Autumn Marathon

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You can maintain your cardiovascular capacity by cross-training, but it is extremely difficult to maintain your performance when you rely on cross-training,” Dr. Tanaka said. “This is because you are violating the principle of the specificity of training.”

Anyone who has been injured and forced to do an alternate sport knows this already. If you cannot run and end up substituting workouts on a bicycle for running, almost invariably you will end up losing running speed and endurance.

But if an alternate sport doesn’t help endurance athletes, resistance training might. It’s a bit counterintuitive — if you are training for an endurance sport like running, your workouts increase your ability to perform the same motion over and over again but do not markedly increase your muscle strength. Lifting weights is just the opposite — you do a few repetitions with the goal of increasing muscle strength and size. Yet in a review of published studies, Dr. Tanaka found that resistance training improved endurance in running and cycling. The effect occurred both in experienced athletes and in novices.

A more recent study of experienced runners by a group of Norwegian researchers confirmed that weight lifting could increase performance. One group did half squats with heavy weights three times a week while continuing a running program. The other group just ran. Those who did the squats improved their running efficiency and improved the length of time they could run before exhaustion set in.

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