The last cross country topic!

[VaultPurple]

Alright i know the cross country vs. pole vault topic is kinda getting beat to death but I thought It would be intresting to see who out here accualy did run cross country and pole vault and how did they do in both.

and answer pole on weather you agree with running xc and pole vaulting.. i am going to answer no just on the fact that i think that i would have vaulted much higher without xc.

Respond with

XC PR-
Pole Vault PR-
Pole vault (in same school year as running xc)

-----------
xc PR- 17:49
Pole Vault PR- 13'6

[rainbowgirl28]

I don't think you are asking the right question. High school athletes are faced with a variety of choices in the fall. For few kids that includes pole vaulting.

Most have at least some of these options:

- Football
- Volleyball
- Cross Country
- Soccer (in WA the girls are in the fall and the boys are in the spring)
- Cheerleading
- Swimming
- Do running/strength workouts by yourself
- Do running/strength workouts with similarly dedicated athletes
- Club gymnastics
- Do nothing

Scientifically, the best option would be to do like they do in college, and train/pole vault in the fall. OK, so most kids don't have the option to pole vault in the fall. Let's just assume that most kids who want to get better at pole vaulting, and who have the opportunity to pole vault, will do so. SO let's not waste our time discussing how kids should get a job to pay for pole vaulting lessons and gas money to get there. Let's just assume those kids are doing that.

The best choice for kids on that list is going to vary by kid. Running/strength workouts would be the most scientifically ideal for most. No one is arguing that point. But the reality is that most kids are not in the right environment and not mentally tough enough to stay motivated. Most kids also do not have the knowledge and resources to properly execute these running and strength workouts. Rick and DJ have both given some really good workouts that are fairly simple and easy to follow. However, the majority of high schoolers don't know about these workouts and aren't going to follow through.

The pole vault does not exist in a vacuum and we cannot give advice as if it does. The best advice is given when the advice-giver knows and acknowledges all factors in the life of the advice-asker.

The number one thing is to look at what the athlete enjoys doing. If they enjoy football just as much as they enjoy pole vaulting, it would be bad advice to tell them to quit football. Same for any of these sports. They may need to reevaluate their goals for both sports (saying I want to get a scholarship to college for two sports is unrealistic for most, for example) but it doesn't mean they can't enjoy both.

The next thing to look at is what kind of injuries the athlete is prone to, and what their roles would be in each sport. Obviously football has a lot of different positions. I would think training as a wide receiver would be more beneficial to high school athletes than training as a linebacker. Football can be really good, but also has fairly high serious injury rates. Cross country has fairly high minor injury rates. Some kids are really prone to things like shin splints or knee problems, and maybe running cross country is not the best choice for them.

While playing any sport, you can make adaptations to get yourself more set up to pole vault. A kid I worked with last year swam in the fall. I told him to make sure he was getting some running in a few times a week. He did. We went to a Halloween Vault in late October... he had not touched a pole since early July... he got a lifetime PR. If all you do is gymnastics, I would also recommend adding some extra running.

If you are doing cross country, the ideal situation is with a coach who will let you do less mileage and more speed/strength work. This may mean your best cross country time suffers a bit (or maybe not if your coach tends to overtrain).

I would much rather see a kid do cross country than: do nothing, cheer, burn out.


You asked for personal examples... I started track the spring of my junior year of high school. I came from a pure gymnastics background and had almost NO cardiovascular fitness. I got asthma doing our 4 lap warmup and had trouble finishing the spring workouts. I vaulted 6'6".

I kept doing track that summer and got my PR up to 7'6".

That fall I turned out for the cross country team. I am sure when I started I would have been well over 30 minutes for a 5k. Our first few races were shorter, my first actual 5k was 29 something. By the end of the season I got down to around 26:30. Nothing impressive, but a good improvement.

I was fortunate, and an indoor pole vaulting club started up. I went there once a week beginning in the late fall.

(I was doing club gymnastics 4 days a week this whole time).

During the winter sports season I did gymnastics for both a high school team and a club team (so two practices almost every day) plus I was still vaulting once or twice a week. I went to two indoor meets and got my pole vault PR up to 8'2".

In the spring I did track and started backing off of club gymnastics and got my PR up to 9'9". That summer I went 10'6".


