Decent at road, abysmal at cross country

I have a friend who has this problem as well. He is pretty good on the roads (1'06 half) but he is quite pedestrian at cross country. Some people are better at holding a certain pace and others adapt better to the constant changes of pace of XC. We are all diferent. Its not your fault

I'm the same (but much slower) and I can't figure it out. I am older and it's something that I've noticed getting worse as I get older. Maybe it's the uneven surface.

My three favorite workouts for XC

-K repeats on flat grass, drop the road and track; just get the unevenness (a loop around a park works well

- hill “toppers”. Rather than just running a hill, find a solid ~200-300m hill with a flat road on top, run the hill hard then run hard as you crest it for 50m, imagining youre passing someone at the top of the hill(bonus pts if trail or grass).

- hill loop tempos. Find a section of rolling terrain thats ~1 mile and run 3/4 of it at a hard consistent effort, then float the last qtr mile. Keep looping, start with 3-4 and add on. Focus on effort not pace, letting body fall down the hills (controlled but use gravity). Good to practice hill sprints but also the down too!

This was me - I was almost impossible to beat on the track or roads, useless in xc. Couple of changes that helped: a ton of mobility work in the soleus (distracted ankle stuff), and hip mobility. Then for whatever reason I just had to get my head around feeling like I was going to die at the top of every hill, but by the end of the race I would be way the hell up there. For some reason I was way faster on the downhills relative to my competitors and had to work harder on the uphills. The other thing is doing tempo sessions just below lt, then 20-40 sec burst, then right back to LT.

The ankle/soleus stuff is really interesting to me. I also consistently underperform at cross country in comparison to my track and road times/rankings, and my physio has told me I have poor ankle mobility. I've been doing knee to wall for months but it hasn't improved much. What were your top exercises/stretches that helped you in that area?

I think I ran worse in XC than on the track and road because I have a fairly slow turnover and my stride generates a lot of force. It seems to me like a lot of the energy I was expending was being wasted on grass and mud, whereas on harder surfaces I was getting better, snappier returns.

I agree. Without getting too technical people have different kinds of strides and in more extreme case can have a stride very well suited to one kind of surface and not at all well suited to a different kind of surface. One of the best cross country runners of my generation was Gaston Roelants. I recall that people would comment on how light and bouncy his stride was and it seemed like he was floating over the ground.

congrats on your success, OP!

It's not an automatic transfer. You know the expression: race to your strengths, train to your weaknesses.

So train for XC.

Mostly that means hills on odd terrain. Do mile repeats exactly where you don't want to do them - rutted, soft, hilly terrain where time doesn't matter. Don't even use your watch.

Do a lot of 60-90 second hill repeats at mile pace, with 4-5 minute recovery. That helps with your anaerobic capabilities and hills.

Work on racecraft. Don't race with a watch - just go compete and chase people. Go get them.

Also, many people think you can train in regular running shoes and then on race day throw on some XC spikes and have that work. It doesn't always. Do workouts in your racing shoes, if safe. Not just one or two workouts...but most of them. We run differently in spikes and flats so you have to train your body to run in spikes.

First I would ask what times are you running in 5k XC? Cause you can't expect to run the same on the road as on grass as the road is a faster surface. So if your breaking 16 on the road and running 16:30 on a XC course those could be similar performance. Next if your doing club workouts whats your periodization like? Club workouts can be the same all the time or when the club is focused on a race or season geared towards that season. Like one of the clubs I have ran with usually does hills in the fall, fartleks in the winter, cruise intervals in the spring and 5k/10k workouts in the summer. So depending on my current phase I didn't always go or do that workout.

Let me guess.. you do most your running in carbon spring shoes...

Thank you for these responses, genuinely very useful. Looking forward to hitting some grassy hills and resenting you all.

As a very "springy" runner, I always struggled with XC. My guess is that XC (particularly on soft courses) is harder for runners whose strides make more use of the stretch-shortening cycle. Basically, your muscles can store elastic energy for fractions of a second and use that energy at push off. If you're stuck on the ground because you're running through mud, you can't use that energy. For someone whose stride never makes much use of that energy, the effect is going to be less than for someone whose stride makes use of that energy.

You can train xc to improve a bit but you'll prob always be better on the road. I was much better at xc when I did over 80% of my mileage on grass and trails.