In October 2020, our daughter Joy, then a sophomore in high school, ran in the cross country sectional meet and qualified for the next week’s State meet…or would have qualified for State, except it had been canceled because of Covid. (Cue the sad music here.) So her season ended on a bittersweet note: she didn’t get the opportunity to run at the State meet, but she knew she was good enough to be there. We went home and celebrated by handing out, and snarfing down, a bunch of candy (it was actually Halloween). But then the excitement wore off for Joy, and she said to me like she was irritated, “I don’t want to just qualify for State. I want to be All-State. What will that take?” So I did some research, and we came up with a plan together. We had to answer two questions: 1. Statistically, what do you need to do to be All-State? And 2. Same question but from a different angle: What do you need to do to be All-State? Below, I list the changes that she incorporated to try to make it happen. Her teammates’ parents, other runners, and the parents of younger runners have asked us over the years what her “secrets” were. No secrets.
Let me start by saying, and this is no slight to her, but Joy wasn’t the kind of gifted runner who would show up and win right away. There are two things that lead to success in running, or anything really: talent and hard work, and hard work is the more important one. Joy wasn’t the fastest girl on her team when she started out. Sometimes the best runners are the ones who just keep at it. There’s a well-known quote attributed to Tim Notre, a high school basketball coach: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” Joy was never going to out-talent some girls on the cross country course, but she decided to outwork them.
Okay, let’s look at the statistical deep dive that I did. First, our state’s high school sports website (IHSA.org) keeps an archive of State meet results, so I looked at a representative sample of the previous 10 years. All-State in cross country is the top 25 runners in the 3-mile race. In Illinois, there are three classes based on school size; our school is in Class 2A, the medium-sized schools. Note that each State meet race has approximately 236 runners (28 teams of 7 runners, plus the top 40 individuals whose teams didn’t qualify). In Class 2A for the previous decade, the 25th runner (the last All-Stater) finished in an average time of 17:58. (17:57.8, to be exact.) So, the objective answer to the question of what it takes to be All-State, for a Class 2A girls runner, is 17:58. For rounding purposes, I told Joy that she’d have to get under 18 minutes for 3 miles, or 6:00/mile.
So next, we had to decide, was it doable? Did Joy have the ability to go from where she was to the top 25? We looked back at Joy’s first 2 years of cross country: as a freshman, her PR (personal record) was 21:05. Sophomore year, it was 19:14. So I took a few liberties and came up with this general goal: freshman year: sub-21 minutes (she was close); sophomore: sub-20 (she beat that); junior year: sub-19; and by senior year, be sub-18 minutes for 3 miles. That made it sound possible.
Next was the challenge: What would Joy actually have to do/change to improve so much? Most importantly, she had to want to do this. How many times have you seen a kid forced by their parents to join a sport or activity? And how many times did that go well? With Joy, she was decidedly against joining cross country her freshman year until (surprise, surprise) her best friend asked her to. (Thanks, Melanie!)
Keep in mind that many of these next suggestions are lifestyle changes. Any runner can do them. It’s just a question of who will stick with them. It can be hard to do things that other kids aren’t doing; sometimes we want to fit in, and if our friends or teammates aren’t making changes, we might feel awkward or embarrassed to do them ourselves. A teenager might read this list and say, “Seems a bit much. I don’t want to do that. I’ll just keep doing the bare minimum and enjoy myself.” That’s totally fine! No judgment. Just don’t expect improvement. I guarantee that the best runners in the state are doing hard things. All these suggestions are simple, but they’re not easy. That’s why there are only 25 All-Staters.
- Listen to your coaches! If they’re halfway decent and dedicated to their athletes (Joy’s were awesome), they are prepared with plans for summer conditioning, in-season workouts, hard days and easy days, pre-meet exercises, etc. When Joy tried to run more than what the coaches suggested, the summer before her junior year, she got injured. Take the warmups, cooldowns, and other “little things” seriously. But do take the easy days easy. Not every day is a hard workout; that could lead to injuries. They also did a core workout most days; Joy was committed to that.
