Does Running Build Character? What the Science Actually Says
The work that builds a young person happens here — in the miles nobody sees, long before any finish line.
Character is built one mile at a Time.
By Coach Larry Weber | coachweber.org
For decades, I have believed something in my bones: that distance running builds character in young people. I have watched it happen too many times to doubt it. But belief and proof are two different things. So this year, I decided to go find out whether the science backed up what I had seen with my own eyes for decades.
It did. And it taught me something even better than I expected.
The research does not say that running, all by itself, turns a young person into someone of strong character. It says something more precise and more hopeful. Character is built by a system — sustained aerobic effort, the structure of a sport like cross-country, and a coach and parents who care more about the person than the performance — all working together during the years when a young person is still being formed.
Once you see how the pieces fit, you understand exactly why the sport I have given my life to does what it does. Let me walk you through it the way the science lays it out, one section at a time. Running Builds the Brain That Builds Self-Control
Start with the part almost nobody talks about because it is not motivational—it is biological.
At the University of Illinois, a research team led by Dr. Charles Hillman ran a study called FITKids. Two hundred and twenty-one children were randomly assigned to either a nine-month daily aerobic activity program or a wait-list that continued life as usual. That word randomly matters. Because the children were assigned by chance, the study could show cause and effect, not just coincidence.¹
The children in the active group showed real improvements in what scientists call executive control — the brain's ability to hold back an impulse, keep information in working memory, and shift flexibly between tasks. And these were not just better scores on a worksheet. The researchers measured the actual electrical activity in the children's brains and observed the change there as well.¹
Here is why that matters to every parent and every runner. Self-control is not only a virtue that a young person decides to have on a given morning. It is partly a physical capacity, built into the brain, that grows stronger with aerobic training — the way a muscle grows stronger under a barbell. Broader reviews of the research point in the same direction: aerobic exercise produces meaningful gains in impulse control in young people, and these gains grow larger after 12 weeks and beyond.²
Now think about when this is happening. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that supports self-control and judgment — is still under construction through the teenage years.² A cross-country season is, whether the athlete ever realizes it or not, a sustained twelve-plus-week aerobic program landing on a young brain that is actively wiring itself for the rest of that person's life.
We are not just making them faster. We are helping build the very hardware they will use to govern themselves as adults.
Grit Gets Rehearsed Every Single Day
Once the brain has the machinery, the sport puts it to work.
Dr. Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania gave a name to something coaches have always seen. She calls it grit and defines it as passion and perseverance toward long-term goals — the tendency, in her words, to keep working strenuously on challenges and to maintain effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus.³
Read that definition again and tell me it does not describe distance training exactly. Invisible daily work. A payoff that is weeks or months away. Plateaus where nothing seems to improve, and you get up and go anyway.
Duckworth's most famous finding came from the United States Military Academy at West Point, where grit predicted who would make it through the brutal first summer better than talent or physical fitness did.³ And endurance athletes are not an afterthought in this work — her team has studied ultramarathon runners directly, and those runners tend to score high on the perseverance side of grit.⁴
I will be straight with you, the way I try to be about everything. The grit research has its critics. A careful analysis in 2017 argued that grit may be mostly plain old conscientiousness under a new name, and that its power to predict success has sometimes been oversold.⁵ I take that seriously. But even their critics do not dispute the simpler point I am making here: cross-country is one of the few things in a teenager's life that asks for perseverance and rewards it every ordinary day, for months on end.
You do not learn grit by hearing about it. You learn it by living it. Cross country makes them live it.
The Marshmallow, Run Over Ten Weeks
There is a famous experiment you may have heard of. Years ago, Dr. Walter Mischel sat young children in front of a single marshmallow and told them that if they could wait without eating it, they would get two. Some waited. Some did not.
What made the study legendary was what came later. The children who could wait grew up, on average, to have stronger stress-coping, better academic outcomes, and healthier lives — and when researchers tracked some of them down forty years later, the differences in self-control had largely held.⁶ The ability to choose the larger, later reward over the smaller, immediate one turns out to be one of the most powerful predictors of a life well lived.⁶
A cross-country season can be described as a prolonged marshmallow test that lasts ten weeks and often takes place in the rain. It involves months of unglamorous mileage, early alarms, and sacrificing comforts, all in preparation for one race day that may be far in the future. Education researchers name this sport in particular as one that teaches children to value a long-term reward.⁷
I want to be careful, because I never want to claim more than is true. Running does not magically install this trait in a child. But it does something nearly as valuable. It gives them a place to practice choosing the later, greater reward, over and over, until the choosing becomes part of who they are.
