Clearing up a misconception on Parker Valby's training.

I cannot find her swim times listed in USA swimming. My son swam from 2009-2020 and his times are listed (club swim times). if she swam in high school probably just 3 months a year. So not year round swimming over 14 years?

What are the high school swim seasons? 14-year olds are typically 8th or 9th graders.

Just saying not sure how competitive she was at swimming. How many years did she swim (from what age/until age) and was it club swimming (more intense) or just middle school swimming 3 month out of the year? I think she is an animal in cross training now/currently!

Swimming is great aerobic training. Look at Alan Webb running a 3:53 mile in high-school before supershoes...

Everyone with a brain knows that cross-training can substitute for running miles. A lot.

The reason most runners don't do it is because

(1) It's time-consuming

(2) It's boring

(3) They have some degree of OCD about counting miles, want to make sure their miles are "real"

(4) It feels wrong to be a gym rat when the weather is nice

(5) It’s a lot less pleasant than running when cross-training at some of the PV intensities.

Parker could do the chicken dance, 8 hours a day for cross training and still be tops in my book.

Sorry, what is PV? Not familiar with that term.

It's definitely true that, for reasons I can't explain, an easy 10-miler at 145bpm effort, conversational pace, goes by much faster and easier than trying to maintain the same HR on a stationary bike.

PV is short for Parker Valby.

In my experience, D1 lacrosse players have the athleticism of D3 football players. They are athletic compared to the average person, but not that freak of nature athleticism you see with D1 football players. Not enough people play lacrosse, and not enough top athletes play lacrosse.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the ESPN documentary “Crossroads”. It is about a high school in North Carolina that forms a team with a bunch of inner city kids who previously had never even touched a lacrosse stick, and then they get to the state finals in three seasons. They were just so much more athletic than everyone else.

That being said, being a midfielder in lacrosse is going to better prepare someone to do middle distance and distance running than football. I am sure there are some people who have done lacrosse who became good runners, but yeah overnight sensation is a pretty high bar.

That last point doesn’t make much sense. How is she even comparing the difficulty of running up a hill in an all out 6K race to a 70 minute Arc training session? She should have just said that the Arc trainer helps her run hills better.

Didn't know she swam. You can understand that the early development and structure that swimming clubs bring would set any young endurance athlete up for later success. US Distance running could learn a thing or two about early athlete development that US Swimming has down pat. Large numbers of clubs training in a organized way in organized environments. Pump enough athletes into the pipeline and you end up with the results and records US Swimming churns out year after year after year.

Swimming has an organized coaching and training system that allows it to produce medalist every championship. Track has the athletes, it just doesn't have the organized structure/system to push the athletes through the pipeline. Yes, we have high schools, colleges etc. but if the training was better organized we'd have 2-3x as many athletes ready for the next level.

Solinsky had essentially said that already. She added more color.

I’ll bite again. Like many, I don’t think you’re getting it yet. The difficulty on the Arc Trainer is worse!

That is what she is saying. That is why she burst onto the scene at Nuttycombe and blasted up those slippery hills! Kara Goucher could only describe it as “she is popping off of that (obviously soft) ground!”

A lot of Arc Trainer sessions are only 40 minutes long. It takes her 20 minutes to get the heart rate up into the sweet spot. She is blaring music and just hammering. She won’t watch a video because that’s too distracting. It’s like a long tempo run, slogging under resistance!

She also does interval sessions (repeats) and ‘long run simulations’.

Gavin Sherry is one.

You don't know what she is doing. You just suggested that.

So many top coaches wasting their time on running training programmes for runners, when we know now it doesn't matter how runners train and what they train on. I'm surprised chess hasn't been introduced yet.

This whole discussion is a complete red herring. Training at one sport has no necessary connection to success at another unrelated sport. There are runners who have taken the sport up late and succeeded at it.