How To Recover After An Endurance Race
How To Recover After An Endurance Race – Do recovery runs really help you recover? How often should you do them? Here’s your guide to recovery runs and their importance.
Going out for a second run of the day hardly feels like recovery. What is recovery anyway and what is the point of it? How to distinguish junk miles from recovery miles? Understanding this workout and the benefits it can provide will help you run better, recover faster, and improve your running fitness.
How To Recover After An Endurance Race
Recovery runs are best performed after moderate to high TSS efforts such as training, racing, or strength training. Endurance athletes often suffer from muscle soreness after such workouts, and recovery runs are designed to relax the body by increasing blood flow and waste elimination. This is vital for performance, as stiffness and soreness can limit your mobility, reduce power output, and make workouts uncomfortable and difficult to complete.
Is It Ok To Walk During A Run?
When you exercise, especially at high intensity, several physiological processes occur that increased blood flow can help with, as shown in the diagram below.
For athletes who train more than 50 miles per week or participate in multiple sports (like triathletes and duathletes), recovery running can be a great way to get past the underlying drivers and kick-start the recovery process.
There is no clear difference between light aerobic running and recovery running, other than the purpose of the workout. Your daily aerobic run, aimed solely at maintaining your heart rate in zone 1 or zone 2, meets the definition of recovery running. However, aerobic running and recovery running are starting to look different.
Recovery runs, which typically consist of 20 to 30 minutes of aerobic running, are designed to replicate hard efforts and eliminate waste (as described above). Running for more than 30 minutes creates metabolic waste and, depending on your fitness level, recovery can take more than 8-12 hours. These types of runs are definitely not what you would call recovery runs!
Running Workouts To Increase Speed & Build Endurance
There are two types of recovery: active recovery and passive recovery. Going for a recovery run, gentle spin on a bike, or a 20-30 minute yoga class are examples of active recovery. Passive recovery includes the use of a percussion massager or compression boots, sleep, or massage.
The biggest difference is that active recovery increases heart rate and blood pressure, which leads to vasodilation (i.e. dilation of blood vessels) and transport of metabolic waste.
Your choice of approach to recovery should always come down to understanding your body and where you are going to gain the most benefit. If you’re physically exhausted from your last run, light running may not provide recovery, but may instead help.
Your recovery time. The variables to consider are numerous, and it will take some experience to determine whether running a restore is the best solution to optimize your recovery.
Tired After Running?
If you’re injury-prone or currently run less than 24 miles per week, a 20-30 minute recovery run could actually put you in a worse position. If your body is having a hard time recovering from strenuous sports like running, you may want to consider light riding or yoga as a recovery option. Conversely, if you train between 40 and 60 miles per week, a 20- to 30-minute run later in the day after a hard workout may be a good option to help you increase your mileage, recover, and gain additional benefits from your workout.
*Special note for ultra-distance runners: Training on tired legs is common and often a desired training state. If you’re interested in learning more about how we generate fatigue, you can listen to one of my recent podcast episodes, The Biology of Fatigue, on the Defining Endurance Podcast.
In short, yes. A recent study compared a group of men and women after a half marathon to evaluate muscle function, strength development, and the impact of long-term muscle soreness. The most important finding was that women, on average, showed earlier functional recovery than men. This is potentially due to the fact that women have less muscle mass, strength, and power output than men at the same relative intensity, and are therefore considered less fatiguable. It may also be due to the direct and indirect influence of sex hormones (eg, estrogen versus testosterone), which produce fewer metabolites and metabolic waste products in women. The above study found that estrogen can reduce the effects of exercise-induced skeletal muscle damage, thereby reducing the effects of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) compared to men.
One of the most important factors affecting the recovery of female athletes is the period of the menstrual cycle, since fatigue is higher during menstruation. Menstruation also plays a role in metabolic needs during recovery. One study found that menstruation increases basal metabolic rate by more than 6%, which has a significant impact on glycogen stores, recovery, and overall perception of fatigue. This increase in caloric needs occurs over three to five days as women’s menstrual cycles change, which can make refueling before and during the race more difficult. If you want to learn more, check out this podcast about how ultrarunner Camille Herron ran the Western States 100 on her first day of her period.
What Is Active Recovery? When Should You Try It?
Assessing the quality of your recovery requires experimentation and introspection; There is no specific metric that can truly determine your ability to perform. However, using an indicator such as TSB (aka training stress balance or
C) can give you a rough idea of how you’ll feel in your next workout, and ultimately give you an idea of how prepared you are for race-level performance. The closer your TSB is to 0, the better you have recovered. On the other hand, a reading of -20 or -30 indicates that you will need a few easy days to recover your body.
After all, performance can only be improved by challenging the body and then adequately recovering. Increased adaptation to training stimuli leads to improved fitness as well as the ability to cope with greater fatigue. In other words, the better you become, the less time you need to recover.
Running exists, meaning you can simultaneously apply a small stress load, increase blood flow to your muscles and recover. Simply put, recovery runs are an easy way to get real performance gains.
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McKee, R. et al (2021, March 18). The influence of gender on the pattern of functional recovery after graded running: an original analysis to determine recovery profiles. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8012843/.
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Andrew Simmons is a USATF Level 2/2 Certified Trainer and the Founder/Head Trainer of Lifelong Endurance. Athletes who want to improve their distance running times have had great success with his personalized coaching and training plans. Andrew resides in Denver, Colorado, where he still trains as a professional amateur. Follow Coach Andrew on Facebook and Twitter.
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First of all, if you’re reading this, it means you’ve probably completed a recent race, so first of all, thank you! Racing is a great way to challenge yourself, test your fitness levels and see if all that training and miles you put in are paying off in terms of performance. Shout out to my Connecticut runners who just completed the Hartford Half or Full Marathon or Race Series!
In this week’s episode and blog, I’ll be talking about post-race recovery tips and answering the following common questions:
Postrace Recovery Plan: How To Recover From A Race
I’m going to break it down into three distinct phases. Each of these steps will provide 4 specific tips to help you recover faster and get back to the running you love, healthy and injury-free! Phases:
Before we get into the content, I want to say that post-race recovery will look a little different for everyone! This will depend on your ability, fitness level, running experience and dietary needs. However, these guidelines will help you navigate both race day and week.