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Today I want to talk about rest.
This is yet again another mistake I’ve made in the past. And it all goes to the fact that we are all built differently.
Rest for one person might look different from rest for another. Copying someone’s strategies in running or life might not always work out the same way it did for them.
But rest is crucial, and getting it right can make or break your goal.
Let’s jump in!
What is a Rest Day
When it comes to training, a rest day can take 2 forms:
- It could be a full day of rest; no running, no exercise whatsoever.
- It could also be a day with a small recovery run or cross training.
Typically, in my schedule, I have one full rest day where I don’t do anything other than maybe a walk in the evening with my wife.
But that’s not my only rest day. I also have 2 recovery run days in my typical week. These are shorter 5-6 mile runs at a recovery pace.
Why and how did I get there in my routine?
I have now read 3 different books on the science and physiological adaptations surrounding training for a marathon.
Every single one includes recovery runs. These are crucial to success. But a lot of people still get them wrong. Myself included.
In my last training block, my shortest average run was around 11 miles. That included my recovery runs. Some weeks maybe I got down to an 8 miler for recovery days.
That is way too long. Even for a marathoner.
The goal of a recovery run is just that: recover.
How do you recover, you might ask?
If I had to break it down from what I’ve learned, there are 2 goals to cross off for a successful recovery day:
- Increase blood flow
- Don’t add stress
In other words, we want to increase blood flow to our legs. This helps move built up lactate and other junk from our legs, and clean them with fresh oxygen for our harder workouts later in the week.
The second piece is that as we add more blood to our legs, we don’t want to then over stress the body and undo all the refreshment they just got from increased blood flow.
This can be achieved by one golden rule: run slow for a shorter distance.
What about Cross Training?
The other option for recovery is cross training. This can be any other aerobic based exercise like swimming, cycling, elliptical, ski erg, row erg, etc.
However, like anything in life, there are tradeoffs.
You want to pick something that you can push at an easy effort aerobically without getting worn out. In other words, get your heart rate slightly elevated before your muscles give out.
If you are a runner, your body is used to running and so you can get into an easy pace where breathing is under control, your heart rate is elevated to zone 2 but not above, and your legs feel strong.
You may not be able to do the same on a bike.
I know for me, sometimes my legs feel like they are exhausted and yet my heart rate is still in zone 1. My legs just aren’t used to cycling as much as they are running.
But again, our goal is mainly to increase blood flow. So my take is that if you are doing recovery work, don’t worry about the numbers or effort so much. Just get on the bike and go for an appropriate recovery time.
What time is that?
You could get technical about it and estimate going around 3x the distance of your run. So if a recovery run is 5 miles, you need to bike 15. Or you could just stick to a time based routine and add ~15 minutes. So I typically just hop on the bike for an hour because it takes me 45 minutes to run a 5 mile recovery run.
But even that can be a little too complicated. So when in doubt, just match the time it would take you to run. If you run for 45, cycle for 45. Keep it simple and just get on there and do it.
The biggest benefit to cross training surrounds that second goal of a recovery day: don’t add stress.
When we run, our body absorbs a ton of impact. When we cycle, swim, or elliptical we do not. That extra impact adds extra stress, which can lead to potential injuries.
So on top of limiting stress and potentially hurting recovery, you are also pretty safe from any injuries that day.
Win win!
So we should always cross train and never do a recovery run?
Unfortunately, that’s not quite true either.
This goes back to the first point, actually: increasing blood flow. When we run, we are using the exact same muscles we do on the other days we run…duh.
When we swim, that’s not the case. It increases blood flow, yes, but it might not increase blood flow to the exact same muscles in the same way that running would.
It doesn’t necessarily add more mileage on our legs.
When we have more mileage on our legs, our bodies continue to adapt to running and it gets easier and easier.
Cycling is much closer to running than swimming, but still not perfect.
That being said, if cross training is keeping you from getting injured, then by all means replace it all. But if you can comfortably run all your recovery runs, that will technically be more optimal.
But why take the literature at face value?
I’m going to put it to the test. This entire marathon block, I’m planning on replacing one recovery day with a cycle instead. My goal with this experiment is to see if I stay 100% injury free during the block and after.
My last 2 blocks I have either had some kind of injury during training or shortly after the marathon.
Let’s see if I can end that trend.
