Workouts for Cross Country

Audio Transcript

Coach Sinead: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, if you have a question you would like to submit for an upcoming episode, you can do so at runnersconnect.net/daily.

We would love to hear any questions you have on training, racing, nutrition or any other.

Today, we have a question from Lida, on how high school runners should go about preparing for a cross-country season.

Lida: I am looking to help young girls between ages 12 and 14 that want to do cross country. What are the best work outs that they should be doing?

Sinead: This is a great question Lida, and one that applies to our listeners as well.

A lot of these workouts, you’ll find, are going to be pretty like the ones that a lot of our listeners do in preparation for half marathons and marathons.

These are your bread and butter workouts for a lot of different distances. But for cross-country, they work just as great, especially for high school runners coming off a nice summer of pure mileage.

The first workout I’ll talk about is the tempo run. This is certainly one of these bread and butter workouts that I was talking about.

During a tempo run, you run at a speed of about 15 to 30 seconds slower than your race pace and roughly eight out of ten on the exhortations scale.

When you ask your high school runners what their perceived effort is, or how they’re feeling, it should be about 80%.

It should not be feeling like they’re running all out, by any means in these tempo runs; they should be relaxed for the most part.

While they are considered hard runs, hard workouts and tempo runs should not leave a runner feeling completely exhausted afterwards.

The purpose of a tempo run is to increase your metabolic fitness as well as your lactic acid thresholds.

When your runners get to race day, they’re going to be less fatigued by doing these tempo runs.

Another big workout that is important to cross-country and to most other road racing events, is interval training.

Intervals are bursts of high intensity running followed by short stretches of recovery. You can do these on the track, trail, or on hills. The goal is to increase your speed and quickness.

Intervals help to move your muscles through their full range of motion and allow you to improve your stride efficiency while also improving your ability to sustain any given speed.

An example workout would be to run 400 meters, followed by a 400-meter jog and then repeat that for about 8-12 times.

This would be a good workout for your high schoolers and it’s a nice way to touch on a quicker pace.

This is going to be a little bit quicker than the pace that they want to hit in their races, but it’s going to be a nice way to again work on their range of motion and work on their stride efficiency.

Another big workout is the fartlek and most of our listeners know exactly a fartlek is.

For those of you who might not, a fartlek is like an interval workout in that it varies between intense and moderate effort but fartleks do so in a much more unstructured manner.

Fartleks are my favorite workout by far and it’s a nice way to break up a distance run. You can do fartleks on roads, grass or wherever your high schoolers train.

Essentially, you run hard for any given time and then take a recovery jog in between the distances.

I’ve done fartleks in such a way that I’ll pick a tree off in the distance, run hard until I get to that tree and then pick another tree and do a recovery jog until I get to that tree. They can be pretty fun workouts.

I think that’s a great way to keep it fun for your high schoolers for [oaks 00:04:53] or an enjoyable way to do a workout.

You can also have it a little more structured in that, you can make it more of a ladder workout.

For instance, a workout you could do is 800 followed by a 600, followed by a 400 and then you just go right back up the ladder.

That’s another nice way to do a fartlek. You’ll do either or even recovery in between. You could do an 800, after the 800, a 600, after the 600-

Or if you want to make it a little bit harder, you can do half recovery. So, a 400 after the 800; a 300 after the 600, and so on.

Fartleks are a great way to simulate races especially cross-country races, because they force you to shift your pace quite a lot.

You can work on increasing your speed unexpectedly, as you do when passing an opponent, for instance, or getting off the line really fast as they do in cross-country races.

It’s a good way to practice your ability to shift paces; that’s what fartleks are known for. They also help your body to recruit more muscle fibers when you are fatigued.

It’s another great way to lengthen that time to fatigue for your runners. It really helps them maintain any given pace for a longer period, which is crucial when it comes to cross country races and any races for that matter.

One more big type of workout is the progressive run and a lot of our listeners know exactly what I’m talking about.

For your high schoolers who maybe have never done a progressive run, this is essentially a long run that builds your endurance.

The way you want to do a progressive run is you want to keep the first half easy and moderate pace and then once you get into the latter half of the run, you are going to begin to gradually increase your speed.

Ideally, you want to run each successive mile slightly faster than the last. This is not an easy workout to accomplish for more experienced runners let alone high schoolers.

This one you would have to monitor a little more. You would have to pick a route and have mile markers so that your runners knew exactly the paces they’re running.

This one is great at helping your runners practice finishing fast. In a cross-country race or in any race, you often want to start picking off opponents in those last few miles.

For the cross-country 5k, once they get to that halfway mark, progressive runs are going to benefit them because they’re going to help them finish fast and get through that tough middle section of the 5K.

Those are the four main workouts your high schoolers are going to want to do. These are the workouts that a lot of our members at Runners Connect do as well, and they’re tried and true.

They’re great at giving you runners endurance but also the sustained speed they’re going to need for a cross-country.

Lida, thank you so much for submitting that great question. I don’t believe we’ve gotten one about high schoolers before so I really enjoyed answering that one.

For any of our listeners who might be regulars to the podcast, as you can tell, a lot of these workouts do apply to the average runner as well.

Lida, I wish you and your high school team the best of luck this season. If you have a question you’d like one of our coaches to answer and an upcoming episode, you can submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

As always, we would love to hear from you and love to help you however we can so please do feel free to submit.

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Thanks so much again for tuning in and I hope you have a fantastic run today.