With a child of my own interested in running a marathon, I researched marathon training programs for youth in the US (there are some!), injury rates and how these compare to high school running programs.
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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Here's a summary of references for the post. You may be interesting in the first two, a sort of meta-analysis and the second one, a podcast interview between two pediatricians on the topic. One concludes "I have more concerns about some of the cross country runners and the volume that they do as opposed to people who are running a marathon... if it's done properly it could be safe."
If there are other useful journal articles on the topic I missed, link them in a comment below. Thanks!
References
Are you a bot? The references deal with acute injury like I said in my reply. Keep your AI slop answers out of discussions.
lol, no bot. That's my list of references I gathered for the article. The publisher trimmed the section out of the final publication. I'll renew my invitation to share other journal articles you've found on the topic.
Sorry Jesus. I'll take the snark down a dozen notches. Jack Daniels has a lot of stuff about optimal training for youth - he did a lot of high school development work but he was performance focused rather than injury focused. I'll take a look in the book case and see what I can find. Tim Noakes is always a good starting point (although he is very out of fashion these days).
Full disclosure: this is not my area of expertise. I was an organ physiologist who was serious about running for many years. So I was sort of professionally adjacent to these guys and paid attention to the literature, but I am not a subject expert.