I know we discussed convincing black youth to run distance. Here is a great story about a newly found running club in Detroit.

https://tinyurl.com/y3w6m5wy

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This is a really good idea. Easy, cheap, and not (yet) geared toward any more complex purpose than showing people that getting out and running a few miles with some friends can be really fun.

As a postscript to the post about black kids running distance, the runner that was about graduated. He had a pretty good cross country season as a senior, but seemed didn't run indoor or outdoor. There was a more direct issue at stake than a larger, general black American disinterest in distance running: he really preferred cross country to track, but his skillset was a bit more closely geared toward the latter. I hated losing a talented runner, and one I enjoyed having on the team. But if a kid is self-aware enough to ask the question "is this fun enough to spend my last six months of high school?" then that's ultimately a good thing.

I've got another freshman who's going to have to be a (not as rare as it was a few years ago) black, American kid running distance events and furthermore doing it on a pretty white team, in a pretty white conference, in an area where who runs which event is pretty segregated. But he's a TRACK KID, a multi-year veteran of those horrifying fourteen hour AAU meets so I suspect he's not really worried about it. Though, in an unrelated phenomenon, I always worry about burnout with the TRACK KIDS.