No hill too high: Girls’ toughness wins the race

By Marc Bloom

One day in the late 1990s, in the midst of my five-year stint as a boys’ high school cross-country coach on the Jersey Shore, a group of the older team members grabbed a nerdy freshman during a run on the boardwalk and threw him into the ocean. Another time at practice, when the boys were down the road beyond my view, they ran impulsively into the surf, with one youngster getting swept up in a riptide and needing teammates to pull him to safety. When I confronted the boys about finishing the workout in wet clothing, they lied about the incident.

Now, in my third season as an assistant coach with a girls’ high school crosscountry team, I am struck by gender differences, a reflection not only of culture and upbringing but something deep within a teenager’s psyche, sense of community and world view. The freshmen girls on our team at Hillsborough High in Somerset County, New Jersey, have been welcomed by their older "sisters" with open arms, high-fives and "good job" calls during hard runs. Every newcomer, slow or fast, has been respected for her efforts.

While the Title IX legislation providing girls equal opportunity in education, and sports, is celebrating its 40th  anniversary this year, there is something still new and refreshing about girls’ learning and adaptation to the stresses of training, growth and development — something shirked off by boys who tend to operate with a sense of entitlement.

Boys feel they are born to run but do not always take full advantage of their gifts. Girls feel they are privileged to run and in most cases, whether or not they are true competitors, suck the marrow out of the team experience.

Boys need cajoling to bond as a group. They barely listen when offered advice. Girls are eager for advice and thrive on personal coaching attention. More than anything, they want to be part of a team — to share in a community endeavor.

If athletic success is based on fulfilling one’s potential, then from what I’ve seen teen-age girls are better athletes than boys, and have more to offer a high school squad, at least in running. This view stems not only from my personal laboratory in central New Jersey but from more than four decades of writing about young runners, interviewing thousands of athletes and coaches, throughout the nation.

Just about any cross country coach who works with both boys and girls will tell you that girls are tougher. Brian Zatorski, a New Jersey coach at Southern High School in Manahawkin, who has coached a number of state and national champions, told me: "Girls can suffer more than boys. They’re not afraid. That’s a huge benefit in distance running." 

If you don’t believe that, stand at the finish of a hilly, 5-kilometer cross country race and watch the boys cross the line, many seemingly with more to give, and then watch the girls, each one straining with anguish on her face, fighting for every inch, collapsing into a waiting teammate’s arms.

Last December, at the Nike Cross Nationals high school championship in Portland, Oregon, conditions were extremely muddy from week-long rain. A number of leading boys’ individual contenders ran a lackluster race, feeling that if they could not compete at their usual pace, why bother? I did not see one girl do that. In fact, Sarah Baxter of California ran so hard that she defeated the super-star Mary Cain — Cain’s last high school defeat before gaining prominence on the professional track circuit.

In the team standings, the favored boys’ school from New Jersey, Christian Brothers Academy, also had trouble in the mud and wound up fourth. The girls’ favorite from the Syracuse area, Fayetteville-Manlius, responded to the tough conditions by winning its seventh straight championship by a record margin. Afterwards, barely recovered, the Fayetteville girls tossed off their shoes and continued running barefoot around the course in a post-race ritual. It was a statement of their take-no-prisoners demeanor. Their coach did not have to remind them. The triumphant girls did their barefoot encore on their own.

And those same winning girls did so with matching ribbons in their hair. Other teams of girls competed with "war-paint" on their faces. Perhaps fashioning a feminist ideal, these young female runners were courageous and radiant at once, fulfilling an athletic mantra to win at all costs and look great doing it.

I believe that a girl’s superior toughness can be traced to her harder path to the finish line. For girls, the course through adolescent growth can be complex and difficult. Working through those issues of nurturing a healthy running body requires an extra dimension of rigor and perseverance. For boys, the teen years are about acne; for girls, they’re about "our bodies, our selves."

Nutrition Is Key

It’s been 20 years since my 1993 front-page New York Times article on the high incidence of injuries in girls cross country. The story was based on a landmark 13-year study of 60,000 high school athletes in the Seattle area. Girls cross country injury rates were found to be second only to football and ahead of such high-impact sports as soccer and gymnastics; girls cross country injuries were also much more common than those in boys cross country.

