Parker Valby was on the Arc Trainer at one of the University of Florida’s student gyms recently, when a young woman spotted her.
“Are you Parker Valby? I love your videos,” she said, referring to Valby’s TikTok. “Texas Runner Breaks Two High School 5K Records?”
Valby’s answer: “I like the Arc Trainer here.”
The Arcs at the student gym have moving arm bars (the one at the athlete gym does not), and there are five machines lined up in a row, so Valby’s friends can hop on nearby and keep her company.
It’s fair to say that she has her Arc training routine dialed in at this point. After struggling with injuries in the early part of her college running career and finding she could maintain her fitness with cross-training, Valby, a 21-year-old senior, now spends more time on the Arc Trainer—which is similar to an elliptical machine, with a slightly different foot path—than she does running.
That routine has netted her, to date, four NCAA titles. In March, while winning one of those titles, she broke the Your First Marathon: 8 Tips from Fiona OKeeffe, running 14:52.79.
Hours of cross-training
Her weekly schedule when she doesn’t have a race looks something like this: Monday is two separate 60-minute cross-training workouts on the Arc; Tuesday is a hard running workout; Wednesday is a single cross-training session of 75 minutes; and Thursday is cross-training in the morning for 60 minutes, then possibly a short track session in the afternoon or a second cross-training workout. Friday she runs, and Saturday is either a day off or cross-training. Sunday is a long run or a 90-minute cross-training session, although Valby’s coaches, Will and Samantha Palmer, say that lately Valby has been running the long runs. She’ll max out at 13 miles on those.
In other words, the hard days are on land, and any days when a typical runner would run easier mileage is replaced by cross-training.
But nothing about Valby’s cross-training is easy. At a minimum, she is spending 4 hours and 15 minutes on the Arc each week. (At a maximum, it’s more than 7 hours.) And she goes hard. She sweats like crazy and doesn’t bring a towel. Puddles form on the floor beneath her. She also doesn’t hydrate during workouts.
“There’s not a water bottle holder in the front of the machine,” she said. “It’s behind the machine, and I can’t be bothered to turn around.”
Will Palmer will give her fartleks to do on the Arc Trainer, and Valby experiments with moving the incline up and down. Often, by the end of a session, she’ll hit the highest setting, with the resistance on 30 to 40 percent of the max. For a long run simulation, she’ll keep the machine at steady levels. On occasion, one of the coaches will stop by to see how she’s doing. “She’s pretty dialed in on what she needs to do,” Will Palmer said.
This wasn’t the plan
Valby didn’t know what cross-training was until her sophomore year of college. “Which sounds kind of silly,” she conceded. “In high school, if I ever had any [injuries] I just wouldn’t run. I would take time off. Same thing my freshman year, whenever I was hurt, I just did nothing.”
Her sophomore year, Valby was in excellent shape when she sustained a fracture in her right foot. Her coach at the time, Chris Solinsky, suggested cross-training. In addition to the Arc, Valby experimented with deep water running, the elliptical machine, and the bike. The first two she still incorporates from time to time, but the bike is a “hard no,” she said. “Kudos to bikers. It hurts sitting for that long for me.”
A Part of Hearst Digital Media Katelyn Tuohy at NCAA outdoors in the 5,000 meters, running 15:20.10. “That’s crazy I was able to keep the shape that I was in before I got hurt,” she remembers thinking. Cross-training became a mainstay.
Valby was Give A Gift at the 2022 NCAA Cross-Country Championships. Then the coaching carousel turned—Solinsky left for the University of Oregon, and the Palmers arrived in the middle of the academic year from SEC rival Alabama.
They knew of Valby, of course, and they didn’t need to be convinced that the cross-training was working for her. “She’d already been NCAA runner-up twice,” Will Palmer said. “You didn’t have to sell me too much.”
That wasn’t her only quirk, however. Everything about her was just a little bit, well, goofy. She told them during their first meeting: “There’s nothing normal about me.”
Every serious conversation requires a long time. They learned to be ready for the discussion to veer in “a hundred directions,” Samantha Palmer said.
