Changing Plans

Okay so no magic today, not so far anyway. Like I mentioned in the last blog, yesterday had a lot of box ticking, unfortunately some of those boxes involved a lot of running around and also a bit of light furniture moving. Satisfying for sure, but exhausting. Today I felt a little bit like I had been run over by a steamroller. Don't seem to be recovering like I used to it seems. Grumble, grumble, getting older and some such rubbish.

Upshot of the aforementioned steamrolling is that I didn't get out of bed this morning. I have nearly always had Monday as a recovery day. Usually it is a good chance to get over a heavy weekend of training. Sometimes those recovery days have been days off and sometimes they have been dynamic recovery, an easy swim or an easy jog, that sort of thing. I am quite a fan of dynamic recovery, it helps you feel better while getting you a bit more training time. It is important that the session is done in the right frame of mind, ie that it is about recovery, not fitness, but if you can approach the session properly then I think they are really beneficial. Where they can fall over is when people use them as another fitness session, obsessing over pace or wattage and pushing too hard. I think that learning how to do a recovery session properly is one of the hardest lessons a lot of athletes learn, certainly one of the most common mistakes we see among athletes. However, if somebody can learn do go easy properly, then it can be hugely beneficial and help with their long term sustainability as athletes. 

Anyway, my habit of having Monday as a morning recovery hasn't changed. I still try and do a recovery session on Monday most weeks, typically a nice easy paddle for about an hour if I can. Today that was the plan, but when I got up I decided that a static recovery session might be more beneficial. Training last week was pretty good and I would like to get in another solid week of training this week and so I am keen to start that off right. I suspect that if I had pushed myself out of bed this morning it might have been at the expense of some other key training later in the week. I don't like making deals with myself when it comes to training as I think that is just another form of making excuses to skip training. However, in this case I thought that swapping dynamic recovery for actual rest might have been the wiser course of action.

Hopefully my decision to rest pays off tomorrow with a couple of nice solid sessions.