Learning to Turn Stress Into Growth
There is a whole body of research on why some people fall apart under stress, and others come out stronger. The psychologist Suzanne Kobasa called the difference hardiness and described it with three words: Commitment, Control, and Challenge.⁸.
Hardy people stay committed to what they are doing rather than pull away. They believe their own effort can shape the outcome, rather than feeling powerless. And — this is the important one — they treat difficulty as a challenge to grow into rather than a threat to run from.⁸ It is worth noting that physical exercise was identified early on as one of the things that builds this very quality.⁸
Cross-country is a controlled, repeated, voluntary dose of exactly the kind of hardship that builds hardiness. Week after week, an athlete chooses to step into discomfort, chooses to stay in it, and learns firsthand that pushing through actually changes the result. Commitment, Control, Challenge — trained not in a classroom, but in the legs and lungs and will of a young person on a hard hill.
The Rarest Thing a Teenager Ever Gets to Do
In 2000, the psychologist Reed Larson published a landmark paper asking a simple question: where do young people actually learn initiative—the drive to pursue a hard goal with sustained, self-directed effort? He argued that this capacity is essential for adult life and that most teenagers rarely have the opportunity to practice it.⁹
His reasoning was sharp. Schoolwork, he pointed out, demands effort but is rarely freely chosen. Free time is freely chosen but rarely demands much effort. Neither one builds initiative. The one setting that reliably does is what he called structured voluntary activity — sports, arts, organized programs — where a young person feels the rare combination of truly wanting to do a hard thing while concentrating deeply on it over time.⁹
I cannot think of a cleaner example of what Larson described than cross country. Nobody is dragged to the starting line. The effort is enormous and self-driven. The goal stretches across an entire season. This is the bridge that carries a young person from the training of the body to the forming of the person.
The Piece That Ties It All Together
Now I have to tell you about the research that matters most of all — the piece that turns all of this from a nice idea into a truth you can build a program on.
Two of the most respected scholars ever to study this question, Dr. David Shields and Dr. Brenda Bredemeier, spent their careers examining whether sport builds character. Their findings were sobering and honest. In some studies, athletes showed less mature moral reasoning than their non-athletic peers. Certain high-contact, win-at-all-costs settings were linked to more aggression, not less.¹⁰
I do not run from findings like that. I lean into them because they point straight at the thing I have always believed matters most.
What Shields and Bredemeier concluded was not that sport corrupts young people. It was that sport is neutral in itself, and that character grows only under specific conditions — within what they called a moral climate deliberately built by coaches, parents, and teammates, where adults deliberately teach compassion, fairness, sportsmanship, and integrity.¹⁰ Take that climate away, and the same sport that can build a young person can just as easily coarsen them.
This is the whole thing. It is not the running that builds character. It is the running placed inside a formation system led by a coach who is genuinely present. Dr. Joe Vigil, who coached America's finest distance runners for fifty years, said a great running coach is really a life coach first. Now you can see that this was never just sentiment. It was science. The coach is the deciding factor in whether everything the science above shows us produces a stronger runner and a better person, or only a faster one.
That is exactly what I set out to confirm. And there it was, in the research, in black and white.
What a Season Actually Produces
Researchers who study young people have a helpful way of naming the harvest. Dr. Richard Lerner describes what he calls the Five C's of positive youth development: Competence, Confidence, Connection, Character, and Caring — with a sixth, Contribution, emerging when the first five come together in a young life.¹¹ In this framework, Character means respect for what is right, a sense of standards, and integrity.¹¹
That is a fair description of what I have watched a good cross-country season produce in a young person, over and over, for decades. Not every time. Not automatically. But reliably, when the system is whole.
The Only Formula That Works
Let me put the whole thing together the way the science does, in order.
A young person chooses to run. That sustained aerobic effort physically builds the brain's machinery of self-control. That new hardware makes grit and patience possible. Repetitive, voluntary hardship builds hardiness. And then — only then, and only if a caring coach and parents have built the right moral climate around all of it — that raw material is formed into genuine character.
Performance is the part everyone can see. It is the finish time, the medal, the record. But character formation is the system underneath it, quietly building a person who will still be standing long after the last race is run.
We are not just focused on building runners; we are in the business of building people. Running is simply the most beautiful tool I have found for that purpose.
Run hard. Run smart. And find yourself a coach and parent community who sees the whole person — because in the end, that is the only training plan that forms a life.
