Why do so Few Teenagers Love Running ?
Primary school playgrounds are full of children running around. It’s a default state that brings smiles to red faces. Adult mass participation running events, including the flagship Parkrun and Race for Life, are equally popular. This evidence would suggest that running is a popular activity which brings joy to many. Anyone who has worked in a secondary school environment knows this is not the case. Many teenagers do everything they can to avoid running, and announcements of its place in the programme are rarely met with a positive response. If it is popular with small children, and it works for vast numbers of adults… what goes wrong in the middle?
It is true that for many teenagers, the resting state is one of inactivity. However, there are large numbers who are engaged in sports teams, for whom running still holds little appeal. The sad spectacle of children walking round school ‘running’ routes, or a visit to the medical centre the morning of the house cross country provide ample evidence that these activities hold limited attraction for most. Why do girls who make every effort to avoid running a step in school become dedicated participants in Parkrun only a few years later? Why are there more enthusiastic runners aged 50 than aged 15?
Perhaps it is linked to the way that running is presented in schools. The ‘teaching’ of running is one of the most unimaginative activities in the programme of most schools. Developments in games coaching over the last decade have departed from the ‘skills and drills’ of a previous era. It has been widely recognised that this is neither engaging nor developmental. A whole industry has emerged around athlete-centred coaching, and has gained traction in all but the world’s most backward-looking schools. Running education, however, has not kept pace. The principles that have been widely adopted to make the games experience more positive and appropriate have been extensively ignored in running.
There are many inconsistencies, which make running an activity destined to fail in many schools. The first is the conditions in which it takes place. Reserved for the worst conditions of the year, with mud underfoot and arctic air above ground, combining to almost guarantee a negative environment. The language doesn’t help: ‘cross-country’ carries a lot of inter-generational baggage. Parents shudder recalling their own unfavourable experiences before hastening to write excuse notes to spare their children the same miserable fate. Secondly, it is often presented as a maximal experience: pupils are encouraged to run to exhaustion, and to finish in states of distress. This experience is wildly overrated, and inappropriate for many. Most adult runners adopt a comfortable steady state and finish with a positive feeling. When the results are being posted on school notice boards, with rank orders, times to two decimal places and accompanying punishments for the slowest, the stress of the occasion is redoubled. Even competitive athletes only train to exhaustion infrequently: in schools, it’s always a maximal activity, despite the lack of any kind of preparation.
It defies belief that in many schools, running still has a fixed distance for all participants. Inevitably, the best athletes finish in half the time of the least able, even on the rare occasions when the latter are motivated. The 1500m ‘race’ sees Athletics education at its worst. There is no other subject where the slowest learners are given twice as much work as the most able. Failure in running round a defined route is the most public environment that schools can provide; none of the other mechanisms by which they sensitively support the less able and their self-esteem are deployed here. It is clear who is last: anyone wanting to forget is reminded when the results are posted on the noticeboard for public consumption.
Where running is offered as a choice in a games programme, it is too often the destination of last resort for the refugees from Rugby and Hockey. If this is combined with the tail end of reluctant staffing – a clipboard to register attendance and take times – it is unsurprising that is has an atmosphere of being unloved. A minority of staff involved in running do it wildly differently, and pass on their love of the activity to a small number of like-minded pupils. The contrast is stark.
Running education often sees teachers at their least professional. Well wrapped up against the cold, they are rarely role models of participation. At its worst, input is confined to describing the course, and outlining potential punishments for underperformance. Little effort is made to describe what is to come, explain steady state or oxygen debt, identify inflection points, encourage strategies to deal with them, or describe potential benefits of delayed gratification and the impact of endorphins. Differentiation – so popular in other areas of education – is rare.
Of course there are enlightened schools who do this differently. They are, however, surprisingly few and far between. Schools which set out to devise an imaginative programme aimed at promoting a love of running, and an appreciation of its benefits, are always successful in doing so. If a school was dedicated to establishing a culture in which all pupils could run a mile without stopping (and saw a value in it), they would undoubtedly be successful. Unlike school sport, it’s not a zero sum game.
However, the many whose concern is restricted to getting through the ‘Annual Cross Country’ and its summer equivalent, the conscripted 1500m, will continue to fail. Often spectacularly.