Well okay.  Mike Boyle's making another crazy--but very well-argued--point this week about skipping aerobic base-training. 

I remember back at Hanover High School the lacrosse coach had his charges run and run and run for nearly half of practice.  It was all aerobic base training.  Sometimes, even more perplexingly, he would have them bike and bike and bike (apparently some of the bigger guys' knees couldn't take the pounding.)  The football team did as much running as the track guys.  I think I lost weight that the season I played football, which was the last thing I needed.

Boyle's argument is that all this long, slow training--wait for it--slows athletes down:  adolescents interested in power sports particularly (i.e., pretty much any sport besides cross-country or marathon running), should emphasize the development of speed and power rather than aerobic training to force the body to favor the development of fast-twitch muscle fibers throughout life. 

In the video linked above, Boyle doesn't even go into the greater fat-loss benefits conferred by interval training, which have been covered ad nauseum by Alwyn Cosgrove and others (and probably no one's more nauseumed than Cosgrove himself, who's been arguing this for about a decade now).  Boyle suggests that the only reasons to do aerobic training are:

1)  If you like it or

2)  If you're a long-distance athlete.

As Boyle indicates, the case for aerobic base training is pretty much closed.  There's really no reason to do it unless you fall into the relatively limited categories above.

Yet if you go into the local pumpatorium...everyone's doing it.

I'd argue that this is kind of a gender issue:  women like to do steady-state cardio; they think it makes them 'smaller.'  Guys don't like doing cardio for the same reason--they want to get bigger, so they don't do it.

It just ain't that simple. 

As a matter of performance enhancement, long, slow running falls under the category of non-specific training.  If you're trying to get faster--don't run slowly.

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The ever-creative Nick Tumminello has a nice piece on muscle imbalances here.