“What’s your recovery plan?”
“You know no one gets stronger while they’re exercising.”
“All your improvements come when you rest.”
A good coach stresses these concepts as much or more than actual training practices. Athletic achievement, especially of the relatively low-skill, high mileage sort I practice, depends on a balance between stress and recuperation.
There are at least four levels in this balance. Within a workout, especially one involving shorter, more intense efforts, going easy between bursts of speed allows higher stress levels for longer total time, than does a single effort to exhaustion. For example, when running 6 individual miles with two minutes of walking and slow jogging between each, I can go faster and harder within each mile than if I tried to run all six miles continuously. The higher level of intensity provides a greater stress to my neuro, muscular, and endocrine systems than the slower pace I would need to hold going non-stop. The short rest intervals in between make this possible. These rests are a safe haven, a beacon of hope, in an otherwise hellish session. I like those recovery jogs, or the times I hang on the swimming pool wall, or slow, easy spinning on the bike (or better, coasting downhill!)
Then there is the recovery needed after a workout, or, more properly, between two or more such intense efforts. I need at least 2-3 days between each intense effort in each of the three triathlon disciplines, and I can’t really do more than one such effort on any given day (an exception being a very short swim session can be added onto a bike or run effort). So this limits me to about 5 or 6 big efforts each week. The days I refrain from hard work, maybe two a week, leave me feeling a little guilty. But doing something each day covers that up.
After a couple of weeks of this, I need an easier week, the third level of recovery. Ten to fourteen days of hard work, with a few easy days thrown in, usually hands me a profound exhaustion, with my brain, my muscles, my joints, and my depleted hormones rebelling against any significant work. This forced step down, just when I seem to be making progress, creates even more guilt. This is the biggest trap for for, the time when I make plans to do harder, longer workouts, and then feel guilty at not wanting to or being able to. Even the beginning signs of joint pain, or slower pace is not enough to remind me of the need to rest, recuperate and repair.
The final level of recovery comes season to season. After 6-11 months of training and peaking towards several big races, despite the desire to remain on a high plateau of performance, the inevitable happens. And, as in mountaineering, or surfing, or love, coming down is riskier than going up. Ever see anyone wipe out while paddling to catch a wave? Trying to sustain a peak athletic performance level is doomed. Just as you can’t stay in the first full bloom of love, or live forever on the summit of Everest, or ride in the curl forever, at some point, you have to leave the harmony of perfect fitness, and allow a time for a period of … just vegging out. Ergo, Michael Phelps hits the bong.
Today, I had planned on a longer swim and run. But, I was ending the third week of heavy effort, having mentally flip-flopped my recovery week to get a rest before my half ironman in San Diego next Saturday. I thought I could squeeze one more day out of the cycle before the wheels fell off. But in the pool this morning, after about 15-20 minutes, I started feeling a snagging pain in the left front rotator cuff area of my shoulder, every time I brought my arm forward out of the water. So I quit that swim after the warm up. On to my planned two hour run. Getting dressed, I knew the spark was gone, and I would have to switch for the recovery week run – 60-80 minutes. Even in that abbreviated, I was running about 5-10 seconds a mile slower than the weeks before, a two hour run, at the same effort level – a sure sign I was at the ragged end of work and sorely in need of recovery.
It is so hard not to see the joint pain and the slower speed as a sign that I should work harder. Of course, the actual message is “You need some rest!” How do you put “rest” in a training log, and give it a value equal to the miles and hours on the other days? Our whole society is built on the opposite concept – you’re paid to “work”, and pay someone else when you want to relax. I have yet to figure out how to pay myself to rest, other than to rely on race results to prove it was worth it.