zoo_manimal wrote:
Reality is real wrote:
FWIW, a friend of mine is an exercise scientist who spent a couple of years working for an EPL team. This was about 5 years ago now.
In pre-season training (July) the club did a couple of 3 mile time trials on a 400m track. My friend reported that several of the players ran 15:xx.
Now this obviously isn't world class or anything, but considering that elite soccer players do little sustained long distance training, it does show many have the ability to run some decent times.
They're world-class athletes who train for hours every day. So not totally surprising they're actually fit.
But "a couple" out of a 20-plus person squad sort of refutes the point.
I said several. From memory I think it was around 6 who ran 15:xx. The vast majority of the other players were in the 16-17m range. Hard to quantify the effort of these times too, because they are soccer players running a time trial, not runners training or running race.