For some girls, running or walking a 5K can take two hours, and some who Alison Berman has met over the years had never even walked a mile.
"But they finish the whole thing, and their whole family and school is supporting them," said Berman said who is the executive director of Girls on the Run Western Massachusetts, a multi-month after school program for girls in grades 3-to-8.
Like runners in Monday's Boston Marathon, knowing you have a community is such a boost Berman said.
About a thousand young girls from the four western Mass. counties will run or walk a 5K on June 6, around the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with thousands expected to cheer them on as they navigate the course.
Many of them may not have even physically active before participating in Girls on the Run (GOTR), Berman said.
"Either they don't have access to outdoor space or safe outdoor space, and so being able to run or walk a 5K is huge for them," she said.
GOTR is a national education non-profit with chapters around the US. The group's mission is physical—hand in hand with teaching participants social and emotional skills.
"What they do throughout the season [with GOTR] increases their confidence, it increases their ability to manage emotions," Berman said. "All of that helps them both through the 5K and in navigating life in general."
Over 16 weeks culminating in a fall and a spring 5K, sessions could focus on building empathy through a mix of story telling and physical activity, which Berman said is so much more powerful than sitting around a table and just lecturing to them.
"All the movement based activity is really helping them physically," Berman said, "but it's also because of the movement they're also able to absorb all these other lessons —the combination helps them do both the physical and the mental."
One lesson is about the power of the word "yet," as in "I can't run a 5K yet, so what do I need, to do that?"
This mindset, Berman said, it's the same for people who train for a marathon.
