January 13, 2007
Marathon recovery
Marathons leave you fit but f***ed up. How do you take advantage of that?
All the usual caveats apply. Your mileage will [literally] vary. Not only from mine, but over time from your own previous efforts, and not necessarily predictably. You might be fitter going into (and coming out of) one marathon than another, but you still might need more recovery from the one you approached with more fitness.
So, marathons leave you fit but f***ed up. How do you take advantage of that? There's no question that if you prepare right, you come off a marathon tremendously aerobically fit. Now, I think it's very much the case that the specific fitness required to run your best marathon will not put you in the shape to run the best 5000m you're ever capable of. If you prepare for a marathon right you'll be tremendously economical, great at sparing glycogen, but perhaps not as sharp as you need to run a great 5000m (this relates to the Greg McMillan article in Running Times Mike discussed a while back. One day I may discuss this. That day could be many days away).
Nevertheless many people do run shorter distance PRs pretty soon after a marathon. I happen to think that this is because their overall aerobic fitness has been raised so much that it compensates for non-specific preparation. (Lets put it this way. If you successfully bump up your mileage to 80 mpw and train for a marathon, you'll probably beat the 5km times you ran on 50mpw but doing 5km focused workouts. The aerobic benefits from the increased mileage and threshold work would more than compensate for the dimunition, even absence, of VO2 max workouts.)
Now, if you live in the upper Midwest and do a late fall marathon you're not going to get much opportunity to do a PR at anything several weeks after your marathon. So I happen to have lost touch with the idea of seguing from a marathon into shorter distance racing. But what I know from earlier marathons and other people's experience is this: it is possible to do a good race a week or two or three after a marathon, but you need to let your muscles recover somehow (aqua jogging, running on grass very easily) before the next race, and you're just going to set your recovery back again. But hey, if you're fit, there's a good race on, and you feel mentally up to the challenge, why not? My best racing soon after a marathon has always been 5-8 weeks afterwards. That time frame gives me time to recover, time to get in a week or two of easy distance, strides and then at least one workout before the race. After my first marathon I didn't race for 8 weeks, but that gave me 4 weeks without workouts, 4 weeks with workouts, and then a very good day at the races (albeit in a relay at the totally non-standard distances of 4.78km and 3.89km. My absence from racing meant I got stuck in a relay team below my ability that was one person short. Beating both the people from the team I would normally have been in was the most valuable index of how good I felt). To sum up, my limited experience with transitioning from the marathon back into shorter races suggests that the best races come a few weeks after the marathon when you're both recovered and fit.
Transitioning back into another build-up, however, is something I have experimented with over the last 18 months, and my conclusion is this: an extra week of recovery makes for an even better build-up.
Here's a graph of my mileage after my last three competitive marathons
After Grandma's and Philadelphia I followed Pfitzinger's recommendations: "[Shuffle for a week] Then run 50% of your usual weekly mileage the 2nd week, and 75% the 3rd week." I interpreted "usual weekly mileage" to be what I'd averaged over the marathon buildup which came out to about 85 miles per week (mpw). In both cases I felt pretty good by week 3. After Grandma's the jump from 62 mpw to 75 mpw with a tempo run left me feeling a little tired (though perhaps it was just the July doldrums) so after Philadelphia once I'd got to 63 mpw in week 3 I then added 7-8 mpw until I hit 100. This worked out pretty well and while my mileage was a little lower than after Grandma's it was slightly higher quality. If the footing wasn't always great, the effort was higher after Philadelphia than after Grandma's. The 5 week sequence of 88, 90, 100, 100, 100 mpw post-Grandma's was done mostly at an easy effort because it was July and August, and I couldn't be bothered making my head spin by running harder in heat and humidity. But it wasn't until the last two weeks of that five week stretch that I felt really fresh most days.
If you have the time to freshen up, why go into your next training cycle mentally and physically fatigued? With this in mind I decided that after Chicago I would have a week completely off running, and then take a very easy month. Now, I won't pretend that the obsessive-compulsive mileage addict that lurks in me didn't have some doubts about this, and didn't say "Why don't you jog a couple more miles each day?" But I mostly banished these thoughts from my mind. The 30 and 40 mile week were quite enjoyable, mostly ambling around at an easy pace. There was a mild sensation of the legs and lungs not quite feeling in sync -- the legs felt fresh after the week off to recover, so I'd pick it up gradually and wonder why 7:15/mile effort yielded 7:55/mile. But mostly I just jogged around.
The 50 mile week was a challenge. 3 weeks post-marathon there shouldn't be much fatigue left. I struggled through the easy 13 mile run I'd normally do 2 weeks after a marathon, and wondered how I'd ever get back to the point where 13 miles was a pretty typical day out on the roads. But a couple of days later I felt slightly better on an 11 mile run, and realized that perhaps I was not fatigued, I was just a little unfit (relatively speaking). If you're used to running at least 300 miles a month, a month where you run a marathon and mostly jog another 100 miles will not maintain your fitness. Another couple of days later, and I felt slightly better again on another 11 mile run. But on the days in between I felt much more tired than 11 miles usually leaves me. So, the week was a struggle between the days I felt fatigued from runs that normally wouldn't tire me too much, and the gradual realization that each of the longer runs was better than the one before, and perhaps I was regaining fitness.
So I started the 60 mile week mostly expecting to continue feeling better. And I did. When I checked my pace on various runs I was hitting the times I expected for the effort I was putting out. Things were on the upswing. Yet the pay-off for the longer recovery was not the 60 mile week, it was the month from Thanksgiving to Christmas where I ran 80, 90, 100 and then 113 miles in each week. Aided by a dry, warm start to winter I was able to make those good quality weeks with at least one long tempo run in each week, a leg speed workout, one day of reps on hills, and good long runs. I felt the best I've ever felt starting a winter buildup, both physically and mentally. The price of a good month's training was an extra week's recovery, and really it was a bargain. It wasn't much fun feeling unfit and slow for 2-3 weeks, but it all came back together much quicker than I'd expected.
Better to struggle through the 50 mile recovery week and then feel fresh when you are running 100 miles, than to keep the miles up and feel fit but tired when you're doing 100 miles.
Posted by eroberts at January 13, 2007 9:09 PM