Hi, folks. It’s Kelvin here.
In this little video, I’m going to share some thoughts on recovery after a hard event. So, not specifically a workout, as we very rarely go 100% in workouts, but after maybe a super-hard race.
And I’m going to talk about distances to recover from, looking at the 10K all the way up to 100K.
How Many Days Should You Take Off After a Race?
One of the first things that I’m thinking about when I’m recovering myself or I’m working with runners is just a bit of a general rule.
I don’t particularly like rules, but we can do this kind of one day off for every 10K raced.
So, if someone was to race a half marathon, they’re probably looking at a couple of full days off training, maybe a little bit more, depending on the runner’s age and how well they recover.
So, half marathon would give you two to three days off training.
And then obviously, like a marathon, four or five days off training, all the way up to events like 100K, where you might take 10 days, maybe even a little bit longer, again, depending on how well you recover.
What Does Recovery Involve?
So, sometimes that might be just available time to recover, so time to sleep, time to prep meals, make sure that protein intake’s where it needs to be, hydration, day-to-day nutrition, and all of those things.
And because that’s only a general rule, the next thing that I do is we just want to keep a bit of a training log.
So, we still put things in our training even on the days that we don’t run to say, maybe quads felt a bit sore.
Maybe the next day they maybe feel a little bit better, and then maybe the next day they feel a little bit better still, until we’ve got minimal soreness.
And then we might go try a run-walk.
How to Test Your Return to Running
Yeah, so then we do a bit of a test run and just kind of see how we feel.
We might even go out for a walk in our running gear and just do a really short few little short sections of running, and then again record how we felt the next day.
And then, once we’ve done a kind of test run-walk, we think about these kind of sweet spots in running, so what volume we know that we can handle, and we want to sort of build up to that as soon as we can.
Building Back Up to Your Normal Training Volume
So, after something like a 10K or a half marathon, we might build back up to volume in a week.
So, one to two, three maybe days off training, then maybe spend another week building back up to that sweet spot of just general volume, and then maybe a week after that, we might start layering in some intensity.
So, I hope that makes some sort of sense, and if you’ve got any questions, please pop them in the comments below.
And for now, happy running.