2. We happened to know a former cross country state champion, and we asked him for any suggestions. His main piece of advice: do pull-ups and handstands to work on upper back and core strength. Most runners, when they are tired in the late stages of a longer race, slouch and curl their shoulders forward; that’s when you have to maintain your stride and keep your shoulders back. Joy was dedicated with this: she made me buy a pull-up bar for our basement, and every night she would go down there and work on it. Also, every night she would do headstands (not handstands; she couldn’t quite get there) for us in the living room; this helped more than anything with her core strength.
3. This is a loaded topic, but nutrition. Let’s not say “diet.” Food can be a challenging issue for teen girls, and far be it from me to offer any specific advice; this is just what worked for Joy. She didn’t go on a diet. She simply made adjustments to what she ate. Less “garbage food” (fast food, fried stuff, ultra processed foodstuffs). More actual food (fruits, veggies, whole grains, beans, nuts). But moderation; she didn’t eliminate anything totally. If she wanted a piece of pie, she had one. The former state champ’s suggestion was fish about two times a week. It’s massively important to note that we didn’t care about Joy’s weight. As a distance runner, the most important thing above all is getting enough calories; maybe ideally you’d eat certain foods over others, but getting enough calories is the most important. And every body type is different. Some runners are thin; some are muscular. (I have very tiny bones, but my chest and shoulders somehow have some heft? My lovely wife Jen calls me “dense.” I’m not sure how to respond to that!) Joy actually gained weight as she got older. Guess what? We didn’t care. It didn’t make her slower; it probably helped her, since it was muscle gain. “Healthy” means many things to many people. In the summers, you’ll find our freezer stocked with multiple flavors of ice cream. In addition, she found that eating three meals a day worked for her; instead of skipping breakfast, she’d have a big bowl of oatmeal each morning. She’d also snack when she was hungry. Again, nothing groundbreaking, just little tweaks here and there.
4. Consistency of sleep, paired with consistent homework routine. In previous years, Joy would save her homework for late in the evening or stay up late once a week finishing it. She would cram for a test the night before. She instead started to go to bed the same time every night (usually 10-10:30). She would also utilize her study hall to do most of her homework; that way, she could return from practice most nights, have dinner, and relax in the evening instead of pulling late-nighters.
5. This seems obvious, but hydration is important. She made sure she was taking in enough fluids during the school day and then before and after she ran. We’ve never been a soda family, so she mostly drank water, with some sports drinks after long runs or races.
6. Focusing on mental health issues. If anyone is having problems, I’d suggest talking to their primary care physician for suggestions, and if needed to seek help with therapy. For Joy, mental health also meant focusing on a positive mental attitude. There’s a great book by the legendary American marathoner Deena Kastor called “Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory.” Not only is it a great read for young girls starting out in running because Kastor talks about her early experiences with the sport, but also it’s a wonderful resource for how to improve your thoughts during runs. Example: Kastor says that when bad thoughts would creep in (“I’m not winning! I’m too slow! My legs are dead!”), she would wipe them away and overwhelm them with preplanned positive thoughts (“You are strong! You are doing great! You are powerful!”). Eventually, what you think is what you feel. Joy also took from Kastor the idea that, if something is bothering her, she should instead focus on what is working: If Joy’s legs were hurting, she would focus on her arms or her form in other ways.
7. This goes hand in hand with item 6 above, but Joy told me to add this: Another thing about mindset is visualization. During strides at practice, she would imagine that it was the ending sprint of a race and that (for example) she was in 25th place at the State meet and her teammates were other competitors trying to take it away from her! She also visualized races while lying in bed, but sometimes it would stress her out and her heart would start pumping, so she had to know when to stop thinking about it too much. Moderation: she wanted to prepare but not overthink. Similarly, Jen and I learned that we had to get out of the way of her positive thoughts. Example: in an early-season race on the State meet course (First to the Finish Invitational), Joy came in about 35th place. She came home flying high and talking about how she was ready to compete with the top runners in the state and only needed to figure out how to pass 10 girls and move up into All-State contention. I immediately started negative talking about, “Just remember, not all of the top runners and teams were there, so you’re actually further away from the top 25 than you think,” which was really just my not wanting to get too excited about the possibility. Joy looked at me like I was crazy and said, “You don’t think I can do it, do you?” And I recognized the importance of what I did or didn’t say. For the rest of the season, anytime Joy mentioned a wildly optimistic goal, I would agree: “You think you can run with the top runners in the state at your conference meet? Definitely! You want to push the lead early and see who comes with you at the sectional meet? Yes, you can do that!”
