Yesterday morning, on a 5K running course that snaked through Sandcastle Waterpark, 16 girls from Verner Elementary School of Verona joined hundreds of other girls from the Pittsburgh area to prove their mettle in an event hosted by Girls on the Run, an international organization that promotes healthy lifestyle choices for young girls through running.

But they weren't competing for first prize. Instead, they were competing for their own personal goals and against their own self-doubts.

Thirty-one teams from the Pittsburgh area came to run in the event, the culmination of a 10-week training program that combines educational lessons on nutrition, body image and team-building with running.

The Girls on the Run program at Verner, now in its third year, has been especially popular given that the elementary school has no organized sports teams and only about a quarter of the third-, fourth- and fifth-grade girls in the program play sports. There is no running track nearby, so the girls trained by running laps around the school.

But co-coach Jennifer Zemarel, a second-grade teacher at Verner, emphasizes that the program isn't built to create the next Olympic champion.

"I don't think that athleticism is the key here," she said. "To me this program is more about self-motivation, self-respect and making these inner goals."

Jennifer Ketler, a guidance counselor at Verner who founded the school's chapter, said promoting a healthy body image is central to the program's theme.

"The objective is to get girls to support each other and realize that no matter how you're built, if your built like a banana, or you're built like an apple or you're built like a pear, you can still be athletic," she said.

At Verner, the coaches helped the girls track their progress by having them set a goal for the number of laps around the school they could run at the beginning of each session. If they completed their goal, they got a miniature plastic foot key chain.

Each of the running sessions started with a series of educational exercises on healthy life choices. They learned about body image, and how the popular media can mislead them on what a healthy body looks like.

They learned about the importance of teamwork through team-building exercises, and how not to exclude anyone.

Finally, for a community service project, they bought potted plants and decorated them and then created cards for the families of the police officers who were killed in Stanton Heights last month.

The skills they learn ­-- like how to be a good friend and how to be a graceful winner -- are ones they might not be learning in the classroom, said Ms. Zemarel. And they're especially important for young girls, who have been shown in studies to deal with more self-esteem and body-image problems than their male peers.

"As a teacher I feel like we don't have enough time in the school between math and science and reading and social studies to teach these values, and you don't want to assume that families are teaching them," she said. "So this program allows me to kind of fulfill that goal for myself."