After disappointing performances in a couple of key tune-up races last fall, a depleted Ryan Hall made the hard decision to withdraw from the Chicago Marathon. Too many grinding 15-mile tempo runs at a five-minute-per-mile pace at 7,000 feet with too little rest afterward had finally caught up with him. “I love to push my body,” he says. “Recovery is the hardest part of training for me.”
Problem is, if you don’t take time for proper rest and recuperation, your body won’t adapt to the stress of your training—you won’t get stronger or faster, explains Stacy Sims, Ph.D., of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, School of Medicine. Neglect recovery for too long, and you will start to lose strength and speed. You’ll sink into the black hole known as overtraining.
First, your sleep patterns and energy levels feel the effects. Eventually, your immune system crashes, and you lose your appetite. It’s like burning out your engine. And you don’t have to be logging 100-mile weeks to suffer. Recreational runners can overtrain, too. “With deadlines, chores, bills, kids, and lack of sleep, it’s more challenging to recover properly from your runs,” says Sims.
So in preparation for the 2011 Boston Marathon, Hall used an online recovery-tracking program called Restwise, which looks at simple biological markers that are recorded by the athlete first thing each morning, calculates a daily recovery score from 1 to 100, then trends it over time. (Restwise subscriptions start at $99 for six months; go to restwise.com.)
Pay attention to the following ten markers. If three or more of these indicators raise a red flag, you should consider a few easy sessions or off-days so you can return to running strong. Says Hall, “Now I’m learning to love to rest.”
A 2 percent drop in weight from one day to the next indicates a body-fluid fluctuation. Most likely, you didn’t hydrate enough during or after your last workout. Dehydration negatively affects both physical and mental performance, and could compromise the quality of your next workout.
Take your pulse each morning before you get out of bed to find what’s normal for you. An elevated resting heart rate is one sign of stress. It means your nervous system has prepared for fight-or-flight by releasing hormones to speed up your heart and move more oxygen to the muscles and brain. Realize that your body won’t know the difference between physical and psychological stress. A hard run and a hard day at work both require extra recovery.
A pattern of consistently good sleep will give you a boost of growth hormones, which are great for rebuilding muscle fibers. Several nights in a row of bad sleep will decrease reaction time along with immune, motor, and cognitive functions—not a good combination for a workout.
This can indicate dehydration, although it might also be the result of the consumption of certain vitamins, supplements, or foods the evening before. The darker the color, the more you’re struggling to retain fluids, because there’s not enough to go around. You need H2O to operate (and recover).
If your energy level is low, there’s something amiss. The key to realizing this is honesty. Athletes can block out signs of fatigue and push through it, thinking they will become stronger. But it doesn’t always work that way.
When your body is overwhelmed by training (or other stressors), it produces hormones like cortisol that can cause irritability or anxiety. Stress also stops the body’s production of good chemicals like dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that has a positive effect on your mood. Crankiness probably means not enough recovery.
Any illness, or even a woman’s menstrual cycle, will increase your need for energy to refuel your immune system, which works overtime when you’re sick. This means fewer resources are available for a recovery from training.
Whether you’re sore from overworked muscles or an injury, your body needs more energy to put toward repair, lengthening total recovery time.
This is a subjective measure of workout quality, not quantity or intensity. If you felt great on yesterday’s run, you’d evaluate that as “good.” If you felt sluggish on that same run, you’d count it as “poor.” Trending workout quality—multiple consecutive “poor” marks—is one of the easiest ways to identify the need for more recovery.
The amount of oxygen in the hemoglobin of the red blood cells can be measured by placing your fingertip in a portable pulse oximeter, a gadget available online for about $40. The higher the percentage, the better: Above 95 percent is the norm at sea level or for an athlete who is fully acclimated to a given altitude. This is a new area in recovery science, requiring more research, but there may be a link between low oxygen saturation and the need for more recovery.