In Prep Cross-Country, Girls Often Face an Uphill Battle

"It rocks to be that freshman who is up there with the seniors, but you know you're not going to see those same jumps of success later in your career," said Stefanie Slekis, a 2006 graduate of Forest Park High School in Woodbridge. "If you start that fast, sometimes you're just trying to hang on."

Slekis said running felt almost effortless when she was a high school freshman and sophomore. She weighed only about 105 pounds, and 3.1-mile cross-country races rarely tired her. Now, as a freshman on the cross-country team at Syracuse University, Slekis competes at about 130 pounds.

"I'm a stronger athlete, but that was kind of a big transition in terms of running," said Slekis, who adjusted to her natural weight gain and became an All-Met as a junior and senior. "When I was a freshman, I was practically frail. But I could definitely run fast."

Coaches and doctors said that young, lean girls possess running advantages. Narrow hips allow a girl's legs to hit the ground at a 90-degree angle, reducing the strain on ankles and knees. Lighter athletes tend to use oxygen more efficiently, so they rarely run out of breath.

Purpura guided Severna Park to the state championship last year with a varsity team that comprised four freshmen, two sophomores and a senior. The coach sent his runners into the offseason with candid advice. "Next year's freshmen are going to be just as good," Purpura said. "You're going to have to work harder to stay where you are."

But too often, hard work is futile. In the last five years, Severna Park has had two all-state sophomore runners who failed to make the varsity team as seniors. Purpura said many of his juniors and seniors give up cross-country because they feel frustrated and powerless against regression. This season, 51 girls came out for Purpura's team. Only three were seniors.

"When it's not working out, they vote with their legs and walk away," Purpura said. "They say, 'I don't want to do this anymore.' They find other things they're good at or try something new, and who can blame them?"

Said Alison Smith, a senior at Atholton High in Columbia and the two-time defending Maryland 2A champion: "You get heavier and you hit a plateau where you stop improving. You lose focus and things pile up. It's like, 'How can I ever fix this?' "

The only answer, coaches said, usually strikes runners as counterintuitive: do nothing. Fighting maturation is pointless, coaches said, and it can lead to consequences much more severe than disappointing race results.

Katherine Beals ran on the cross-country team at the University of California-Davis more than 20 years ago, and her coaches instituted a strict policy against weight gain. Beals and her teammates sometimes weighed in before practices, and coaches stood in front of the team and asked certain runners to lose weight. As a result, Beals said, at least four or five runners suffered from anorexia and bulimia.

Beals has devoted her career to helping athletes prevent such things from happening. She wrote a book on athletes with eating disorders. She became a nutrition professor at the University of Utah, where she screens incoming athletes for dangerous eating habits. Beals estimates that at least one-third of collegiate cross-country runners suffer from some sort of eating disorder. Other colleges coaches guessed that number could be closer to 50 percent at Division I schools.

"It's so common that some coaches almost accept it as part of the sport," Beals said. "With cross-country, sometimes there's actually a reason to be thinner, since you have to transport that weight through space. That creates a dangerous temptation."

An eating disorder typically helps an athlete improve as a runner for about six months, doctors and coaches said. Then the consequences are inevitable and disastrous. An eating disorder often leads to amenorrhea, the absence of menstruation. Amenorrhea decreases bone density. Low bone density leads to stress fractures and osteoporosis.

It's a cause and effect that every cross-country coach knows well -- "the downfall of our sport," Georgetown University Coach Ron Helmer said -- but even experts struggle to address it. Regression, injuries and eating disorders make for uncomfortable conversations, and some high school coaches said they hardly feel comfortable confronting young runners with such negativity. Other coaches, though, said full disclosure works as the best preventative measure.

Almost all cross-country summer camps include seminars on nutrition. Local club coach Brian Funk said he asks every girl he coaches about her menstrual cycle. Sometimes the conversations feel awkward, Funk said, but they allow him to gauge an athlete's sustenance.

"You can't shy away from a tough topic in this sport, because bad things will happen," said Mike Mangan, coach at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke. "If a girl's body is changing, I'm going to be honest from the start. I'm not going to tell them: 'Hey, don't worry about it. You'll be fine in a few weeks.' I'm going to be upfront. I'm going to tell them: 'We're in for a long road, but we're going to try work through it. You can be a stronger runner and a better person on the other side.' "