Although everyone is different, one of the primary things I’ve noticed as I get older is that I need more recovery time after a run to keep performing at a high level. I could go out and do detailed research on why that is, but for today I’ll just talk about personal experience.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a 3-5 day per week runner with a long run and maybe a speed or track workout thrown in. This seemed to work well. Then back in November and December I decided to do an experiment and run every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas to see how that felt. I didn’t do any longer than usual runs. In fact, I ran shorter than normal on many days as my goal was only to run at least one mile every day. I extended my everyday run streak to 40 days and noticed progressive changes as the days piled up. The first thing was that it began to take more time to warm up and feel loose. The standard 7 or 8 minutes turned into 10 to 15 minutes. On some days, I only felt loose for the last few minutes. Also, as I got nearer to the end of my streak, I became continually slower and my legs never felt good.

Finally when the streak ended, I took about a week off from running. My first run back was amazing! My legs felt light and I was running minutes per mile faster than at the end of the streak. The difference was dramatic. It was obvious that to remain a runner in a sustainable way, a certain amount of rest and recovery time between runs, no matter how short, is needed. My new experiment is to determine how much recovery time is optimal. To little will be detrimental to performance and too much won’t provide enough activity to remain fit. The fine tuning will continue forever, I expect…