I was recently asked by Patrick, a 17 year old high school student from Omaha, Nebraska, what I thought about somebody his age running a marathon. He had a couple of half marathons lined up and had been training regularly at 30 to 35 miles per week for quite a while, and he was thinking that it might be a good idea to move up to a full marathon.

Normally, I would think that somebody with Patrick’s running background would be in a perfect position to move up to a marathon. He’d been running for years, he trains regularly, and he is already competing at the half marathon distance and has found that he loves running. And this is in spite of the fact that running isn’t his primary sport; hockey is.

Patrick is only 17 years old, and he probably isn’t done growing yet. Does this sound like anybody that you know?

I personally don’t recommend young folks racing in distances over a half marathon, nor do I recommend easy training runs over 15 miles at least until they are in college and have a coach to oversee their training. Women can probably handle that type of distance a little earlier than men can, because they reach their adult height and finish maturing at an earlier age.

I ran my first marathon my junior year in college, about a month before I turned 21. My second marathon wasn’t until I was almost 24 years old. I ran similar mileage to Patrick when I was in high school, and then bumped that mileage up to the mid-60s the summer between high school and college before immediately moving into an 85 mile week my first week at RIT. After that, I was running 95-105 miles per week, and averaged 85 miles per week over the next two years if you include my off seasons. My feet grew right before I went to college, which had always been followed by a few inches in height, but I never got those inches. My doctors had told me that I would continue growing into my early/mid 20s because I was born so prematurely, and I am convinced that my college running stunted whatever growth that I had left. I was eating less and put on 10 pounds of muscle in my first 3 months in school, and my body was so busy adapting to my new training regimen that was unable to grow taller.

One of my college teammates who is a few years younger than I am waited until he was 23 or 24 to run his first marathon in 2 hours and 39 minutes. We can’t convince him to run another one until he’s 26. I don’t think that young people need to wait that long before running a marathon, but I definitely advise against running one at 17 or 18.

While an introductory marathon and it’s required training probably will not cause any real problems with your body, there is the potential. That isn’t the only reason not to run one though.

One of the biggest objections to my view on young folks running a marathon is, “What’s the worst that could happen, they get injured?”

An injury is not the worst thing that could happen, but yes, there is a risk of injury. I also think that getting injured towards the end of high school or early in college is worse than getting injured as an adult. Getting hurt can prevent a young runner from competing well in college. Missing out on a season or two of training can put a young runner behind everybody else in terms of fitness, which can lead to overextending themselves before they get healthy again which can lead to further injuries. It is an easy recipe for stunting one’s college career.

The training in college will generally be for 8k or 10k races anyway. That sort of training will build a great base for a post-collegiate run at the marathon, especially if there is no pause in the the training schedule before or after graduation. There is no real need to rush things.

Another danger with running a marathon early is that it can easily lead to a bad experience. If a young runner fails at their first attempt to run a marathon, they aren’t going to have as many good experiences to fall back on and to remind them why they love running. The marathon is a very unpredictable race, even when you are more than halfway through it on race day. Why turn yourself off of the sport by competing in a race where the odds are going to be against you?

If you or somebody you know does decide to run a marathon at an early age, then I recommend only doing that one marathon and then waiting until post-college to start running them regularly. I just have to recommend running even the one.

When a young runner asks me if they should run a marathon, I can boil my advice down to the same advice that I would give to a novice runner who has only been out hitting the streets or trails for a short time.

Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.