July 20, 2019

Training hard and recovering: running and thinking (Across the Sundering Seas, #23)

> You can’t sprint up the mountain your entire life. You just physically can’t.
> —Charity Majors

Earlier today, I (finally!) got to a podcast episode (which has been sitting in my backlog for months; some language, so not kid-friendly) wherein the guest (Charity Majors) said a few interesting bits about seasons of hard work (indeed, the experience of pain in search of payoff) vs. seasons of rest, and it crystallized a few thoughts I’ve been chewing on for months—maybe even years.

(I think there may have been too many parentheticals in that paragraph. [This isn’t helping, is it? Ah, well, might as well run with it.])

For almost a decade now, I’ve been a runner. In college, I fell in love with the game of Ultimate. The spring of 2010, though, I got a nasty case of mono.¹ Even once I came through the struggle with the disease itself, I was completely wiped out physically. Just standing for an hour left me literally needing to go take a nap. Realizing this just wasn’t workable if I wanted to play in a church league again that fall, I started running over the summer. It was a rough start—the first day out, I could barely make it a mile—but I stuck with it. Seven months later, having learned a few things and having found I really enjoy running, I signed up for my first half marathon. The rest is history, as they say.

I have learned a great deal from running over those nine years. In this particular issue, though, I want to focus in on training and recovery. When you’re training for a race—any race, though the contours look very different for a 400m than for a marathon—you do a wide variety of kinds of runs and cross-training. What’s more, you do different kinds of training at different points in the training cycle, including intentionally letting your training level decrease substantially.

Every day is not a bunch of sprints up hills, in other words—even if you’re training for a hilly half marathon, as I am. More than that: not every month in the year is a training month! These are simply hard necessities. If you do not build recovery both into and between your training plans, you will end up injured, overtrained, or both. Overtraining, for those not in this world, is not just a mild degree of being extra tired for a few days; the body goes into a very weird mode where it is stressed out all the time. It is, effectively, exercise-induced burnout.

However, the flipside of that is that there are parts of the training season when you are working really, really hard. That kind of intensity happens both on a day-to-day level and on the macro level. On the day-to-day level: Some days you’re doing quarter-mile hill repeats (pushing as hard as possible up a steep incline) to build length strength and speed on challenging terrain. Some days you’re doing longer-than-race-distance runs, pushing hard on the last few miles. Some days are 50/50 easy/miserably hard. None of those are fun. They just aren’t. But, besides the fact that many other training days are enjoyable, there’s a reward for the miserable days: setting a PR is a lot of fun. I spend a lot of time on those days talking myself through it with exactly that reminder:

> This is where you win on race day. Right now. Right here. Push. This is for race day. Push.

If you do that all the time: overtraining. But if you never do it, you never get faster or stronger. You have to do both, carefully and wisely, so you can continue improving or even just basically maintaining your capacity over time. (All these same basic principles apply equally to other kinds of training, including things quite unlike running.)

I see two immediate applications of these observations from running (and I’d be curious to hear feedback from the many of you out there reading on both of these, as I’d like to turn both of them into fuller-fledged essays later this year):

1. We need hard phases of our mental lives. If we don’t, we don’t grow. Learning is hard! Whether it’s doing a new kind of development or learning a foreign language or trying to understand economics or whatever else, there is an uncomfortable feeling of mental stretching and indeed at times mental pain in the process. That pain doesn’t mean something is wrong (necessarily—see #2!); it often means we’re doing what we set out to do, and with a reward in mind.

2. We need recovery in our mental lives. If we don’t build seasons of recovery from the “hard training” times, we will lose our ability to do that hard training. There’s a great deal of very interesting research on this dynamic around learning in the cognitive psychology space, which I’ve only just dipped into, but it’s very clear from both that science and from the deep wisdom of the thinkers of the past that digging deeply into something and then giving it time to work its way down into you are both important. Some of the most important thinking times in my life have been times when I wasn’t consciously working on some new idea or technology, but when I was just going about my day with the things I had already learned—only to find that my skills were much sharper when I picked up that new idea again.

As always, thanks for reading (and, in today’s case, for putting up with so many parentheticals). I’d love to hear your thoughts on this kind of healthy back-and-forth between training and recovery—and hey, if any of you are really into running or cycling or something, I’d love to hear about that, too!