Recovery

I probably shouldn't be attempting to write this right now, but here goes. It's pre-season build up time for all the cyclo-bloggers, and we're being treated to all sorts of impressive details regarding the training accomplishments of our heroes. Reading these accounts, I'm left wondering if the subjects put as much thought into recovery and improvement as they do filling up the training log. It would be nice to get a discussion going here, and I'm somewhat pressed for time this morning, so I'm going to throw out some ideas and turn this over to my faithful readers to do their worst. That seems a lot easier than trying to put all this together into a coherent essay, which you may have noticed does not happen around here very often anymore.

Start with Friel's recent "Basic Training Assumptions" post. Joe's original Training Bible had some good basic stuff and was well-written for the typical amateur athlete, but his new testaments drift around quite a bit it seems, over-influenced by whatever the last seminar he attended was. We all know how difficult it is to continually come up with new material that is any good... But you still have to read what he has to say.

Then we have American Blogging Idol Gewilli's query on foregoing recovery days in favor of split workouts. Interestingly, G-String also advocates a "drag race start" force workout similar to Coggan (I don't have time to find the link, but it's probably listed here somewhere). My mentorissimo Michel Ferrari describes an interesting hybrid approach you should also read up on. Last but not least, we have PE.720 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You may not think of this school first when it comes to collegiate athletic powerhouses, but they have made respectable showings on their bikes at collegiate nats, and their rowers are no slouches when it comes to VO2 max. Besides that, they have The Beaver Cheer, and that's got to be worth something. Anyway, somewhere in the coursework the strength coach advises taking a full 72 hours between hard weight sessions. Chew on that for a bit little beaver.

So how do you know if you're recovered? What is recovery anyway? How come I never read much about it on your blog? Is it not important to you? If you're planning to say "I know I'm recovered because I can bounce back to x power or whatever after two days, so I must be ready to train again" then how do you know that this isn't just the level that you've adapted too? In other words, how does that help you get better? In laying out an aggressive training plan, are you actually getting faster or just adapting yourself to higher volume? I'd submit that endurance is the easiest component of "fitness" to adapt to. Observe that tens of thousands of people complete marathons and/or ride centuries, even race iron distance triathlons, and then contrast that to how many people get really fast. Pouring on volume and building endurance is relatively straightforward, but does it give the subject a false sense of improvement? Sure, you build some strength along the way, and probably lose some fat, so you get a bit faster, but is it the productivity you're looking for?

Be cautious when evaluating the training plans put forth by all the self-proclaimed coaching experts (besides me that is). When asked why they hire a coach, most of the wannabee athletes I know list "being held accountable" as their number one reason for not going it alone. Coaches know this, and since you've admitting to not being capable of self-motivation, they're naturally going to lay out an over-ambitious plan because in all likelihood you're going to miss the proposed target, or at least that's what you've suggested in your self-eval.

Solobreak adds a few other things about training: 1) Everyone is different. For some reason this gets lost. 2) So-called "training" is just adaptive stress, so whatever you do equips you to do just that. 3) Recovery is just like training. You can give it names like macrocycle and microcycle or what have you, but just as you have to recover from each interval, you have to recover from each training session, each training block, each training season, and so on. How do you judge this, or do you? Going back to point #2, how do you know that you're not just recovering enough to take up where you left off? If you recover quickly and are always able to maintain training volumes, how do you know that this is a case of adequate recovery and not that your workouts simply were not intense enough to force the kind of adaptive improvements you seek? Are you sure that you wouldn't do better with more recovery, less volume, and more intense workouts? Thank for reading.