Recovery Week!
I’ve had my first real ‘recovery week’ after a 6-ish week training block of base fitness. This successfully completes my first structured training program I think I’ve ever really done. Not that i’ve never trained before, but i’ve never had the fear in me enough — or the desire to crush sports opponents — to put in the kind of dedication I find my self adhering to right now. So with a few weeks of sweating on the trainer behind me it was time to enjoy a week off — program’s orders — and let the body repair.
Train hard play hard?
The time off was suitably exotic for this West Coast Canadian boy and was spent eating, drinking, and wandering around northern Spain. Spain has a great bike culture that was fun to take in.
During the week away I had plans to throw down a towel in the hotels and do some core work, stick with nightly stretch routines, and keep the overeating under control — but none of that happened. I did nothing and ate everything. It was great.
One thing I did manage was to read Primal Endurance by Mark Sisson. After my complete failure in the Dirty Duo race (coming in dead last) I realized my understanding and execution of nutrition sucks. This book proposes an interesting take on competing as a ‘fat adapted’ athlete where you can forego the dirty glucose burn and run for 1,000,000 km on just your fat stores. It’s all part of the paleo approach. The book gets good reviews and Mark was an interesting guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast a few weeks ago so I thought I would give it some attention and loaded it on the Kobo as my book-to-read for the week off.
I’m probably not the person you want to take advice from on any of the nutritional details of the book so i’ll just share a few take-aways I personally took to heart:
- Spend more time on recovery, and make a serious effort to get enough sleep
- All those long slow distance (LSD) miles actually to have aerobic benefit
- Generally speaking, aerobic training happens at 180-age heart rates. So if you are 40 you should hold to 140bpm and under for a proper zone 2/3 training session
- Have more fun!
This last point of having fun was something that I keep having to remind myself as I work through the details of a fitness and nutrition plan. That all still needs to be the bulk of my time right now, but balancing that out with time in the saddle enjoying a new two-wheeled adventure has benefits too.
The final learning from the week off was that recovery really does make a difference! A good night’s sleep and removal from other life stresses mysteriously made all sorts of aches and pains disappear. I really did feel stronger after a week of doing nothing and I can appreciate the power of a good taper week in the days before the big event.
Train hard rest hard!
