Does Cross Country Ruin Soccer Explosiveness?

Recently, perusing my favorite forums filled with trolls and half-truths, I found a wonderful thread on soccer and cross country running.  It was a great look into the psychology of coaching as well as the dynamics of cross-sport training benefits and hindrances.  The premise we will explore today is the proposed question, "does cross country ruin soccer explosiveness?" which is actually quite a complicated matter and cannot be summed in a terse response.  Athletic training is not a continuum, it is a matrix, and therefore one position in the training matrix does not discount the possibility of having attributes for other variables.  Correlation does not imply causation (i.e. cross country does not get athletes slower), and the statement made by the soccer coach described in the forum post was mainly made on either bad information or ignorance.  In the simplest terms, his statement is absurd, and for many reasons.

First I want to consider the logic of the statement before I actually move onto a physical body of evidence.  Cross country is an inanimate object, simply an idea.  An idea can't have any physical bearing, it needs people to engage the idea like athletes participating in the sport and the coach preparing a schedule of training to maximize the productive output.  The reason I broke it down like this is because, by this coaches logic, I can easily make the argument that soccer causes ACL injuries, and especially in women, which is a huge problem in the sport.  This is obviously not true.  The physical and dynamic nature of soccer lends itself for the athletes to have a high incident rate of ACL tears, but by no means can be said to have caused the problems.  

Another issue is that many soccer coaches, especially at the club level, want to focus more on actually playing the game rather than developing fundamentals and athletic ability.  Similar issues happen with club basketball and nearly all levels of youth baseball where there is a higher focus on playing games rather than practicing.  I've said before that one reason why the NBA is simply miserable to watch now is that many athletes are making it to the highest level based on stature and physical prowess, but the sport is barely worth watching during the regular season due to bad coaching and bad player development.  This stems from the club basketball culture where athletes can play up to 60 games in a three month summer period.  Including travel time, is there any room left for actually working on skills? The learn-as-you-go approach is basically an excuse for lazy coaches who really don't want to hold practices.  I mean, you can make a lot of money from hosting tournaments and making parents pay ridiculous travel expenses for your team, right?  Why be bothered with something as non-lucrative as practice?  But don't worry, I'm not going to hang out the other sports to dry without drilling my own.

One reason why there is a stigma that cross country makes athletes slower is because there are A LOT of bad coaches out there, perpetuating that reputation.  There is nothing as damaging to an athletes dynamism like doing absolutely nothing explosive/athletic in training.  Here's looking at you LSD (long slow or "steady" distance) coaches.  Welcome to 2013, we're running sub 52s for the last lap of 1500s and 5000s on the regular.  Sure, cross country isn't the same as track but make no mistake, the 5k xc course is still only 3.1 miles.  Not only do I not see a need for you to run only slow, I mean "steady," distance in the off-seasons, I can't think of a single non-marathoner on the elite or sub-elite level who does this, so why would we do this for the developmental group?  When you choose to train only slow twitch muscle fibres, well guess what, you don't have a very dynamic athlete.  They haven't developed the neuromuscular pathways to be quick or agile, so of course the cross sport relationship will be strained. I also have no doubt, without having any body of evidence to link to you, that these types of runners who play soccer will actually have a comparable injury rate as sedentary players who only train for soccer during the season.  By this training strategy I have no doubt that there is a kernel of truth to what the coach was saying to his athletes.

Now I will make a crazy and bold statement: age group soccer players that run cross country for knowledgeable, scientifically based coaches will be better than their year round soccer counterparts.  I can imagine the soccer coaches out there are fuming right now.  Good.  And before I get a host of angry emails I want to explicate why runners in such a program would be better.  These athletes will have far fewer overuse injuries.  And furthermore year round runners will have less overuse injuries than nearly any other sport which requires athletes to participate year round.  Why is that? Because runners like mine who I train this way, and runners in programs similar in nature, train their athletes as if they were in a year long athletic development program which also focuses on building a giant aerobic base (or "house" as Canova calls it).  It's like a giant off season program that builds athletes just ready to explode in whatever sport they compete in next.  It's no coincidence that distance runners in my program are usually the fastest athlete in any other sport they play.  Last year I had three baserunners/outfielders for spring programs on my varsity cross country team.  Recently, I had one of my runners vertical jump almost 30 inches.  Last years 4x400m state championship relay we ran at the state meet was composed of three distance oriented runners who would often do workouts like 3x1000m to prep for the season, and could split 50s and 51s.  Tell me these types of athletes would not be prepared for the rigors of a game like soccer.  

