Cross country and swimming are two sports that require a lot of the same aspects. Mental toughness and physical toughness are needed in both sports. Both sports also share long and grueling workouts. Therefore, there are many cross country runners that decide to join the swim team.
According to www.runnersworld.com, the resistance of water offers a cooling workout that taxes the body enough to maintain cardiovascular and musculoskeletal fitness, while its buoyancy and zero-impact environment aids in recovery and injury prevention. This helps your body recover quicker from the pounding of running and still stay in great shape. Swimming is an ideal alternative in the offseason to maintain fitness, but also to avoid injury.
Sophomore Scott Speiser and junior Dominick Farino both joined the SHS swim team for the first time this year. Farino has run cross country for seven years and Speiser has run for three years. Speiser and Farino were mainly influenced by their friends to join but were also looking for swimming to be beneficial for their running.

Speiser says he believes that it will help with his air capacity. Farino believes that it will build his endurance for the next season of track and cross country.
As far as workouts, cross country and swimming have the majority ofthe same distances.
“A lot of them are mainly similar to cross country a lot of intervals, it’s not fun,” Farino said.
Other swimmers that run cross country include Delaney Bucker, Fritz Laut, Jacob Smith, Josh Love and Luis Torres. This would be a total of seven cross country runners that also swim. It seems that the swimming and cross country teams seem to sharethe same type of athletes. Both of the sports have athletes that have great cardiovascular endurance and great determination.
SHS cross country coach Herman Bueno believes that swimming has some advantages but also has some disadvantages. Bueno says that swimming gets them into great shape, but not great running shape. He also says that when track season comes they are not as ready for the workouts as the people who have been running winter conditioning workouts.
“There are numerous advantages to being multi-sport athletes,” Bueno said. “It keeps the athletes mentally fresh. For example, If someone trains only for basketball year round, the actual season may seem to drag out and they become mentally stale.”