Rest Days

I believe rest days are exceedingly important to my weekly training, but I do not believe that I need to be placed in a medically induced coma on rest days. In fact, I run, ride my bike, hike, unicycle and even do my core exercises (sit-ups, push-ups and unweighted squats) on what I sincerely claim are rest days.

My criterion is simple, I ask myself if what I'm doing is at a low enough effort level for the amount of time I do it to make it (after eating well and getting a good night's sleep) restful. That generally means that speed work, ruck runs and high volume (i.e. > 50k) preclude the day from being a rest day.

Riding a flat 100 miles on a bicycle, can be a rest day, if I keep my heart rate around 130bpm or below, even if I do it in a fasted state and completely in high gear, but it won't be a rest day if I'm not already accustomed to riding that long.

So, my typical schedule is to run six days a week and ride my bicycle or a unicycle on Sundays. The Sunday ride is almost always a rest day, because I typically do a long run on Saturday and try to do speed work on Monday. I can easily believe that I might get better results if I do even less on my rest days, but if I don't exercise at all, that tends to cause me to both have trouble sleeping and gain weight and both of those interfere with my training and performance.

I do my core exercises on Tuesdays and Thursdays and then "run" after doing them. My distance may even be 15.5 miles, but if I'm out of shape (for me), then I may walk quite a bit in those miles. On the other hand, when I'm doing that distance regularly on rest days, I might be jogging the entire time.

Bear in mind, one of the big adaptations I want (and get!) out of my body is the ability to do long distances, slowly, in close succession, whether that is doing a two hundred miler or doing the Deadman Peaks Trail Run 106 miler six days after running the Javelina Jundred.

I log my runs and rides (but not my core exercises) to Strava, so you can see my how I let my body rest between my hard days.