Three Approaches to Crosstraining

by GRP runner Elena Horton

“8 miles?” my college hockey coach repeated back to me after hearing how far I had just run. “Yeah!” I replied with pride - this was the furthest I had ever run, and I had kept going purely because it felt so free and fun. After a full year of daily practices and workouts confined to dimly lit rinks and gyms, I was thriving getting to feel the rhythm of my breath in the crisp spring New England air. 

“You shouldn’t do that, it will hurt your skating power,” my coach replied, abruptly cutting into my newfound joy. I felt confused, already burnt out with hockey, and, after some more processing, newly confident that my happiness lay somewhere outside this version of the sport. 

Playing multiple sports had always been a big part of my life. The bulk of my childhood was spent rotating from cross country to hockey to lacrosse to swimming, mixing in anything else available for fun in between. The transitions excited me, and I picked up various lessons from the many different coaches, teammates, and experiences I was able to have as a result. And now, it was this experience of regimented D1 hockey that showed me exactly how much I didn’t just enjoy the variation, but I needed it. 

After leaving the hockey team, I spent the rest of college relearning how to listen to my body and enjoy its movement. I tried new things: longer runs, a triathlon, bike rides, backcountry skiing, weight lifting routines, Nordic skiing - and each new experience excited me, fueling my drive to learn more and helping me discover again and again the uninhibited joy of moving efficiently through nature, no matter the medium. I fell in love with endurance sports precisely because all the skills felt so transferable: the same self-talk that helped me get through a long run helped me summit a mountain; the same focus ripping downhill on a bike helped me finagle my way down narrow chutes on skis; and the same legs that had made me a powerful skater pulled me up hills I had never thought possible to run. Using my body in different ways taught me to appreciate it like I hadn’t before. As a hockey player, I could only see how my thighs were weaker than my teammates in the gym, but, as a holistic athlete, I could feel how they could carry me across many miles and let myself be surprised by their abilities. And to this day, my favorite adventures have not been the competitive trail races I’ve entered, but the mountain adventures I’ve planned that were entirely reliant on my fluency with different sports and techniques.

My experience with cross-training is not unique, and it may resonate with you as well. As I’ve grown more as a runner these past few years, I’ve learned how cross-training is foundational to two major concepts all athletes must think about - sustainability in sport and focusing on feelings over actions. Both are topics that my teammate, Britta Clark, has elaborated on in previous GRP Blog articles. In other words, I believe cross-training is essential for keeping me motivated and healthy as a runner over time because it is good for my body, good for my mind, and just plain old fun. Endurance sports are a long game, literally, which makes enjoying the process especially important. 

Three ways to approach cross-training

So how should you approach cross-training? I think it depends on both your goals (where are you trying to go?) and your limitations (what do you have to work around to get there?). I’ve seen three main approaches: transitioning based on seasons, mixing in other sports as “bonus-joy” throughout a single-sport focused training cycle, and balancing multiple sports consistently throughout training. 

Based on seasons

As proponents of the “full seasons” approach, both Kilian Jornet and Katie Schide, the champions of 2022’s elite UTMB race, are known for focusing on ski mountaineering throughout the winter, only transitioning back to running when the snow melts. They both credit their time skiing with giving them a break from the physical and mental pressures of high-volume running while still positioning them to grow their cardiovascular fitness over time. If you’re a person who enjoys focusing on one thing at a time and doing it well, this may be the approach for you. If I had no limitations on my access to snow, this is likely where I’d fall - this winter I have a ski mountaineering race planned to hold myself accountable to the joy I know skiing brings me. BUT, it can be hard for me to make my way out of Boston to the mountains during busy grad school winters. 

Bonus-joy approach

To deal with this, I’ve mostly adopted the “bonus-joy” approach, where I focus on running throughout the year, but often throw in days of biking or skiing (or sometimes even hockey) when the stars align for me to feel like it’s really what I want to do that day. This could be because my gut is telling me that running is feeling boring, or because I have a group of friends wanting to ride (community is also a huge part of cross-training!), or I have the time to drive a little further for a fun ski day. I find this approach to be my baseline when I have a lot of limitations to work around and big running-focused goals to hit. I’d say that most of the busy athletes with single-sport focused goals I know tend to follow this approach. 

Multi-sport consistency

Finally, the “balancing multiple sports” approach can seem like a jack-of-all-trades for a set of different goals and limitations. When I first moved to Seattle after college, this was my style - I didn’t have any athletic performance goals, I was learning a lot about traveling through bigger mountains, and I was building a community of diverse athletes. My goal was simply to embrace all of this, and doing a bit of everything maximized my progress and enjoyment. But this also works well for athletes who are limited by certain injury risks. For example, an injury-prone runner may keep their mileage low to maintain running-specific strength while supplementing their cardio fitness with biking or swimming. It’s also highly effective for athletes who want to be simultaneously competing at a higher level in multiple sports at once (the definition of a triathlete!). 

There is certainly no “right” approach to cross-training. I’ve learned that it’s an ever-shifting individual journey defined by asking myself the same questions over and over again: Am I having fun? Do I feel good? What sounds exciting to me this week? What do I want out of this season? This year? And what obstacles do I know I have to work around? My hope is that I can use cross-training as a tool to embrace the child athlete in me, finding play in a variety of ways. And maybe, by having fun with the journey, we all can continue to surprise ourselves with our performances as well.