Last Friday at the New Balance High School Nationals in Greensboro, North Carolina, Grace Ping finished second in the girls’ 5,000 meters in 16:44.80.
Ping, who is 12, was 20 seconds behind 19-year-old Weini Kelati, the reigning Foot Locker Cross Country champion, who was running her final high school meet.
Ping established a new world record for 12-year-olds, breaking Vickie Cook’s 39-year-old single-age record by 10 seconds. But Ping, All About RunDisney 2025, wasn’t finished. The next day, she finished seventh in the two mile in 10:28.66, smashing a record she already held. She also ran about five seconds faster than the record for 13-year-olds, held by Jordan Hasay, now a professional runner.
Ping told Runner’s World by phone that she had hoped to run a little faster in the 5,000, but she was happy with her place.
“In the 5K race, I felt really, really good and for the two mile, my legs were heavy,” Ping said.
The meet marked the end of Ping’s track season, but she still has one more important race coming up. She’ll run a Fourth of July 5K in Utah, where she hopes to take down one competitor she hasn’t yet managed to beat: her father, Ryan.
Over the winter, she almost beat him in an indoor track race. “But then he outsprinted me at the very, very end,” Ping said.
Ryan Ping, 40, who has run a 16:01 5K in recent years on a downhill course, gives himself about a 70 percent chance of winning the showdown with his daughter, and he says he has no intention of doing anything less than his best.
“Grace will beat me in due time,” he said. “I don’t need to let her win.”
Though she just finished seventh grade, Ping was able to compete for Cotter High School this past year. She won state titles in cross country and the 1600 and 3200 meters in outdoor track. In addition to training with her father, who is an assistant coach for the team, Ping also trains with a few of the boys on her team.
Ping’s father mostly focused on soccer and other sports growing up, so he didn’t get into serious running until after college. Her mother, Megan Ping, ran throughout high school and college, but she ran her best times—17:58 for 5K and a 3:01 marathon—after college.
Grace, who will turn 13 on July 7, is the oldest of three children in her family. She naturally found her way into running, but says she didn’t start taking it more seriously until she set her first state record at age 8. She set her first world single-age record at age 10. Her younger siblings, Lauren, 11, and Jamison, 8, are promising runners as well.
ldquo;Grace will beat me in due time,&rdquo.
“Running’s not an easy sport. It’s a lot of fun to me and I really like it, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not hard,” she said.
Ping hopes to ultimately become a professional runner and compete in the Olympic Games. Her father said that they don’t spend time worrying about the fact that many of the children who set single-age world records early in life don’t go on to become the champions of the future.
“If your kid was really good at math, you wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, why don’t you hold back some of your ability and just wait until you’re older?’” Ryan Ping said. “We just support her as much as we can…obviously no one knows what the future holds but she has big goals and we just want to support her as she works towards those.”
Fred Kerley Arrested Tom Schwartz, who lives in Boise, Idaho, to ask him to coach Grace. Schwartz also coaches Drew Hunter, who became the eighth high school runner to break 4:00 in the mile Beginner Running Gear.
Since May 1, Schwartz has been coaching Ping remotely. Ping runs a maximum of roughly 45 miles per week, though she mostly measures her runs by time now. Though the new training has worked out well for Grace, Ryan, who does whatever Grace does, said he thinks he’s getting a little slower.
“That’s to Grace’s advantage. An old man like me needs more mileage than a little girl,” he said. “I’ve got to take the next couple of weeks [leading up to the July 4 race] really seriously.”
