The Importance of Recovery

The topic of recovery has come up a lot this past week via various Facebook posts/comments, and since the past week was a recovery week for me, I thought I’d weigh in with my thoughts. Some (in fact many) endurance athletes seem to always go, go, go, racking up the mileage and never seeming to take a break. And it’s not just ultra-cyclists – many of my triathlete and runner friends seem to log way more training hours than I do for a good portion of the year – yet they accuse me of being the crazy one! What makes us so obsessive about continually cranking out the miles irregardless of what our bodies may be trying to tell us? I guess the culprit is at least partially the segment of our personalities that in fact allows us to do endurance athletics in the first place – the need to always be doing something. We feel lost when we stop for a breather and don’t have that 6 hour workout to fill our Sunday – endurance athletics bring a certain degree of order and routine to our lives. Add to that the fact that we surround ourselves with others with the same affliction, and then peer pressure and guilt begin to factor in too – even if you do convince yourself to take it easy for a recovery period, then you see everyone else around you cranking out the miles/hours and you suddenly start doubting yourself and feeling guilty about sitting on the couch (or better yet, foam roller) for an afternoon rather than slogging it out on the bike or trails for umpteen hours.

Many of these same people who are constantly on the go are then dismayed and shocked when they get injured, sick, feel sluggish, or are constantly tired. I would like to think that we endurance athletes are a relatively smart box of cookies, but when you see this behavior you start to wonder!! I’ve been there and done that though – ran/biked/swam myself into the ground and got injured, exhausted, and unmotivated. I like to think that I’ve learned from those past mistakes though, and have become better at listening to my body. That’s not to say I don’t train any time I’m tired, or that I’m constantly taking full recovery – that’s not it at all. The key is periodization. I train really hard for a block of 3-4 weeks, pushing my body to it’s limits, and then I back off for a week and let my body recover and adapt to that block of training. If you constantly stay in a beat down state though, then your body is too busy trying to “survive”, and it may not adapt such that you see the gains you otherwise would have from the hard training that you did. I’m not an expert in human physiology and alike, and I’m certainly not claiming that we’re all the same and that what works for me will work for everyone. We’re each unique individuals, and it’s a long and intricate process to get to the point where you can listen to your body and understand the subtleties of what it’s trying to tell you and successfully walk that fine line between overtraining and maximizing your training. Some people are just genetic freaks who are incredibly gifted athletically who can do anything and everything and never get injured or tired – but I can’t look at what they’re doing and then try to apply that to myself and expect the same results. I’m not them – I’m me, and I have to do what my body will allow me to do (of course all the while trying to coax it to do just a little bit more than it would really like to do!). I’m a mere mortal, lacking any particular athletic gift apart from perhaps a healthy dose of stubbornness! So I have to train accordingly.

So that brings me to this past week – my first recovery week of 2011 (well apart from the first weekend of the year when I was recovering from my 325 mile botched attempt at a 750 mile ride the week after Christmas – as well as thawing out from an encounter with a blizzard and frigid temperatures in Arizona of all places while visiting the Grand Canyon!). On January 8th I did a 100 mile ride including Mt. Hamilton followed by a hilly 60 mile ride through the Los Altos hills the next day. On January 15th I did a 100 mile ride to the coast with climbs up Old La Honda, Haskins, Stage, Lobitos Creek, and Tunitas, followed by a mellower 70 mile ride the next day. Then on January 22nd I did 112 miles out to the coast with climbs up Kings Mountain, Stage, Haskins, West Alpine, and Stevens Canyon, followed by a mellower 80 mile ride the next day. So that was 3 back to back weekends of 160-190 miles, with quite a bit of quality climbing (considering it’s January – we had a gorgeous spell of weather though!). Plus during the week I was cranking out 5-8 hours on the stationary trainer doing a lot of standing intervals, and I was also doing 2hrs a week at Integrate Performance Fitness doing strength/power training. By the end of the 3rd weekend, I could tell that I needed to back off for a week and let my body recover, so this past week became a recovery week – a couple easy spinning sessions on the stationary trainer, 1 strength/power workout at Integrate, and a relatively flat and easy 80 mile ride on the weekend. Some point to the 80 mile ride and say “Hah! That’s not a recovery ride! You’re saying one thing but doing the opposite!”. Sure, that ride wouldn’t have been a recovery ride for everyone, but what makes it a recovery ride for me is the fact that it had no sustained or steep climbs, I kept the ride at an easy pace not exerting myself for any long stretches, and in the days leading up to the ride I’d been taking it extremely easy. Additionally, given my base fitness right now, a fairly flat 80 mile ride in 4:45 is a relatively easy recovery ride for me. My original plan was to have only ridden 60 miles on Saturday and then done 30-45 miles on Sunday, however the weather forecast had quite a bit of rain on Sunday so I opted to bump up the mileage a bit on Saturday and then only do a very easy and short stationary trainer ride on Sunday.

Coupled with backing off on the duration and intensity of my workouts during my recovery week, I also tried to do other things to aid in recovery – things like doing additional foam rolling and stretching, and getting a deep tissue massage with one of my sponsors – David Ledesma. One of my regularly scheduled morning classes at Integrate Performance Fitness even aligned perfectly with my recovery week in that all we did for the hour was foam rolling and stretching – it was like Al had read my mind! So the end total for my recovery week was less than 8hrs of training, plus lots of stretching and foam rolling, compared to in the range of 20hrs/week the 3 previous weeks. I think it was a successful recovery week – now I’m looking forward to ramping things up again in the coming month and hopefully feeling rested and fresh so that I can get even more gains out of this next block of training!

So if you take anything away from this post, let it be that recovery is just as important if not more so than any training that you do. How much recovery you need is a very personal thing, but learning to listen to your body so that you can find that optimal balance for you is extremely important if you hope to do endurance athletics and not burn out.