Rest your weary soul
A sojourn in the gray land of effort/not-effort
Walking down the carpeted halls of my office I break into a bouncy trot. I lavishly feel the twitching strength in my calves and thighs. I feel like a physical coiled spring, an athlete. This is the training effect.
It is the end of a rest week. What is this strange new world? What is this bizarre universe where I run less and feel stronger?
It is the rest week.
In the bad old days when I was young…cue old guy sitting in a lawn chair on his porch…”When I was a boy w didn’t get rest weeks…all we had was rocks…and instead of resting we just hit ourselves with the rocks…yeah…that’s how training is supposed to be…hard…darn kids these days with their rest weeks…”
I have, through necessity and good coaching, learned something new, and I think many of us old timers are learning this new thing. I don’t have to run every day. I don’t have to beat myself senseless with miles and effort and intensity.
I can, God forbid take a week off. Not completely off, but ‘off’ in the ‘rest week’ sense; off in the in the sense of ‘less’ not ‘more’. What an epiphany!
These rest weeks work. Not only the physical, but the mental rest is a wonderful boon in the middle of a training campaign. I find myself filled with barely restrained energy actually looking forward to the next hard week’s workouts. I find myself mentally buoyed by the rest.
Instead of grudgingly forcing myself to the workouts I look forward to them. Instead of finding ways to cheat the workouts because I’m mentally and physically exhausted, I find ways to cheat in the other direction, doing more than the coach asks and loving it.
This is an interesting turn of events. There is a lesson here for us old-timers and you young fire-breathers as well.
I have always seen a marathon campaign as a 14-16 week escalating calendar of effort. You had some step back weeks, but even these were not rest weeks per se. They were the back side of the wave and a fresh set was heading right at you.
The hardest part about this new world is mentally convincing myself that it is ok. It’s ok not to run every day. It’s ok to schedule a rest day or a rest week. It is not cheating to step away from the hard workouts for a week and let your body heal.
Is there a loss in performance by not hitting it hard constantly? If there is any loss in performance it is outweighed by the simple fact that I will probably get to the starting line this year without having to take a couple weeks off for injury. I’ll actually complete the training cycle. It’s been a few years since that has happened.
What’s the value of showing up healthy? Certainly I still think that more and harder volume could squeeze another 10-15 minutes off my finishing time, but what good is that if I don’t make it to the starting line in one piece?
As hard as it is with my personality, I think that is a tradeoff I’m willing to make. I’ll need a good day to qualify at Boston this year. It’s not a certainty. I’d give it a 50/50 chance. I’m not sure I have the hill strength or the miles to hold pace to the end.
But, I’m going to show up with a chance. And that’s what training campaigns are all about; giving you a chance on race day. Putting you in the position to succeed to meet your ‘A’ goal if you have a good day and the weather is right. That’s all you can ask for.
This has been a mental shift for me to not work so hard, to take some rest weeks, to show up healthy. I’m sure many of you struggle with the same daemons. I feel good about this. If we truly believe that it’s not about the results, if we truly believe that it’s about the journey and the honest effort then we can let ourselves be healthy at a healthy level of training and still achieve the merit of the thing.
The hardest thing for me over the last 15 or so years as I’ve gotten older is learning to gracefully give it back. To keep the core of the gift but to give back the hard edges of competitiveness and training. To be true to myself and worthy to my training without immolating myself in the process.
This is not a loss. This is a victory. This is the power of the rest week.