Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The Importance of Rest

After completing a 10K this morning, I added up the numbers and noticed that I have run almost 24 miles in 4 days. That's an average of almost one 10K per day since Saturday! You can imagine that my body wants a break and I plan to rest tomorrow. Why is rest so important?

Hall Hidgon, a well known marathon expert recommends the following for runners training for a 10K: "Rest is an important part of your training. Friday is always a day of rest in the Intermediate program. Be realistic about your fatigue level and don't feel guilty if you decide to take an additional day off. (Best bet is Monday.) Specifically consider scheduling at least one extra rest day during the stepback weeks." Hal has a lot of good information on running 5Ks, 10Ks, Half and Full Marathons. He's even posted FREE training programs!

The web site RunningInjuryFree.org suggests: "Since a day only has 24 hours, we need to follow a heavy run with a "rest period" to give us the 48 hours needed for recovery. Some people do this by walking or running 3 or 4 times a week, with rest days in between. Others do this by following a heavy walk or run with a light walk or run." The latter type of training is called Cross Training which a combination of heavy and light workouts.

While I generally prefer to take full day to recover, my training program is a combination of Cross Training and resting in between long workouts/runs. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you clear your workout with your doctor!

Hundred Push Up Update 3
Yesterday I started at week for in my quest to meet the Hundred Push Up challenge. I was a little sore and was still able to finish all 5 sets of push ups.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

nice blog...

Adrian

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