Recovery Week

This coming week is the dreaded recovery week. It's one of the hardest things for me to do, especially when I'm feeling good. Before my last recovery week, I was feeling broke down and wiped out.  I was definitely ready to back off a bit. This time, I'm feeling energized and ready to train. This is pretty good considering that over the last 10 days I have completed nearly 21 hours of training.

However, as I promised Coach James, I will ease off the gas pedal for at least 5 days and give my body a chance to repair itself. I am also going to pay close attention to how I feel after this recovery week. Am I tired or lacking energy? Do my legs feel dead? Is my speed lacking? How I feel is going to help me determine how to approach my taper for Barb's Race.

In the September 2013 edition of "Triathlete" there is an article about the 70.3 World Championships. For this article, they interviewed three of the top triathlon coaches to see what they thought it would take to be successful at this particular race. The section about tapering caught my attention...most notably the statement by Lance Watson.

"I've always felt there are two different types of athletes: the diesel-type aerobic engine athletes and then the thoroughbred, the speed athletes. I either do a front-end taper or a back-end taper, depending on the athlete. We will observe how they come out of recovery blocks in training, when they feel good. If they take a rest week in training and they come back and they're on fire the first couple of days back, it means they will respond well to being rested, whereas some athletes will find if they take that recovery week, their first three to four days back feel terrible, but then after a week of training they start to feel good again, so we try to work out that routine and mimic that as they go into their A race."

So, after this brief pull-back, I am going to be paying close attention to how I feel and how I perform. I guess our upcoming brick workout will be a good time to see how I'm feeling.