Recovery Week

This week finds me somewhere in the middle of block 2 of Ironman Traning, which is actually a recovery week. Coming from a running background, this has been a bit hard for me to understand as there are usually no "recovery weeks" in a typical marathon training program.

So last year, I mostly trained right on through recovery weeks right up until the very end when we were admonished to let our bodies absorb all the hard training we had done. I don't know if that helped me or hurt me.

Now looking at my log of the past 2.5 months, I see a lot of volume-- sometimes around 15-16 hours a week. And it's only April. I was feeling a little dull on the bike, but nothing major. I started to wonder about this rest week thing, there's just a day off so it's 6 days instead of 7 in the recovery week of program I actually follow. Joe Friel says deload every 3-4 weeks, and what that means may differ depending of conditioning. Huh??? A British site offerred the advice of decreasing volume by 50% and taking at least 2 full days off. Other sources were less helpful.

I decided to mix the British site's advice with Friel's, took 2 full days off (gasp!) and then returned to training tonight with a sort of technique/ loosen up workout mixing swim/ bike/ run and weights.

Here's the results: I woke up today with ENERGY!!! Had tons of ideas all day long, worked like a crazy woman, no one could keep up with me, weight was down 2 lbs on the scale, and the workouts felt great. Heart rate was nice and low on the run---about 105 going up hill, was able to spin a BIG gear no problem, and PR'd on a 50 in the pool.

I'll watch my body metrics and base the rest of the week on my response to workouts/ rest. f

So why is it that running programs don't typically include any deloading again????