10K for Eleven Year Old Coach Ed Dear Coach Ed, My daughter is age 11, turning 12 in May. I would like to put together a training program to prepare her to run a 10K on April 12th. She hasnšt run since December due to our cold weather. She ran in a marathon relay (5 miles) in 56 minutes on December 5th. Her PR for a 5K is 28:01. For the past two years she was on the Mid-Atlanta Triathlon Team and her work outs consisted of running 1-3 miles 2x midweek, swimming once a week, and cycling once a week. Her coach is taking this year off and since I am a distance running, my daughter agreed to let me be her coach. My daughter is in excellent health, but I donšt want to risk any injuries and ask for a reasonable schedule that we can follow. Thanks for your help, Esther Dear Esther, I have three columns I wrote that might be of help. Under All Coach Ed's Advice on this web site go to "Building Up Running For XC", "Off Season XC Training", and "Getting Ready For XC". You will find the schedules are age appropriate but do not include a 10K run. I personally do not encourage 10K races for eleven and twelve year olds. I do, however, find that an experienced runner, like your daughter, can do an event like this once or twice a year with no harm or injuries and have a lot of fun too. Have her run to finish without setting any time goals. Don't have her train specifically for the 10K. She should just run it for fun with the age appropriate distance training like I suggest in those columns. Building up to a long run of 5 miles once a week or once every other week will certainly be enough training to run the occasional 10K safely. Good luck, Coach Ed Ed Poirier, "Coach Ed", recently was invited by the United States Olympic committee to attend a workshop and training seminar at the Olympic training center in California. Feel free to email the kid's editor at goodrow@infi.net with comments on this column.