Teaching the Love of Running
Lots of people love running. Every evening and weekend the streets, paths and parks are full of adults of all ages running all distances and at all speeds. Race for Life and Park Run are wonderful examples of the sheer delight in meeting the challenge of running. The joy of movement. Marathon running has been a growth activity for twenty consecutive years.
Primary schools are another celebration of running. Kids love to be active: to run all distances and at all speeds.
But, between these two age extremes, what goes wrong? Running is one of the least popular activities in most senior schools. Encouraging children to take part in running is one of the least enjoyable parts of the teacher's job. And yet the enjoyment of running is clearly hard wired into humans. Is the problem with the children, or with the way in which running is presented to them?
How do schools seek to foster a love of movement in pupils of all ages, sexes and abilities? How much time and effort do PE professionals spend working out new and imaginative ways of encouraging the love of running? How is it presented in schools?
Whether it is packaged as "Athletics" or "Cross Country", running is almost always about maximal activity. The best time you can do. Finishing in pain and exhaustion. With a clear rank order, often recorded on the clipboard and often publicly displayed. And celebration of those who finished first - who may or may not have been the ones who expended most effort. And yet most adults who relish running rarely run maximal times. Steady state running is the staple of adult running satisfaction. Only a minority of adults compete to win. Aerobic running means that everyone runs at their own speed. Quite happily. But this isn't how running is packaged in schools. It is an outdoor, time based, discomfort ridden round uninspiring tracks, courses or circuits.
Is there an alternative? Could schools teach children of all abilities to love running? What would this look like? Almost certainly, radically different from the annual Cross Country season, or the 1500m. Pupils might learn to run within their aerobic capacity, and to develop both this and the distances that they cover. They might learn about persistence in the face of temptation to stop. They might have this explained to them, together with the discovery of the satisfaction of overcoming that temptation. The celebration might not be of the fastest times, but also of the persistence towards individual goals. Ways of rewarding effort and encouraging endeavour. All running achievement in adult life is individual, and triumphs are personal. However, when running appears on the school programme, we line up on the start line and the teacher's role is to say, "Go," "Keep Going" and "This is your time". The equivalent of a maths teacher saying, "Here is the sum" and "You got it right/wrong". Without learning any strategies for becoming more successful, or being rewarded for effort. And maybe a punishment for getting it wrong.
The love of running needs to be separated from the concept of racing. Steady state is an altogether different thing from oxygen debt. Maximal exercise will always be a minority attraction for teenagers. Rather than recognising this and working to encourage children to set and meet their own targets - to present imaginative challenges and emphasise benefits of both participation and persistence - schools persist with a Victorian approach that is limited to prescribing a route and threatening punishment for under achievement.
The opportunities for an imaginative running programme are enormous. But it is rarely a priority. However, consider this: which would you regard as the bigger achievement for the games programme of a school - eleven pupils winning a hockey trophy, or every child in the school being able to run a mile without stopping?