor of physical therapy at Marymount University, who researches .
On one end of the spectrum, she says, there are overweight and obese kids who never find sports they like, which raises their risk for obesity as adults. On the other end, there are kids whose parents pressure them into a sport, leading to burnout, "and now they don’t want to do it anymore,” she says. “So we can have two totally different prongs coming in with the same results of having people not engaged in lifelong fitness.”
Growing Bodies
The son of two runners, Nicholas didn’t need any convincing to take up the sport. "It’s just so much fun," he says. "I love to run with my mom and my dad." But just because he often runs with his parents doesn't mean he does, or should, maintain an adult's . These days, Nicholas runs up to 25 miles a week – spread between four days – while his dad runs closer to 50 miles weekly.
So far, Sullivan says, he and his wife have been "very, very careful with how much he runs because now he really likes it, and he’s showing a lot of natural talent for it.”
Tailoring children’s to their age is important, says Donovan, a runner and volunteer marathon coach through the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Team in Training Program. “Kids are not just little adults – they have different physiology,” she says. For instance, children take in more heat on a hot day and lose more heat on a cold day than adults due to their greater body surface area to body mass ratio, according to the , which discourages before age 18.
Kids also face unique risks when it comes to overuse injuries. For example, children’s bones grow faster than muscle tendons during growth spurts, which can affect their flexibility and make them more prone to injury, IMMDA says. Given their shorter strides, kids also pound the pavement more often per mile, which increases the risk of stress fractures.
“The longer they’re doing this repetitive activity at this young of an age without having appropriate muscle development, and [without] having a coach help them with flexibility training and strength training, that really kind of puts them at risk for developing injuries long term,” Donovan says.