What is NOT a Rest Day
The first mistake a ton of beginner runners make, myself included, is never running slow.
Always run as fast as you can everyday.
If you do that, you will never recover.
The best advice I’ve gotten is to never look at pace on recovery days. In fact, if you are bold enough, you could just leave the watch at home and go run a route you know and love.
I’ve never tried that because I’m not crazy and I’m addicted to the data. So maybe I am crazy, but in a different way.
If you are like me and refuse to leave the watch because a run that doesn’t show up on Strava is a run that never happened, there is still hope. You can start your run and turn the screen to show your heart rate only. Don’t worry about pace, just go off of effort and heart rate. Or turn the screen away completely so you can’t see anything.
The second mistake I made was running too far.
It doesn’t matter how good you are, if you run 10 miles in one go that will add stress to your body that you don’t need. That’s why most experts suggest a 4-6 mile recovery run.
Elite runners who need to stack up 100+ miles in a week, will often run doubles. This means they might run 8-12 miles on a recovery day, but they will split it into two separate runs, both targeting that 4-6 mile range.
So even the elites don’t run long recovery runs.
Again, you want the distance to feel short. In fact, on a recovery run day, you should feel like you didn’t really get a workout in. At the end of the run, it should feel like your workout is cut short and you should be able to keep going.
If your recovery runs start to feel otherwise, then you may be running them too hard OR this could be an early sign of overtraining.
When I ran 11 mile recovery runs everyday, this is what happened to me. They felt like hard runs even though they were at slower paces. Then I was not refreshed for my actual hard sessions, and I could never perform well when it mattered.
Why Rest Days are Important for Your Goals
Now for the question we’ve all been waiting for.
We get what rest days are, “we never even needed your long explanation, David”.
But what are they good for?
Key workout days are when we break down the body to adapt to faster paces for longer distances. These include the long run, tempo runs, intervals, and v02 max sessions, all of which we’ll talk about as this series continues.
Well, like I said before, when you do one of your key workouts, you break down your muscle and build up lactate and other junk inside your muscles.
Quick science break: glycogen is the fuel for your muscles. We get glycogen most efficiently from carbs. When you burn glycogen to create energy, it’s just like burning gas to create energy for your car: you will create exhaust byproduct. That’s what stays in your muscles and what we want to get rid of.
We also want to take our rest days as a day to replenish that fuel you burned up in your previous key workout.
When we do this right, all the adaptations from your last key workout actually get absorbed into your body.
That’s honestly the best way to view it: a key workout creates the adaptation, and a recovery run absorbs it.
If you create adaptations everyday and never rest, your body will not actually grow.
How it Relates to Life
Once again, running has done it. It has created the perfect analogy for life. At least in my incredibly biased opinion.
Because just like in running, we can’t grow in any aspect of life if we don’t take proper rest. This can be in building a business, writing a book, or achieving any goal you set your mind to.
You need rest.
You need to recharge and come back later. Just like running, this gives your body time to absorb all the things you just learned or worked on, and then actually grow.
It also gives you time to refuel. With running it’s an easy thing to see. Obviously, we need fuel to run in the form of food. And we use that up when we run.
But what about life?
In life there are all sorts of fuel: food is still fuel for the brain, so you need that. But I think motivation is a fuel too. If you work and work and work and never rest, you will run your motivation dry. Peace and happiness over your goal is a fuel too. Burning out empties the tank on peace and happiness and is quickly replaced with anxiety and a begrudging attitude. I could go on and on.
But the reality is if all you do is work towards the goal, you will burn out, get injured, or worst of all, you may just quit.
Which is not a form of rest.
I believe this is the key reason God created the world in 7 days and commanded us to follow suit. In the Ten Commandments, He said honor the Sabbath. That means to rest, to take time away from the grind of work, spend the day with God, let Him refill your soul, mind, and body so when you go back to work, you are at 100% fuel capacity. All the work you did before has been absorbed, and the excitement and motivation you had is back.
Just as with running, you may not always want to take rest. You may feel energy and excitement to keep going and run harder.
That’s great! Rest anyways.
It’s a lot easier to rest on days you feel good, than to ignore rest and end up forcing yourself to work hard on days you feel bad.
So no matter what the goal is, always remember to rest.
Until next time, run with joy!
