Recovery Today

This week has got me thinking a lot about this topic. Particularly since last Saturday when I went out for a good hard ride feeling quite good even, yet, could not seem to pick up the pace like I could with ease a couple weeks ago. And then, after the ride, my legs felt so tired that I couldn't tell if I was in pain or not. Whatever it was, it was extremely uncomfortable. Almost like a fatigue so deep it was in the bones themselves. And I almost felt nauseated when I moved around. All this did not go away when I went for my afternoon run, but it did feel somewhat better after. So I took the next day easy. And the next day as well. Yet, though that day only consisted of a relatively easy swim and an easy run, I again felt the same as Saturday. And to top it off, there were slight symptoms of an illness trying to attack me as well. So I took a good hard look at my recent nutrition to try to find if there was anything I might be missing. An electrolyte imbalance such as low sodium or potassium levels, perhaps? Low iron levels? Or simply fatigue catching up to me. All of these could possibly have been culprits. Though my diet seemed to not be missing any of the important nutrients and electrolytes, so I rested. Took the whole day off. Wasn't an easy thing to do. Even with possible illness symptoms growing, I was still brimming with pent up energy from relatively light workouts the two previous days. But now, with an easy hour long run today, I'm feeling great. And ready to rock tomorrow and build into a big weekend. But I won't. Because this week is a recovery week. And my body already has told me it needed more recovery than I wanted to give it. So I'm going to listen. And give it even more than I think it needs. Because it isn't about going big this weekend. It's about next week. And the week after that. And after that one. And the months and months of bigger and bigger training to come. To put it in perspective, I believe that taking this one day off now accompanied by a few easy and moderately easy days will allow me to go bigger over the next few weeks and keep that all too familiar period of 3 days completely off to recover from illness followed by two weeks of easy workouts to get back to business again.