Run energized and refreshed every day
Key #1 BUILD: Chapter 2 - Rest and Revive
New to The Forever Runner Book? Catch up on the Chapters you’ve missed by visiting the Table of Contents.
Chapter #2 Rest and Revive!
Now that we got your training heart rate dialed in and you've got your run plan set up, we want to make sure that you recover enough to enjoy your runs, waking up each morning, refreshed and ready to take on the day.
Imagine, every morning, you're not dragging yourself out of bed. You're refreshed and you're ready to take it on. That can be you, but be aware that as you age, it takes longer to recover. Fortunately, there are a couple things you can work on. I think you're well aware that most of your recovery happens while you're sleeping. So in order to feel good the next day, you really need to be serious about your sleep. We'll be talking about how to adopt a sleep routine to get you in the habit of getting a good night's sleep every night. And then, we'll talk about how you can monitor your stress level. So that you know, whether this is a day you should go out and hit it hard, or you should take it easy. We'll also talk about how to incorporate recovery into your training plan so that even as you're increasing mileage week by week, you build in some recovery time. That way, your body can catch up to what you want to do.
Rest action #1 - Rest
The thing about healthy living is adopting habits. Healthy habits become routines. I want to propose a little routine for you. A Ten, Three, Two, One, Zero, sleep workout. You can modify this the way you want, but it's important to have a little bit of structure as a habit for your sleep to ensure that you're getting good sleep and whether you sleep seven hours or nine hours, what you do before you get ready to sleep is very important. This is a popular plan out there that has some pretty simple rules.
(10) - 10 hours prior to sleep, make sure you're not drinking any caffeine, it takes a long time for caffeine to get out of your system. You don’t want caffeine to keep your activity level going when you actually want a rest. So that's a good guideline to follow.
(3) -3 hours prior to sleep is when you want to finish your last meal. You need time to digest and turn all that stuff off so that when you go to sleep, your body isn't doing other things other than working on rebuilding and recovery. Your body isn’t recovering and rebuilding when it’s digesting.
(2) – If you're working at night, you want to shut that down 2 hours before you go to sleep. If you're working, your mind is all wound up and you want to cut that out a couple of hours before you start to sleep to calm your stress level.
(1) - End your screen time at least an hour before sleep. Because again, that screen time is just bombarding your brain with information and light. Both the information and the light disrupt your sleep hormones.
(0) - Your bedroom should be devoid of electronic devices. It should be cool, and it should be dark, very dark. All three of these are very important for putting your body in the right state for a comfortable sleep because it only takes a little bit of light on your skin to trigger hormones in your body. So the better you can have a consistent place to sleep where it's cool, dark and void of electronics, the better you're going to be.
Give it a try.
Rest action #2 – Monitor daily
Here in action step number two of Rest, I want to talk about how you can monitor your recovery on a daily basis. This is something that I do every single day. I've been doing it for years, and there are a couple of ways to monitor your recovery.
What I did in the old days is measured my waking heart rate. When you first wake up and before you get out of bed, just grab whatever device you have and take a look at what your resting heart rate is when you wake and in general, it should be within two or three beats of your average. What you're looking for is if it's out of whack, up five beats or 10 beats, then you might want to make a decision. Maybe this isn't the day to do my long run or to do that harder workout. And if it's up, you're just not feeling it, then it could be to take a day off. There are apps you can get free on your phone where you can do this, just using your finger over the camera, or you can use your wrist strap or chest strap, whatever works for you.
I’ve also taken to measuring my heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is the balance that you have between your fight and flight response and your rest and recovery response. Basically, the more erratic your heart is operating, the more you're in the recovery phase than the stress phase. There are a few apps out there. My favorite is the “HRV for training” app; it costs $10 on your phone. Again, you use your finger over the camera to measure.
Again, this is a single measurement you take when you wake up. Smart watches can report your HRV around the clock, but for our purposes, we’re only interested in your rested reading. With HRV, its best use is to take a look at weekly or monthly trends to see if your stress levels are trending down or trending up, but on occasional days, it'll notify you your system is a little bit stressed and again, just like with your waking heart rate, it's a good time to do your self-assessment, and decide if you really should go out there or not. So, other than having that mentality of “I've got to get out the door no matter how I feel because it's that important.” Let's take a little bit different approach. Let's do a quick self-assessment before you go out the door. So you're not doing the wrong thing for your fitness and health.
Rest action #3 – Recovery week
Action step number three for Rest is to build in a recovery week. So even though you're running on a consistent basis, you’ll extend your running career and prevent overuse injuries if you tone down your running occasionally.
So recovery is something that you should build in during your base training. If you get into more race-specific training, you're not going to lose fitness by doing a recovery week. It allows your body to kind of catch up to what you've been doing. So every fourth week during your run training, reduce your weekly mileage by 40 or 50%.
One of the easy ways to cut that mileage down is to skip that long run and reduce your other runs down a little bit so that you're still getting out there. If you like to run four times a week, run four times a week, just cut the mileage way back by half of what you'd normally do, but still get out the door on the same day. If you're one of those who runs 5 or 6 days a week, this is a good time to throw in a couple of rest days where you're actually not running at all.
You won’t lose fitness by doing this. This is so important to allow your body to recover from this mileage that you're doing. You know, we weren't necessarily born to run. We were born to walk and what we see as normal as endurance athletes, is a little bit foreign to what our bodies were meant to do in the first place. So that's why this recovery stuff is so important. And especially as we get older, it takes us longer to recover from what we're doing.
If you build this into your training plan, you'll have a ton more energy. You'll feel better when you are running. And, of course, it reduces injuries.
Rest Homework
Okay, here’s your Rest homework. So now it's decision time, again, stop complaining about being tired and sore in start your rest and recovery routines. It's as simple as that.
1. Adopt some sort of a sleep routine.
2. Create a habit of measuring your heart rate or your HRV each morning. So you can have a gauge on what you should be doing during the day.
3. Add that one recovery week every fourth week into your training plan.
Thanks for taking a look. I would appreciate some honest feedback on this chapter. This review is not about spotting typos. Instead, the most useful feedback is about stuff like:
Where do you get confused or lost or have an unanswered question.
Where do you disagree, or have different experiences.
Where you start to get bored and feel like skipping ahead or giving up.
Anything you find especially interesting or helpful.
You can leave comments below(paid member) or email them to me at: Herb@foreverrunner.com
Next Chapter: Chapter 3: Sprint - Run like a kid again using a simple sprint strategy.