8. Have fun! This goes along with doing a sport because you want to do it, not because someone else wants you to. Of course it’s not going to be fun to work hard all the time. But Joy’s coaches incorporated games and play into practices, and she enjoyed bus rides and the non-running moments during meets with her teammates.
9. Focus on your own improvement; try not to compare with competitors or teammates. Joy wasn’t the number-one runner on the team in every race. She didn’t win every meet. But her goal was to help her team and to be All-State by the end of her senior year.
Those were the main things. Then there were some specifics that perhaps applied only to Joy. The biggest was, she got injured during her junior year and missed a month before returning for the postseason (so she never did reach the sub-19-minute goal that year). Turns out she had a stress reaction in her right tibia. Then when she came back, she didn’t have the same “oomph” or closing speed, and it still didn’t return that spring in track season. By the end of the summer before her senior year, we were so concerned that we took Joy to a doctor for blood tests; the results showed that she had iron deficiency anemia, very common in female athletes. A simple daily iron pill remedied that. Also, it’s important for each athlete to know their own body. Joy had Achilles problems (her Achilles heel was literally her Achilles heel), so she made sure to stretch and strengthen. She used a roller on all her leg muscles, too; she believed that this helped her.
Another secret that we would joke about: super power energy balls! I had found this recipe for blueberry-lemon energy balls (with cashews, dates, blueberries, etc.), and Joy faithfully ate two of them after every practice her senior year. Whether the benefits were measurable or if it was a placebo effect was beside the point: she believed that they helped, and I happily made them for her all season.
I supposed you’re wondering how it all played out then (I mean, you read this far already). Did Joy reach her goals? As I mentioned above, she got injured her junior year, midway through the season. So her goal of running under 19 minutes was derailed. She returned in time for the conference meet and went from first runner on the team to third runner but more importantly helped her team win conference. Eventually, her full team qualified for the State meet for the first time in school history. She was nowhere near top 25 at the State meet her junior year. After she was fully recovered (and after we figured out her iron deficiency), her senior year went mostly according to her plans: by the end of the season, she could consistently get under 18 minutes for 3 miles. She went on a postseason tear and won conference (for the second time in her career), won the regional (for the second time in her career), won the sectional (first runner in school history to do so), and entered the State meet being picked to finish somewhere between 6th and 24th place. As fate would have it, the weather that week was historically bad; it rained on the State course multiple times in the days leading up to the meet, and then it poured during the first few races. By the time Class 2A girls ran, there were many, many mud pits on the course, so time goals were thrown out the window. Ultimately, only four girls ran faster than 18 minutes. Joy found herself in a mud puddle early in the race, clawed back to the top 10, and hung on for an All-State 14th-place finish in 18:21. The 25th and final All-Stater ran 18:55. Joy became the first runner in school history to be All-State; amazingly, one of her teammates fought her way to 21st place, so the school had their first two All-Staters ever. Joy carried over her training to the spring track season and finished as an All-Stater in the 3200-meter run.
End of parental bragging. Actually, I took quite a bit from Joy’s training and applied it to my own. Probably the biggest issue I have struggled with in running marathons is the mental aspect. I knew about having positive thoughts, but the notion of flooding my brain with pre-rehearsed positives has been invaluable. Also, I kept having lower-back pain at the end of long runs, and sciatica that extended down the back of my leg. It all goes back to the core strength. And as Joy ate less garbage food and went to bed at a consistent time, I found myself doing the same. Who knows? Maybe I can turn back the clock and get under 18 minutes for 3 miles for the first time in 20 years. I just mentioned it to Jenny; she called me “dense.” I don’t think she was referring to my body type…