Recovery

Recovery. It is likely the single most important thing for an aspiring elite endurance athlete. Without it, things get bad. Even ugly. Sometimes very ugly. Promising professional athletes often ravage their bodies in the pursuit of greatness, and seemingly for the ones whose bodies handle it, greatness is achieved. Others, however, become what many refer to as... broken. Either from some recurring injury that refuses to go away or by chronic fatigue so bad that the hard and long workouts required to maintain that elite level of fitness is no longer sustainable. Both of which can take months and even years to recover from, if at all. And at that point it is nearly back to square one, with nearly all of the previous training squandered, because it did not incoporate enough rest.

So if this is so important, how do the ones who succeed get it right? Well almost all have a coach, right there, talking to them every day. These coaches have the knowledge and experience and an outside perspective which proves invaluable in the process of taking an athlete to the elite level and beyond. Many of these coaches have complex formulas based off hundreds of the athletes training sessions with complex gizmos from heart rate monitors to power meters to determine how much and when the all important rest is needed. Some though, seem to just go extremely hard. All the time. As is the case with one particularly high profile coach, who, has produced some of the best endurance athletes the world has seen, along with several ones many consider "broken". But on the other spectrum, is another high profile coach who actually has been incorporating whole days completely off from training, once a week even! And instead of seeing athletes get slower, the results seem to consistently show them getting faster, among being generally healthier and feeling better day to day than they did on previous training with less rest.

I plan to follow the latter philosophy, and am going to try to go as far as I can go, while (almost) always listening to my body and giving it rest when I think it is needed. For many top level endurance athletes, this can sometimes be the most important contribution a coach makes to their training regimen. Simply holding them back when their drive to compete and to win, won't let them do it themselves. I, for one, do not tend to have this problem. Oftentimes, I likely back off too early to prevent injury, illness, or overtraining. Without a coach to tell me when to back off and when to go, I am forced to really listen hard to how I feel and to be able to discern when something is not right and when I'm just trying to be lazy. The result of this is that it could likely take much longer for me to achieve the fitness gains that I need for my goals. However, the goal of this journey is not to see what an elite coach can do for an ordinary athelete. It is to see what an ordinary athlete can do for himself, given adequate time and resources. So as long as I continue to steadily improve, as I have since I started endurance training over 2 years ago, I will continue to go uncoached and to err on the side of caution when it comes to possible injury, illness, or overtraining and give my body more of that all important recovery than it likely needs. At least, until that time comes when I am no longer steadily improving.