Cross Country in the Fall?
by Steve McGill
Besides how often one should hurdle in the off-season, another question that comes up this time of year is whether or not hurdlers should run cross country in the fall. Personally, I’m not a fan, although I do acknowledge that there can be benefits, especially for long hurdlers. For sprint hurdlers, not so much, but let’s take a look at the pros and cons.
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The most significant argument against running cross country in the fall, whether you’re talking about a 300/400m hurdler or a 100/110m hurdler is that when you go out for cross country, you’re making a commitment. You’re joining a team in a sport that has its own specific training requirements. A lot of hurdlers (and sprinters) go out for cross country believing that it’s a good way to “stay in shape” for track or to get in shape for track. But the reality, cross country has nothing to do with track. It is its own separate sport in its own separate season, and its relationship to what you will need to do when it comes time to compete as a hurdler is remote at best.
By making the commitment to run cross country, you will be doing workouts that prepare you to run a 5k or 8k – races that are irrelevant when it comes to preparing to run the hurdles. And because you’re part of a team, you don’t get to pick and choose which workouts you want to do versus which days you’ll go off and train by yourself. In the weight room, you’ll be doing workouts that are designed to help you in your 5k or 8k, which means you won’t be lifting the way a hurdler would lift in the off-season. To me, the commitment part is huge. Just as I resent football players who come out for track in the spring “to get faster for football” but who have no real intent of truly becoming the best track athletes they can be and contributing as much as they can to the track team’s success, cross country coaches have the same right to resent track athletes who come out for cross country just to “get faster for track” but who have no real intent of truly committing themselves to being legit cross country runners. So if you’re not going out for cross country because you want to run cross country, don’t go out for cross country.
For the long hurdler – the 300m or 400m hurdler – running cross country can make sense. Your specialty event doesn’t exist in the indoor season, so you’ll have the whole winter after the cross country to implement training that is more specific to your event. For the long hurdler, the cross country season can serve as a time to establish a cardio base that will serve you well in the spring and summer. Also, workouts such as uphill sprints and mile repeats add an element of speed-endurance that directly correlates to the long hurdles. Hurdlers who specialize in the long hurdles can definitely benefit from running cross country, even if they also compete in the short hurdles. If you know the long hurdles are your better hurdling event, and that you want to gear your training toward the long hurdles, then I’d be fine with you running cross country and giving it everything you got in that sport. Then, as I said above, when the indoor season begins, you can make the transition to more race specific speed-endurance with little to no problem.
For the athlete who specializes on the sprint hurdles, I just don’t see the benefit of running cross country. The only way to justify it, in my eyes, is if you know you’re too lazy to train on your own in the off-season, and being a part of a team is the only way you can ensure you will work out regularly. So yeah, running cross country is better than sitting at the house playing video games. But the 100/110m hurdles is an explosive event, a plyometric event, a speed event. It’s also an event that requires a lot of in motion flexibility. Cross country does not help in any of these areas, and arguably hinders development in these areas.
Another major factor to consider in regard to this question is how you run as a cross country versus how you run as a hurdler. Hurdlers need to run tall, on the balls of their feet. They need to minimize their ground-contact time. They need to apply force to the track with every stride. While many distance runners do apply these same basic principles, cross country running is different from sprinting. For one thing, the terrain itself alters the way you run. In cross country, you’re often running on soft grass that have a lot of uneven, lumpy spots. Or you’re running on forest trails that include pebbles and rocks and tree roots. Even when you’re on solid ground, you’re often going on tempo runs that last for 40 minutes to an hour or even longer, and there’s no way you can maintain dorsi-flexion for that long, so you’re bound to run flat-footed or heel-toe after a while.
And here’s the thing, once you’ve gotten into the habit of running flat-footed or heel-toe, it’s a very hard habit to break. One of the girls whom I coached privately for two years ran cross country in the fall, and we would meet once a week, starting after the cross country season, to work on hurdles. When I first started with her, we had to spend a lot of time getting her off her heels and onto the balls of her feet before we could even start over the hurdles. She basically had to learn how to run like a sprinter, because she didn’t apply force to the track, didn’t lift her knees, didn’t run with a forward upper body posture. She was a four-stepper with three-stepper speed, but there was no way she was going to be able to three-step with that running form. By the spring we had everything like we wanted it, and she set new personal bests in both of her hurdling events. But when she started up with me again the following November, after competing in another cross country season, all the problems we had solved were back again, and I had to teach her how to run all over again. Talk about frustrating! Her senior year, she ran the same times she had run her junior year, because we weren’t able to progress as we would have had she been training for the hurdles in the fall. Granted, she liked cross country, and she was good at it, so I wasn’t about to tell her to quit. But speaking strictly as her hurdles coach, I always felt like we were running on a treadmill, so to speak.
That girl came to me with ingrained habits that needed to be fixed. I do believe that a hurdler who already knows how to run on the balls of the feet can run cross country without it having a negative effect on his or her sprinting form. But a hurdler who runs cross country every fall without ever having learned proper sprinting mechanics may never get the hang of it.
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