Day: January 19, 2006

Shout to my buddy Jeff

A wonderful childhood friend and brilliant writer, Jeff over at the Shape of Days, has been gradually coming out of the closet regarding his running habit.

Quick story about Jeff, and how he’s scary smart. Our high school was a Magnet (or Mag-uh-net) High School, meaning that they grabbed all of the geeks out of the other schools in the parish and bussed us off to a school in a not-so-great part of town (believe it was called “Down Bottom) for, I like to believe, our own protection. Of course, the school didn’t have a football team, since, well, frankly, I think the biggest two dozen or so guys in the school could have been literally killed by any JV squad in the parish. Even if you’d gotten the JV squad to give up their guns, knives, etc. and play a fair game of football. But, you’ve got to have some sports for kids to play to put on college applications – we had, honest-to-god, fencing.

Yeah. Poking each other with metal sticks. Great fun.

Anyhow, Jeff fenced his first couple of years at Magnet; I fenced my last couple of years. Jeff and I were buddies for most of school – we rode the same bus, he lived not so far from my house, we both were geeks even among other geeks. So, when I started fencing, Jeff said he’d be happy to practice with me. As this is becoming a longer bit than I’d intended (mostly I just wanted to pimp Jeff’s recent 5K effort), I’ll come to the point:

I like to lie to myself on occasion and pretend I’m a reasonably bright guy. Yet when I do, I’m always reminded that Jeff managed to get me to voluntarily put on a blindfold and let him chase me around his front yard (yard completely festooned with tree roots and, I believe, dog poop) while whacking me with a metal stick. “Training” he called it…

Stupid fearmongering headline grabbers…

So Reuters has a bit up today with the headline Injuries Common Among Cross-Country Runners.

During the 2003-2004 school year, more than 364,000 students in the United States participated in high school cross-country running, which was ranked as the seventh most popular high school sport nationwide for girls and boys, respectively. Previous reports suggest that the incidence of injury among cross-country runners ranges from less than 2 percent to nearly 50 percent, but little research on the topic has been conducted among high school athletes.

(The investigation) team followed 421 male and female runners from 23 cross-country teams at 12 high schools in Seattle, Washington during the 1996 cross-country running season.

Overall, 162 runners experienced a total of 316 injuries during the season, the investigators report in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The rate of injury was generally higher for girls than for boys, the study findings show, and girls were four times more likely than boys to experience an injury that kept them from running for 15 or more days.

What’s not mentioned is the number of injuries that kept runners from running for 15 or more days, or comparisons with other sports.

Why this gets my ire up completely is that it’s just another reason for parents to let their kids sit on their increasingly fatter (ed-posteriors) – “Oh, Sammy can’t run XC – he might get injured”. Or, to insist on further regulation and supervision of what ought to be just straight up play.

Sure, it’s sad when kids get hurt. But hey – twisted knees and ankles are far closer to skinned knees than to concussions, fractures, and cracked vertebrae. Suck it up, put on some ice, and let the kids go get muddy. There are far better stories with which to “raise awareness” and sell fish wrappers.