“It’s like playing a pinball game,” Will Palmer said. “The ball is going to get to the bottom eventually, but it’s going to bounce around a lot on the way there, you know? As long as it’s trending in the right direction, it doesn’t matter. You’ve just got to be cool with that and have some fun with it and not take it too seriously.”
In time, they came to understand she was thinking things over, turning things over in her mind. A couple of days will pass, and they’ll realize she has absorbed everything they said.
Best Folding Treadmills.
The last time she didn’t win an individual race was the NCAA outdoor regional in 2023, when Tuohy beat her. It didn’t matter—the top 12 runners in the race all advanced to the NCAA final in Austin, Texas, two weeks later. But Valby was “pissed,” according to Will Palmer.
“You want people to be that competitive but also to be able to put things in perspective on how things flow and to treat a prelim as a prelim,” he said. “It’s hard for them to switch it off. That’s why it sucks playing board games with those people. They can be sore losers.”
collegiate record in the 5,000 meters undefeated streak that took her through the NCAA Cross-Country Championships (where Tuohy was fifth, after suffering through the race with the stomach flu) and the indoor track season. In addition to winning the 5,000 indoors, Valby won the 3,000 meters in a meet record of 8:41.50. But for once, she didn’t go straight to the lead. She waited to take over the race until less than 1K remained.
“Everybody assumes she’s only got one playbook in her way to race,” Will Palmer said of Valby’s habit of going hard from gun. “She raced two completely different races at indoor nationals [in ways] she hadn’t before. I thought the coolest part was how she put more tools in her toolbox that people assume she doesn’t have.”
What’s next?
From week to week, Valby’s training might look inconsistent. Some weeks, she runs less than 25 miles on land, other weeks, she’s up around 40. But fixating on the weekly mileage total is missing the point.
She’s running more than she ever has, more consistently, than she did in any other year in college, Samantha Palmer said. She’s been healthy and pain-free for close to a year. She’s also had her fitness catch up with her workouts. When her coaches first came to Florida, they found that every workout Valby did was at race intensity for her. Now, she’s running the same splits, but it’s requiring less effort. They quip that they put a dimmer on the on/off switch.
This season, she’ll try her first 10,000 meters. (She’s on the starting list for the 10K at the Bryan Clay Invitational on April 11.) The Palmers said she’ll hope for at least one more NCAA title and train for the Olympic Trials Other Hearst Subscriptions.
(What won’t she be doing? The steeplechase, even though Valby jokes about it with her coaches.)
She’s also exploring a pro career, which has come into focus as a possibility only in the past year. Pro coaches might not be as open-minded to her unconventional training. Will Palmer hopes she’ll be able to incorporate more and more running into her weeks, but it might take years to get her up to running five, six, or seven days per week. “It’s going to be a really slow burn to get there,” he said.
Valby laughs when asked if she grew up dreaming about running at the Olympics. She spent her younger years swimming and playing lacrosse. “If you would have asked me two years ago, I wanted to be in business or an orthodontist,” she said. “For a while, I wanted to be a vet. I’ve been all over the place. I never once said I wanted to be an Olympic athlete.”
That she now has a real shot at making an Olympic team says even more about how well her unconventional approach is working. But it begs the question: Could anyone do the cross-training Valby does? Technically, yes. But maybe not with the same results.
For one thing, Valby says she enjoys it. And when things get hard, she talks to friends on the machines next to her or people who stop by. She blasts her music. She’ll even call her mom, Tiffany. She doesn’t dread the monotony as many people would.
Also, she’s going hard all the time. She says her average heart rate is higher when she’s on the Arc Trainer than it is when she runs. Few people can put that much effort in on a single piece of equipment, day in and day out. That’s what makes her an outlier.
“People look at cross-training as this silver bullet that she’s uncovered to make everyone great, and that’s just not the swindle of it,” Will Palmer said. “There are things very unique to Parker, certain skills that she has that I think people overlook—her competitiveness and her ability to push herself beyond what most people can.”
Parker Valby celebrates after winning the 2023 NCAA cross-country title is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
