TRAIN HARD, RECOVER HARDER

Most age groupers do not understand recovery, much less prioritize it. I was one of these athletes for the first decade of my triathlon career. 

I completed my first triathlon back in 2010 at the River Cities Triathlon in Shreveport, Louisiana. River Cities is a great sprint triathlon and an excellent choice for anyone’s first tri. I signed up for the race on April 1 which gave me a full four months to prepare (the race is traditionally held on the first Sunday of August). At the time I signed up, I couldn’t run a half mile without stopping and 50 yards in the pool left me seeing spots. With that race on my calendar, though, I became laser focused on training. I trained hard - especially for my level of fitness. And I gave precisely zero thought to recovery. 

Fast forward five years, and after completing several sprints and one Olympic distance race, I decided to sign up for my first 70.3. I jumped into a 16 week training plan and once again, I focused on training hard - putting my best effort into my training sessions. Again, I gave no thought to recovery. In fact, I didn’t really understand recovery at all back then. A stress fracture showed up about 30 days before our trip to Miami. I made it to the start line after a forced month-long taper and started ok - but a bike mechanical ended my day.  A year later, at IM 70.3 Texas I got my first 70.3 medal after a horrible, struggle of a day. I was proud to finish but I realized I had a lot to learn about training for longer races. My dream to become an IRONMAN in spite of my bad experiences with my first two attempts at the 70.3 distance (the dnf in Miami and the suckfest in Galveston) set me on my current mission to understand and maximize recovery. 

The first thing I learned is that recovery is more than just rest. Recovery takes place during rest, so consistent, quality sleep is essential. But good recovery also requires proper nutrition. This means the athlete needs to refuel with enough calories, macronutrients (carbs, protein, fat) and micronutrients for the body to repair and rebuild. Getting this refueling right is harder than it may seem. For example after a hard session your body will be screaming for carbs in an effort to replenish your glycogen stores. This is a priority because glycogen provides energy for fight or flight responses. But if you neglect protein intake, your muscle repair will suffer. And even worse, your body will likely still signal that you need to continue eating beyond your carb needs in an effort to find more protein. If you continue to eat carb heavy in response, other health issues can arise such as elevated blood sugar late in the day which can negatively impact sleep in the short term or even develop insulin resistance in the long term. This is why I developed LAN R4P to be a great tasting, easy to digest, high quality source of protein to help an athlete nail their recovery nutrition.

The second thing I learned is that to improve your fitness,  your recovery must equal or exceed your training. If you do not successfully recover from your training, you will lock yourself into a downward trend that eventually leads to fatigue, sickness, and likely injury. How to track and monitor the effectiveness of your recovery is a topic for another blog post. There are both quantitative (HRV, resting heart rate trends for example) and qualitative approaches (basically how do you feel). The overarching principle, though, is that your recovery needs to correlate with the intensity and volume of your training. An effective, common sense approach is to avoid stacking too many hard sessions. If you have big volume and/or intensity on the weekend for example (most training plans do in some form), then make sure Monday is an easy day (i.e. swim only). And on nutrition, don’t just focus on your fueling during training - make sure to have some quality food and supplements ready for post workout. This may involve some meal prep ahead of time etc… But having easy to eat options that hit your macro and micro needs is critical. 

One final thought… Consistent training is the key to improvement. But recovery is the key to being able to train consistently.  This is why our training philosophy is “TRAIN HARD, RECOVER HARDER”.