The reasons for girls’ vulnerability are now well-known. It is based on their very essence as females growing into adolescence and child-bearing age. Girls must produce the hormone estrogen in sufficient amounts to build bone or, as distance runners, they risk the debilitating stress fractures found in such high percentages in the Seattle study. Train hard and take in too few calories — a caloric deficit — and a girl may not have enough body fat to start the menstruation process and produce sufficient estrogen.

While 20 years ago and for some time after, it was common to see ultra-thin girls in cross-country who clearly lacked proper nourishment (one sports medicine physician referred to them as "twigs," another said they had "Swiss cheese bones"), that pattern has changed for the better because of education, greater awareness among athletes and coaches and healthier role models among the professional elite. At the recent world track and field championships in Moscow, American women’s entrants in the middle-distance and long-distance events were visibly strong with well-developed athletic bodies. Cain, the 17-year-old phenom from Bronxville, New York, who was a member of the U.S. squad, had the womanly look of her older rivals in the 1,500 meters.

I’m not aware of any research in the last two decades that has looked extensively at high school cross country injuries. Perhaps that’s a good sign that further inquiry is not necessary. A number of nationwide studies in recent years, funded by the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations, have examined injuries in football, basketball, soccer and other sports but not cross country. 

But from my travels to schools and events, and in my conversations with coaches and health professionals, the consensus is that the dramatic body fat issues and attendant injury rates of 20 years ago have been markedly reduced.

In a training survey I conducted of the 40 national girls’ finalists at the 2009 Foot Locker high school cross country championships, only a handful of girls reported weights under 100 pounds. Many of the girls weighed a robust 110 or even 120 and one girl, the "heaviest" in the field at 135, went on to become an NCAA 1,500-meter champion. How ironic: Girls used to think they had to be as thin as runway models for distance-running success.  

The era of young runners’ diet obsession may be all but over. At Fayetteville-Manlius, the coach, Bill Aris, told me, "I address healthy eating on a daily basis. I put on nutrition clinics for athletes and their parents. We tell our girls — our goal is not to restrict food intake, it’s to eat more food." 

Even with these many positive signs, young female runners still face challenges even greater than tackling ascents like Cardiac Hill or Cemetery Hill on their 5k race courses. Girls with healthy weights may run slower than lighter teammates, at least temporarily, while they adjust to their growing figures and additional body fat. A natural but rapid weight gain can lead to altered running stride and increased risk of injury. Girls who begin menstruating may become anemic because of blood loss, impairing performance; they may need iron supplements and/or dietary changes to rectify the problem. 

In a 2010 interview, Holly Walker of Los Alamos High in New Mexico, spoke openly with me about her weight issues, as a lesson for other girls. Prior to that time, while she was the number-one girl on the Hilltoppers’ state championship team, Walker said that she’d suffered with an eating disorder. After being successfully treated for the ailment, Walker gained 24 pounds and her race times got much slower.

"I was frustrated," she said, "and I didn’t know what to do about it."

With nutritional guidance from her coaches, Walker lost some weight and grew more comfortable with her physique.

"I’ve learned to accept my natural body type," she said at the time. "I no longer compare myself to skinny girls."

Walker’s times improved and she is now running in college.

Our Hillsborough girls team in New Jersey is healthy-looking and robust but like any school we have had incidences of thin-ness issues and stress fractures.

Weight and body consciousness are not easily broached with teenage girls. We speak to the parents first. And the head coach, Richard Refi, stresses good nutrition and also a good night’s sleep, essential to a young runner’s health.

On a recent 10-mile run, our longest of the summer, with steep hills for the first six miles, the girls shot up the initial ascent with no trepidation. I followed from behind measuring my pace. The girls were 13 to 17; I’m 66. I often run with the team, shadowing those girls I can keep up with.

Up the hill, pony-tails swayed like pendulums and the girls dripped sweat in the rising sun. One hill, then another, then another … I managed to catch a few girls and offer encouragement. Their breathing was audible, rhythmic, their hearts working, their souls striving for a state of grace.

My boys team of years ago, while eventually excelling, would never have made it up those hills. They had the muscle, the fitness, the experience. But they didn’t have the same commitment as these girls. They didn’t have their guts. 

Marc Bloom’s books include “God on the Starting Line,” about his high school boys

coaching experience, and “Young Runners: The Complete Guide to Healthy Running For

Kids From 5 To 18.”