HEALTHY PROGRESS

Time it right

Timing is everything in the work/rest balance. Add stress at the right time and you will get stronger by the day. Do hard workouts too often and you will get more and more fatigued until you are injured. On the other hand, if you don’t push hard enough, often enough, you will never get better, so running remains perpetually difficult.

Tune in

Runners who stay healthy and competitive for decades say the best way to maintain the training/recovery balance is to pay attention to our bodies’ signals. These runners don’t follow rigid schedules: they go long when they feel like going long, do the next speed workout when their legs feel fresh again and take it easy when they feel tired. This daily assessment means the training load can be precisely adapted, and it accommodates the many other stresses that affect our recovery and readiness to get out there.

Be consistent

Note that training by feel only works if we’ve created the habit of consistent training and the desire to do as much as we can handle. We won’t get far if what we usually feel is a desire to take the day off, or if we’re always looking do as little work as we can get away with. Steve Kartalia, a runner since 1979 and still a 1:16 half marathoner at 51, summarised the mentality of all who achieve long-term running success: ‘I want to run most days; I want to run hard on some of those days.’