Now, let's not only focus on this speed narrative.  Endurance is a challenge on the pitch as well.  It is noted that many forwards can run up to 10 kilos (6.2 miles) in a single match.  Given the 90 minutes or so that a soccer game totals this actually isn't that much for even a marginally trained athlete.  To be fair, a better term is not endurance, but speed-endurance, or the ability to maintain a relatively high level of quickness for an extended duration.  Chris Wondolowski is a good example of this.  He currently is a striker in the MLS, but in high school he was a 4:15 miler on his team at De La Salle in California.  Chris has a great amount of speed as well as endurance and because of his speed endurance he can be a threat to score on the international level.  

Wondo plays soccer but has a history of middle distance success.

The convergent point of speed endurance is speed reserve and aerobic power.  Speed reserve is the differential of the current pace an athlete is running and his maximal capability at the moment.  An example is when a 1500 runner runs 60 second pace per lap for the first 1100 meters and then finishes the last lap in 50-52 seconds.  They weren't nearly at their maximal ability level for the first three-fourths of the race.  But this rapid acceleration during the "kick" phase of a run can only be accomplished in tandem with an athlete who has strong aerobic power.  Usain Bolt can ran a 400 faster than anyone who lines up to run a 1500 at the World Championships but is built solely for speed, not aerobic effort and therefore would be worthless in the last lap of a 1500 because he would most likely not even be running anymore much less able to flush the metabolic waste of high lactate-oriented running that is acquired with middle distance training. 

Now why a paragraph about solely running on an article about soccer?  Because it illustrates the point that soccer takes place over an extended period of time and requires speed reserve and aerobic power as well.  Soccer is more like middle distance running than marathoning.  You aren't going to run that 10k during a match at 12 minute pace the whole time.  You are most likely going to have periods of walking, then some jogging, then an intense burst of speed in perpetual rotation.  And what does being able to kick into the last lap have to do with play soccer? Well, of course it isn't the exact same thing, but ability to accelerate into fast sprint consistently in the later half of a soccer match has a lot to do with the bodies success in aerobic and lactate spheres.  A poorly trained athlete will be in dire straits in the second half of a match and will not be able to compete with the productive output that a well trained athlete can maintain deep into a competition. That speed reserve is the ability to go to the well and sprint at near maximal efforts when the other team cannot match the intensity.

From a scientific standpoint, the ability to reduce metabolic waste such as excess hydrogen ions is trained through extended bouts of at least moderate activity (hey, distance running does that a bit).  A well trained runner has a keen ability to be efficient while competing and engaging the anaerobic lactate system. And understand that the lactate system will definitely be in play for the strikers because the phosphocreatine system burns up quickly, and furthermore the athletes will also be running too quick to solely function in the aerobic system.  Developing the lactate system for endurance is crucial for soccer and since there is a speed demand in the sport, you better believe developing speed reserve is going to help performance in the later stages of the game when all the Usain Bolts are huffing and puffing.  

The only thing a soccer coach can hang onto now that I have shown that cross country running does not impair soccer prowess is that time spent away from soccer may hinder skill acquisition for the sport.  I would argue that American football is just as skillful, at least for the "skill" positions, and these athletes are mainly found on the basketball courts and tracks around the country in the winters and springs each year.  It doesn't seem to hurt them too much and by all accords football on every level is becoming more competitive.  And lastly, cross country lasts 3 months. So that leaves 9 months for all the soccer madness (which is probably still too much time spent doing one sport at the age group level).