Recovery

One of the most important but underrated aspects of physical fitness is recovery.  Recovery is when the physical adaptation to exercise and the neural "reprogramming" occur.  For the purposes of this post, I'm talking about recovering after a competitive event, peaking after a training cycle, or an exceptionally difficult workout. Before I get started, remember, the better condition you’re in, the shorter your recovery will be.

So you've completed your training-cycle/event/workout what’s next?

• ASAP: If you feel like you may have injured yourself or there is a spot that typically bothers you (example: Bum knee or chronic tendonitis), get ice on it.
• ASAP: Hydrate, especially if you are in warm conditions or completed a long endurance activity.
• <1 hour: Eat something to help replenish glycogen stores and prevent muscle catabolism.  Preferably something with carbs and complete (animal) proteins.  I've heard the magic ratio is 4:1 carbs to proteins.  Chocolate milk fits those criteria well, so do some sports drinks like Accelerade that mix sugars and protein.  Most importantly, just eat.  Eating anything is still better than nothing.
• 0-24 hours:  Stretch and massage.  This is dependent on personal preference, but I find doing light stretching and self massage with a foam roller to be useful.
• That day:  Sleep.
• In the days after: Active recovery and cross-training.  This can be as simple a walk and stretching.  The purpose is to get blood flowing to your muscles and connective tissue.

There are some more things to consider when it comes to injury.  First off, I'm not going to prescribe anything for a specific injury, leave that to a professional.  I will suggest some common ways to combat injuries.  It goes without saying if you think you're seriously injured, see a doctor.

The Really Long-Run Continued...

So, a while back I wrote about my experimentation with a long runs of 25 and 30 miles as opposed to the recommended long runs of most plans maxing out at 20 miles.  I promised to report results so here they are:  This year I ran the marathon in 3:58:59 unofficially (officially, they fucked up my time).  That is an improvement of four minutes and 29 seconds from last year.  Now on the surface this improvement is probably less than can be expected normally running your second marathon, however there were a number of other factors at play:

• The race was wet and windy this year.
• The race was bigger and I started further back contributing to a slower start.
• The base of running mileage was much less this year.  During the first week of April in 2010, I was able to run a 12-mile long run and about 22 miles for the week.  This year, I was only able to run about five miles at a time and a total of around 15 for the week.
• I wasn't any better running this race tactically than last year.  Last year, I picked up the pace in the middle of the race, this year I did the exact same thing.
• Because of injury and missed weeks of training, I aimed to run only slightly faster than last year.  If you don't intend on running significantly faster in a marathon it won't happen.