I absolutely believe that cross country helped me pole vault higher. In my particular case, my lack of running ability and cardiovascular fitness held me back. Running was so new to me, sprinting or distance, that I really just needed to do more of it. Once cross country season was over, most of the running I was doing was just sprinting for vaulting and then track workouts in the spring. My body never had any trouble distinguishing between the two.

I think cross country could be a good choice in the fall for kids whose lack of fitness is holding them back in the vault. I coached a girl last year who was extremely unathletic. She wasn't big, she just had never done any sports and had no speed or strength (she was 17+ seconds in the 100). It took weeks to get her to hold on to the pole when she planted. Her first meet I put special extenders on and put the bar at 4' but she couldn't make it. But eventually she got up to 5'3" and I consider that my biggest coaching accomplishment last year. I was very pleased to see her turn out for the cross country team this fall. I think that for the same reasons it helped me, it will help her pole vault higher next year. If she had not turned out for the team, she most likely would not be doing any physical activity at all.



I look back on my career, and wonder sometimes if I would have vaulted higher had I started track sooner than my junior year of high school. But then I realize, that was not realistic. I HATED running, and I think before that time I was not tough enough to keep doing track workouts. Also, girls pole vault was still exhibition my junior year. I was the first girl at my school to do it. Had I turned out my freshman year, I likely would not have even been allowed to try (and it wouldn't have been offered at any meets).

I think the same applies to other choices as well. You say you think you would have pole vaulted higher had you not done cross country. Why? Did you get injured doing cross country? Do you really think you would have been motivated enough and had the knowledge to do better workouts on your own? Would you have played another sport instead? Did you have opportunities to pole vault that you turned down because of cross country?

I have never said that all pole vaulters should do cross country. I do believe that in the list of options that each kid faces in the fall, it is better than many other options on the list.

[powerplant42]

I do not necessarily consider this 'new', 'exciting', or 'interesting', but RG's post was good enough for me to say:

YES!

And what it all boils down to (as it often does in sports, even just life in general):

It depends.

(I voted 'no' as a blanket statement, because I lean just a little bit toward 'no'.)

[VaultPurple]

I think the same applies to other choices as well. You say you think you would have pole vaulted higher had you not done cross country. Why? Did you get injured doing cross country? Do you really think you would have been motivated enough and had the knowledge to do better workouts on your own? Would you have played another sport instead? Did you have opportunities to pole vault that you turned down because of cross country?

My reasoning was largely because I am prone to shin splints and hip problmes, and I would spend all summer doing sprint workouts, to start indoor season feeling like i was running in slow motion.

But i see where you are coming at it compleatly depends with everyones situation. In my case I didnt really start pole vaulting till my junior year and fell upon it by compleat accident. Freshman year I swam and did a thing for jrotc called Raiders, where you basicaly compeat in PT test, and i was fairly good at the running so I figured id do cross country my sophmore year (the school i was at did not have pole vaulting). Sophmore year I ran cross country at a new school and did track just for long distance, but when i got there and saw we had a pole vault pit I figured id give that a shot too. I still ran the 800 and mile but would mess around with pole vault and get like 8'6 (we had a brand new pit and 3 poles). The reason i fell across pole vault by accident was that after the last meet my sophmore year me and my friend were taking the poles back to the track after our bus ride back from confrence, and i was playing around trying to jump over a drain pipe when my pole got stuck and broke about a foot from the bottom. Now I had no pole anywhere near my body weight that i could use for the next season. So my junior year cross country was going really good and I didnt think i was going to get to pole vault again because I broke my pole the previous spring, so i figured i would just specialize in the mile because i was almost under 5min in that. But at a swim meet in the winter i saw one of the girls that pole vaulted for another school and she talked about a pole vault camp she went to over the summer that let her rent out poles through the winter and spring and held practice on sunday every weekend about an hour from my house. I was up there that weekend, jumped for about an hour and had already improved my pr by a foot, rented a pole, and my PR went from 8'6 to 13 in less than two months.

So for me I owe my pole vaulting to disance running because without xc i would have never pole vaulted in the first place..

