How about this one???

It has been brought to my attention by an old friend that there is now a three-year-old competing in cross country races. I know that during the running boom in the 80's there were American races where whole families including very young children ran marathons together ran marathon races. When lecturing to new endurance coaches, I used to put up on an Overhead Projector a list of times with numbers from 4 to 40 alongside and would ask what the figures were. No one ever said that they were American age group marathon records. When I heard about this three year old, I went to the www.arrs.net website and looked up the Single Age Records page (the link is about number five in the first column) to see how low the world records went.
For the marathon, the youngest boy listed is 5 years 358 days and he ran 5:25:09 and the youngest girl was aged 5 years 261 days and ran 4:56:26 - the 10 year old record for girls is 2:58:01 and the first boy to get under 3 hours was 9 years old and he did 2:56:57.
The notion of children running that far is kind of abhorrent to me - apart from their ages the miles they would have to do to be capable of sub three hours and the effect on their bodies with developing bones and joints must be considerable. It is also of interest that none of the young record holders seem to have made it to the adult ranks with any degree of success.
Knees and ankles are very vulnerable with young children and to subject them to even fairly high mileage when they are 10 years and under borders on inflicting bodily harm.
I know that a three year old running cross country where the surface is kinder to the joints and where the distance is about a mile can in no way be compared with training a ten year old to run a marathon, but nevertheless the fact that we are starting to see children in the lists at this early age is not a good sign.