Pfitzinger Pete - Advanced Marathoning

Recovery from training is important, both from day to day and over the course of your marathon-preparation program. Poor management of your recovery can lead to overtraining, which simply overwhelms your body’s ability to respond positively to training. In this chapter, we’ll review how to optimize your recovery for marathon success.

One of the realities of running is that if you do a hard workout today, you won’t be a better marathoner tomorrow. In fact, tomorrow you’ll just be tired. Hard training causes immediate fatigue, tissue breakdown, dehydration, and glycogen depletion. Depending on the difficulty of the training session (and other factors discussed in this chapter), you’ll require from 2 to 10 days to completely recover from a workout.

At some point, however, the fatigue of each workout dissipates and you adapt to a higher level. To optimize your training, you need to find the correct balance between training and recovery for you. Training provides the stimulus for your body to adapt, but recovery is when you allow your body to adapt and improve. Well-designed training sessions also provide a stimulus for your body to adapt to a higher level, which is called supercompensation.

Effectively managing your recovery means answering two questions:

1. How many days after a workout do you reap the benefits of that workout?

2. How much time should you allow between hard workouts or between a hard workout and a race?

Let’s try to answer those questions.

The intensity, duration, and frequency (number of sessions per week) of your training all influence the rate at which your body adapts. The adaptations in hormone levels, fat-burning ability, capillary density, and so on that result from endurance training occur because of repeated training bouts rather than as a result of one workout in isolation. It’s as though your body must be convinced that you’re really serious about training before it makes the physiological adaptations that let you reach a new level.

The process of adaptation begins with your genes. Training provides stimuli (e.g., glycogen depletion) that turn specific genes on or off. By altering the expression of genes, training changes the rates at which your body makes and breaks down specific proteins. For example, endurance training turns on genes for the production of mitochondrial protein. More endurance training leads to more mitochondria in your muscles so that you can produce more energy aerobically. Your muscles and cardiovascular system adapt over days, weeks, and months to the cumulative effects of your repeated training.

Runners vary greatly in how long it takes them to recover from and adapt to a workout. Differences among runners in recovery time and rate of improvement are determined by genetics, age (you tend to recover more slowly with age), training history, gender (women tend to recover more slowly because of lower testosterone levels), and lifestyle factors. Your genetics determine your predisposition to adapt to training; some of us are programmed to adapt more quickly than others. Lifestyle factors, such as diet, quantity and quality of sleep, general health, and various life stressors (such as work, finances, and relationships), all influence how quickly you recover from and adapt to training. Because so much variation exists among runners in how many workouts they can tolerate in a given period, you shouldn’t copy your training partner ’s running program. Only through experience will you learn how much training you can handle.

As an example, figure 3.1, adapted from Tudor Bompa’s Periodization Training for Sports (2005), details two runners who do the same workout and experience the same amount of initial fatigue but who recover at different rates. Rachel (represented by the solid line) recovers more quickly than Karen (represented by the dashed line). Rachel will be able to recover from and adapt positively to more high-quality workouts in a given period and will, therefore, improve more quickly than Karen. Rachel would also require a shorter taper before a race than Karen.

Only through trial and error will you know how much training your body can positively adapt to in a given time. Successful marathoning requires that you go through this self-discovery process intelligently and systematically. Determining this balance can be tricky because it can be hard to isolate variables. For example, if your job is now much more stressful than the last time you trained for a marathon, your current rate of recovery might be slower. You must find the correct balance of training stimulus and recovery for your specific circumstances over the long weeks that constitute marathon training.

Unfortunately, the scientific literature doesn’t provide clear evidence of the amount of time required to realize the benefits of an individual training session. Personal experience and discussions with many runners and coaches indicate that 8 to 10 days is an adequate amount of time to recover from and reap the rewards of most hard training sessions. Given that any one workout provides only a small fitness benefit – on the order of magnitude of less than 1 percent – but that a workout can cause severe short-term fatigue, it’s wise to err on the side of caution and allow enough time to fully recover from training before a race. For the marathon race itself, complete recovery from training is critical for success. Marathon tapering generally requires a full 3 weeks; tapering is the subject of chapter 5.

Table 3.1 shows typical times to reap the benefits of three major types of workouts. The third column indicates typical amounts of time to recover from a workout of each type. For example, the table indicates that you should allow at least 4 days between tempo runs or between a tempo run and a tune-up race. You don’t, however, need to allow 4 days between a tempo run and a long run or interval workout. That’s because each type of workout uses different combinations of energy systems, so complete recovery from one type of workout isn’t necessary before you do another type of workout.

Although you won’t see the benefits of this week’s workout in this weekend’s race, if you do the workout early enough in the week you should recover sufficiently for it not to have a detrimental effect on your race performance. The timelines in Table 3.1 take into account the fact that we often do a tune-up race when the fatigue of previous training is reduced rather than when supercompensation has occurred. You generally can’t afford the time required to be optimally rested for tune-up races. Marathoners should allow only enough rest and recovery to obtain optimal results for the marathon itself and possibly for one tune-up race.

Of the major types of workouts, tempo runs are the easiest to recover from because they don’t break down the body as much as the other forms of hard training. Tempo runs are neither fast enough to cause substantial muscle damage nor long enough to totally deplete your muscles of glycogen.