But if someone knew that they wanted wanted to pole vault and they know that their school has pole vault, and they have any choice of doing sprint workouts durring the fall, or a pv pit near by, I would high incourage that. As much as I hate what football has done to track and field, working out with them as long as ur not a lineman might be ur best option.

[KYLE ELLIS]

"I think the same applies to other choices as well. You say you think you would have pole vaulted higher had you not done cross country. Why? Did you get injured doing cross country? Do you really think you would have been motivated enough and had the knowledge to do better workouts on your own? "

Becca do you not know how the body works?? When you do extensive long distance running your nervous system slows down (which is a huge hinderance!) Also some of your fast twitch muscle fibers begin to act like slow twitch fibers (become more slow oxidative and slow glycolitic) And if you did nothing instead of running cross country you would probably be better off. Since you took a shot at me I will take one back, (probably will get deleted). I would never try and tell you how to run a website because you have done alot of research and have experience with it. When it comes to science you shouldn't encourage kids to do something that has been scientifically proven because you have a gut feeling. If they love both they should do both, if they want a pole vault scholarship then they should know the truth about the affects of CC training..

[powerplant42]

(Exciting)

And NOW, the argument is out there.

Biology/physiology is usually most important, but there are other sciences at work, LIKE psychology (which you could argue is based on biology, but that's not a road I want to go down), and LIKE sociology... There are SO many factors that affect people SO MUCH differently.

Like I've said (3 times?)... IT DEPENDS.

Yes, if you want to argue it, the 'perfect vaulter' would never do cross country. If you want to be the perfect vaulter, then don't do cross country... simple. Train for pole vault alone, day in and day out. There are people who aspire to be the 'perfect vaulter' (like me), and then there are those that love to vault, and love to run for miles and miles. Will one most likely biologically/physiologically limit the perfomance in the other? Yes, it might be a HUGE career inhibitor, but it might be unnoticable. The truth is, we will never really know. That is a recurring theme I have found in vaulting... "What if he did THIS at THIS point in his career?" You know what I mean? What IF Ockert used a pre-jump? World record? PROBABLY, but we will never know. We can infer based on various sciences that one outcome is more likely than another. But, maybe he would have had a pre-jump related injury or something like that. That is not totally on point, but do you see where I'm headed with that idea? CAN a vaulter benefit from cross country? YES! But of course, it depends on who it is, and how the inumerable factors that I've alluded to affect them! It could be a good thing, and maybe it is a better option than pole vault training alone. WHAT IF?...........

Let's all chill out too, it's not like cross country will kill you if you vault or anything like that (nor will it destroy your career)...

[KirkB]

... I'm letting this one go ... I will not be posting on the topic again for quite some time, unless something new/strange/exciting happens.

Something new/strange/exciting seems to happen every day!

PP's definition of "quite some time" ...

Anything over an hour! ha! ha!

Kirk

[rainbowgirl28]

Becca do you not know how the body works?? When you do extensive long distance running your nervous system slows down (which is a huge hinderance!) Also some of your fast twitch muscle fibers beging to act like slow twitch fibers (become more slox oxidative and slow glycolitic) And if you did nothing instead of running cross country you would probably be better off.

I think you are overestimating the amount of distance running the average high school cross country runner is actually doing.

[powerplant42]

(Interesting)

It depends... mostly on the coach. Becca, you can't argue that there are those high school cross country coaches that will give their runners 50 miles a week... They do exist, they MUST. But of course, there is the other extreme... hardly ever above 5k.



And Kyle, nobody's taking a 'shot' at you... We're discussing. Be less touchy! That's the only way to keep OBJECTIVITY abundant, is not to start to put too much negative emotion in to your posts, because that typically only escalates each party's opinion of their argument.

[pvdad81]

xc pr 19:20
pv pr 15'2"

I ran cross country my senior year in high school. It definatly helped. I had way more stamina at practice. I could take many more jumps than anyone else at practice before getting tired. I feel those extra jumps are what caused me to excel. It is not hard to understand that a kid that takes 1000 jumps in a season will be better than a kid who takes 100 jumps.

[KirkB]

[KYLE ELLIS]

You can get the same effect from doing high amounts of sprints, and it is more specific to your sport. If you can run 15 60's you can take alot of jumps. If you run cross country you can take alot of jumps but with less speed and explosiveness...