Blessings,
Coach Weber
Philippians 4:13
About the Author
Coach Larry Weber is a 2026 Washington State Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame inductee and the author of Mile Three: How the Hardest Part Builds the Best Kids and Jesus on the Track. He has coached USA Olympic Marathon Trials qualifiers, a Paralympic world record holder, and 19 state-championship high school teams at two schools-13 in cross-country, 3 in track and field, and 3 academic state championships. His article "Finding the Point of Diminishing Returns" is indexed in Google Scholar. He writes about faith, running, and formation at coachweber.org. His next article is about the importance of faith in formation and how it intersects and is intertwined with this article. The primary reason Coach Weber still coaches is faith formation.
Endnotes
- Hillman CH, Pontifex MB, Castelli DM, Khan NA, Raine LB, Scudder MR, et al. "Effects of the FITKids Randomized Controlled Trial on Executive Control and Brain Function." Pediatrics. 2014;134(4):e1063–e1071. A nine-month randomized controlled trial of 221 children (ages 7–9) found that daily after-school physical activity improved executive control — including attentional inhibition and cognitive flexibility — with corresponding changes measured in brain electrical activity (P3 event-related potential).
- Hillman CH, Erickson KI, Kramer AF. "Be smart, exercise your heart: exercise effects on brain and cognition." Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2008;9(1):58–65. Reviews evidence that aerobic fitness is associated with more efficient function of the prefrontal and parietal brain regions underlying cognitive control, a system that continues maturing through adolescence. Meta-analytic evidence indicates larger executive-function gains from aerobic programs lasting twelve weeks or more.
- Duckworth AL, Peterson C, Matthews MD, Kelly DR. "Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2007;92(6):1087–1101. Introduces the grit construct and reports that grit predicted retention through the U.S. Military Academy's demanding initial training beyond measures of talent. See also Duckworth AL. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. New York: Scribner; 2016.
- For a specific example in endurance athletes, see Cousins JM, Peterson MJ, Christopher AN, Francis AP, Betz HH. "Grit-passion and grit-perseverance in ultramarathon runners." Journal of Human Sport and Exercise. 2021;16(4):965–972. A study of 153 ultramarathon runners using Duckworth's 12-item Grit Scale reported a positive relationship between years of running and grit, consistent with the goal-oriented, high-persistence profile documented in endurance athletes. Cited here as an illustration, not as proof that running causes grit.
- Credé M, Tynan MC, Harms PD. "Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2017;113(3):492–511. A meta-analysis arguing that grit overlaps substantially with conscientiousness and that its incremental predictive validity has often been overstated — an honest counterweight cited here in the interest of accuracy.
- Mischel W, Shoda Y, Rodriguez ML. "Delay of gratification in children." Science. 1989;244:933–938. Also, Casey BJ, Somerville LH, Gotlib IH, et al. "Behavioral and neural correlates of delay of gratification 40 years later." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108(36):14998–15003, which found that individual differences in self-control showed notable stability across four decades.
- Delayed gratification has been linked in the developmental literature to stronger academic achievement and better self-regulation; educational writing on grit and delayed gratification specifically identifies distance-based sports such as cross country as contexts that cultivate an appreciation for long-term rewards. See Duckworth AL, Seligman MEP. "Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents." Psychological Science. 2005;16(12):939–944.
- Kobasa SC. "Stressful life events, personality, and health: An inquiry into hardiness." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1979;37(1):1–11. Introduces hardiness and its three components — commitment, control, and challenge. Subsequent work (Kobasa, Maddi, & colleagues) identified physical exercise as one of the factors that buffer stress and support a hardy disposition.
- Larson RW. "Toward a Psychology of Positive Youth Development." American Psychologist. 2000;55(1):170–183. Argues that initiative is a core capacity for adulthood, that ordinary schoolwork and unstructured leisure do not develop it, and that structured voluntary activities — such as sports and the arts — provide the rare combination of intrinsic motivation and sustained concerted attention that fosters it.
- Shields DLL, Bredemeier BJL. Character Development and Physical Activity. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics; 1995. See also Shields DL, Bredemeier BJ. "Moral Development and Behavior in Sport," in Singer RN, Hausenblas HA, Janelle CM, eds. Handbook of Sport Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley; 2001. This body of work finds that sport does not automatically improve moral reasoning and can, in certain competitive climates, be associated with reduced moral maturity and greater aggression — and that character growth depends on the deliberately structured moral climate created by coaches, parents, and teammates.
- Lerner RM, et al. Work arising from the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development (2005 onward) describes the "Five Cs" model — competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring — with contribution emerging as a sixth. See also Jones MI, Dunn JGH, Holt NL, Sullivan PJ, Bloom GA. "Exploring the '5Cs' of Positive Youth Development in Sport." Journal of Sport Behavior. 2011;34:250–267.
Character is not built on the podium. It is built on the hill, when it would be easier to stop.
The science is clear: running alone does not form a young person. The coach who is present does in coordination with parents.
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