Tuesday, Feb 6, 2024 – Recovery

Hey Gang!

Happy “feels like Spring”! The best thing about this weather is the footing. Some of my usual routes that are off-limits in winter are still available to me. I’ve been caught before in both Taylor Creek Park and the Moore Park Ravine where I’ve stubbornly maintained my route despite the ice, and pushed too far in before getting caught in a spot of no return where I couldn’t go forwards or back and just had to shuffle/slide while grabbing trees for support for a few kilometers. Things you only have to learn once, or in my case, twice. But despite my rule of never doing these routes again in winter, I might try them out mid-Feb this year. Indulgence!

What I’ve been thinking about this week is Recovery. I know I’ve spoken about this before, but it’s worth reminding ourselves. It’s hard when you get in the groove of a training routine, to remember that it’s not the training that is making you stronger – it’s the response to the training. If you’re not recovering, you’re just hitting yourself over the head with a hammer. And unfortunately, we internalize the hitting ourselves part as being “good” and it can sometimes in an odd way be cathartic, but without a corresponding adaptation and response, it does not move us ahead at all. The tricky thing about this is, there is no universal formula to stress and recovery. And we have to view ourselves as a global system with mental, emotional and social factors as well as the physical.

Training is not just as simple as stimulating a muscle and watching it get stronger. It is a complicated mix of mechanical load, neuromuscular adaptations, hormonal responses, nutrient and chemical pathways in the body, … It makes sense then that recovery doesn’t just mean resting the body. Recovery involves hormonal response, stress response, mental state, nutrient and micro nutrient availability, … When we are stressed or overwhelmed or struggling emotionally, our recovery response can be compromised. That doesn’t mean we won’t recover, it just means it might take a little more time during these phases. I think it’s important to be honest about this. We often want to continue on our usual plan to prove to ourselves we’re tough and can fight through when other areas of life are throwing us curve balls. Which might help mentally, and I do believe our ability to work hard persists and can even be enhanced during these times. But we have to be very honest and clear eyed about our recovery. Two or three hard efforts a week might have to come down to one or two in order to make the same gains.

Many high end college coaches have learned this. During exams they have learned that their athletes tend to have high injury rates. So they back right off the intensity during these phases. Their athletes didn’t just suddenly become weak or unfit – they just can’t recover as well as usual because of additional life stresses. And once the stress has diminished, they can roll right back into where they were without having lost any ground.

It’s a bit naïve to think we’ll go through life without any additional external stresses and that we’ll always be able to maintain the same level of training with the same recovery response. We all enter our own “exam phase” at different times, and the best thing we can do is acknowledge it and adapt our training instead of white knuckling it. Whatever we’re going through shall pass, I promise, but let’s keep our bodies strong in the process. Train, then recover extra. Sleep, eat, meditate, walk, socialize, laugh, read, listen to music … this is all as important to your training as the work part, and probably even more so.

On to tomorrow’s workout – we’re back to hills! I think we’ve got some good base hills in, so let’s progress to hills + tempo. This is particularly helpful for those with hilly races on the sched.

Let’s try this cycle: 2 x full Pottery, 1-2 min easy (to cross the street or get somewhere flat-ish and traffic free) – 4 min tempo. Repeat 2-3 times.

That’s all – see you in the am!

Seanna