Recovery Dayzzzz
Running as a dressage horse or a sloshing bathwater. Your choice.
Recovery days should feel like you’re a dressage horse moving perfectly through drills: knees high, feet extended, chest bright and chin in. Your brain is the rider; your body is the horse.
Contrast this with the more popular concept of recovery day: a run that’s easy to get through. These runs feel like you’re bathwater sloshing through a tub. This is not a good use of your time or effort. If your recovery runs typically have that bathwater-slosh, change that immediately. You’ll only get bored or injured or both.
Creating good recovery days.
Recovery days should serve you, but not take over. They should feel like different effort, not no effort at all. Especially in the days and weeks after a race, recovery becomes the job.
But there is a danger: instead of tapering down, you can find yourself just tapering off.* Instead of repairing stressed muscles, you can relax into using the wrong ones. Not a path to your best runs. The issue is that even with these risks, recovery days are non-negotiable. It’s tempting for any enthusiastic athlete to shorten post race recovery, which leads to injury. It’s also tempting for anyone who just got into running to let recovery become the standard, a formula for plateauing. So the central part of recovery is this: how to remain interested in the run or run series, while still clocking in at recovery pace?
A Short Aside: Stoic Running needs to be a book!
So let’s make one!
I don’t think of Stoic Running as runfluencing (a portmanteau so awful no one should aspire to it) but instead as a guide for living. I’d like to write this guide, long-form.
I’m going to do my best to follow Robert Caro’s dictum to “show, not tell” and to create a non-fiction work so compelling that readers look forward to every page turn.
I think I need about $8K to do this. That means that if each subscriber donated $8.00, I could get there.
If you’d like to support it, please consider changing your subscription from “free” to “paid” for a month or two or donating a flat $8 to the effort.
Thanks for your support! I love writing this column every week. And I love even more that you read it.
It takes effort. That effort is what moves your recovery runs from sloshing bathwater to precision dressage practice.
You need to be sharp, but not necessarily fast. Do this by paying attention to your traps, your lats, and your pelvic floor. Get your foot strike right. Adjust it for miles. This is you-as-dressage-horse. You might feel funny, but you will not look weird; these adjustments are simply too small to notice in most runners. And the upside is that you will recover faster. Plus, the required focus will spark your mind, even as your sore muscles use the pace to repair and regrowth.
You also need to pay attention to the pains that surface or the ones that have been hanging out for a while. Are they injuries or signs of strengthening? Will they respond to simple corrections or will you have to break yourself of a bad habit?
Lastly, recovery runs are different from obviously challenging ones insomuch that the slow pace itself can cause pain and discomfort. That doesn’t mean you’re “too strong” to maintain a slow pace; that means you’re too weak to maintain your form while moving slowly. That is a problem to take seriously, as it is typically a precursor to injury.
Rounding this all up, recovery days don’t mean no effort days. They mean slower paced days, maybe lower mileage days. But they don’t mean lazy days. The focus of your mind is almost more important in these days than on your more challenging training runs because the stress of the workout isn’t inherently there. You have to make the challenge happen. You have to take the opportunity to continue working, even if it feels like you can lay back in so many ways. Slow days are easy, but recovery days can’t count as time off. Go run.
*Author’s Note: this actually happened to me after my most successful season I ever ran. I just took too much time in recovery; I tapered off. Then, the really unexpected happened: my three coaches all had to leave my school for various reasons at the same time. I ran as fast as that year again, but only barely, and not without great effort.
Please “heart” ❤️ this newsletter. It’s a free way for more people to find this work and the running communities hiding right below our noses.
What great analogies! A very clear and true message. Thanks!
So glad you enjoyed it @Henriette!