Soccer and Cross Country

my friend on the team this past year ran both indoor and outdoor track february through may as well as attend a club soccer team practice once a week and play games every sunday. he fared alright, ran a 1:53.3 800 split.

I did it all through high school... the best thing you could do is start running today to get yourself in shape. soccer and cross country are surprisingly similar sports, just look at Andrew Weating.

Half of our varsity distance squad during track season is made up of either soccer players or former soccer players and alot of them play games on the weekend after meets and practice also.

I would talk to your coaches if you decide to do both. However, it's rare that both will cooperate to make sure what is done is best for you.

2/10. Soccer players, or indeed non-runners in general, do not talk about "miles per week."

Gentleman,

Please leave Lionel out of this.

Most of our fastest guys at my high school were soccer players. We didn't really have a coach, so most of them just went to soccer practice instead of XC practice (or came when they didn't have soccer practice) and maybe ran on their own on the weekend (or played soccer then). Some of them only showed up for races and maybe one practice a week with the team.

In Junior High, my son ran track (1600/3200), and played premier soccer, as well as baseball. The big thing when doing multiple sports in the same season is to stretch a lot, boost your daily calorie intake considerably, and drink lots of fluids.

The irony is my son always saw himself as a soccer player first, but his freshman year he was cut from the C team. After half a day of saying he would "concentrate on academics" instead, he joined the cross country team and made all-state as a freshman (and soph & junior) and is now one of the top runners in the state as a Senior.

So, I can't blame your track friends for saying you should go out for cross-country. Maybe they're on to something. ;)

i did it through highschool and was just fine. I ran cross country and track sophomore-senior year as well as played soccer for a dual season club team and the highschool.

Gwen Hardesty (now Coogan) just played soccer in HS, she did not run. When she went to Smith she went out for track and won the (DIII) 3000. Of course, she was good enough to make the Olympic team in the 10,000. I heard that in her freshman year (HS) her daughter ran a 5:04 (1600 or mile, not sure); too bad she did not stay in Madison.

Hey man, I played club soccer all during high school, and by my junior/senior year I was doing a pretty good amount of mileage, at least for me. The problem you're going to run into is coordinating meets and games. But definitely run cross country, it made me a much better soccer player.

Soccer and cross country are two sports that work together really well. If you get into good shape for soccer, you'll be in pretty good shape for cross and vice versa.

0.5/10; see comment about Gwen in my previous post. Soccer players in this neck of the woods are no wimps (and it is tough to make the team at the better schools); I am sure that this holds in the rest of the country.

Depending on how good you are at soccer (if you're a varsity starter or have the potential to be, then stick with it; if not than consider just cross-country), play soccer exclusively in the fall, but do some supplementary running, like 30 minutes extra per day, maybe more on the weekends or perhaps a road race or two. More than that is overkill, because you run enough in soccer as it is.

After soccer is over, keep building your base running more miles per day (perhaps 45-60 minutes) and do a few road races as you feel conforable (but not too many). Then run track in the spring. My guess is you'll find you have "talent" in the 800 and 1600, but perhaps the 3200 too if you're putting in the miles over the winter. If you just aren't that good at soccer and relegated to the JV team, but find that you are a decent runner, then go out for cross instead and just play soccer recreationally. Perhaps next track season will help you divine whether or not you should run cross exclusively next year. That's kind of how I did it.

On the other hand, if you really ENJOY soccer, keep playing it, running on the side, and run track too. Best of both worlds. For me, the decision was easy, because as much as I grew up excelling at soccer, by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had lost my "speed" relative to my peers and went from literally the fastest kid to the slowest overnight. All slow twitch makes one a distance runner. Hell, I never broke 4:30 for the 1600 or 2:05 for the 800, but I did run 9:30ish for the 3200, all above 5000' elevation.

Personally, I would rather have been a star soccer player in high school, but also had the ability to parlay that into a really fast 800 and 1600 by track. Just didn't have the talent or enough fast-twitch.

26mi235 wrote:Soccer players in this neck of the woods are no wimps

0.25/10

If that was true, they'd be playing football. Soccer is the ultimate game for wussies and liberals. In what other sports can you finish the contest with no score and consider it a success?

Soccer, sadly, is a great game only in terms of the nauseating political correctness that we must adhere to in today's society. Little Johnny doesn't have to be consoled after the games because a good old-fashioned butt-whupping means his team only lost 1-0.

Soccer will never be a legitimate sport until it becomes more like basketball on the pitch. Make the goals smaller and take away the goalie.

One guy did football, soccer, and XC all in the same season

https://www.bemidjipioneer.com/sports/3835814-juggling-act-bemidji-hs-sophomore-linaes-whiting-playing-3-sports-fall?amp

https://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2017/10/bemidji-teen-plays-three-sports-at-once/

http://www.mshsl.org/mshsl/johnsjournal.asp?bymonth=10&byyear=2017

Kicking a football is not playing a sport

0/10

Why would a random soccer playyer who doesn’t run track/xc even know that letsrun exists

short shorts and shorties wrote:

0/10

Why would a random soccer playyer who doesn’t run track/xc even know that letsrun exists

When he considered going out for XC, he was probably looking for a forum where he could ask a question about it, where some experts would answer it.