“Too often, runners move from one goal race straight into the next training cycle”
Whether you are a high school athlete finishing up a fall cross country season or an adult having completed a goal race for the fall, one of the most beneficial training practices you can employ is also one of the most overlooked: taking a break. Too often, runners move from one goal race straight into the next training cycle, eager to either continue their progress or put a bad race behind them with the promise of the next one. However, after several months of focused training, taking an intentional step away from the routine has long-term benefits in allowing for deeper regeneration of the body and mind.
A healthy physiology works by responding to stimuli that we give it, adapting us to better respond to similar stimuli in the future. Take a tempo run, for example. The first one you do in a training cycle feels very hard and is not as fast as you would like it to be, and may even feel difficult to complete. Repeat the same type of workout a few times, and you feel better, run faster, and gain confidence in your ability to complete the session. However, the effects of a repeated stimulus tend to diminish with repetition, as your body does have a limited rate of adaptation and response. Ultimately, the body can begin to fail to adapt, in cases of too much training stimulus, inadequate recovery, or too long of a training cycle without a break.
Muscular soreness and fatigue clearly tell us from day-to-day whether we are recovering or not, but the hormonal system – which is important in every physiological process – is not as easy to observe. As an example, in Type 2 diabetes, an individual becomes insulin-resistant, as the chronically high levels of insulin result in the hormone no longer having the proper effect on target tissues. With excessive training and lack of proper recovery, we can become “training-resistant,” meaning that the training stimulus no longer has the desired effect on the target tissues. Often times athletes interpret a failure to adapt as a signal to train harder, when in fact the proper response is a training break.
How Long Should A Break Be?
That depends on how hard you have been training, how long the cycle has been, and how fatigued you feel. It is also important to consider when your next goal race is, and know that the longer the next training cycle is going to be, the more important it is to take a good break now. While I don’t have any set in stone guidelines and every individual and situation is different, here’s a breakdown of how I conceptualize three different types of training breaks:
1) Standard. This is a two week break, with the first week completely off, and a second week where the runner can do some light exercise every other day, in line with general public health recommendations for physical activity but definitely not “training.” This is great for a post-marathon or post-track season recovery, where the athlete has been training intentionally and with focus for a few months.
2) Extended. If an athlete enters their break period feeling quite exhausted or has not had a real break in a very long time (for example, a track athlete who only takes one break per year), a longer break can be helpful. Exactly how long depends on a number of factors, but somewhere in the 3-4 week range is a general recommendation. A good guideline is to wait until the athlete has a strong desire to return to training. Similar to the standard break, I recommend starting with a true rest period, with no planned exercise at all, and progressing to some light cross-training a few days a week, and then an eventual return to some easy jogging.
3) Mini. If your training went well, you were continuing to improve throughout, and you feel pretty good after completing your goal race, your break can be relatively short. I often use a 3-5 day break from running within a larger training cycle, especially if it is a long cycle. Again, all athletes are unique, but as a general rule, a training cycle that goes much beyond 4 months runs the risk of staleness and a diminishment of returns on training. We often will use this after a particularly hard or stressful race or training period. The benefit of such a short break is that there is very little loss of fitness. The downside is that it doesn’t provide the same sense of total recovery and regeneration that a longer break offers.
The time that it will take to get back to full training load is also proportional to the length of the break. While this can be interpreted as a negative by some, it’s actually incredibly rewarding to experience that feeling of getting back into shape, and getting noticeably better from one week to the next.
Finally, I leave you with the words of Dakotah Lindwurm, ripped from the ‘Gram:
“In the past after marathons I never took a real break. I’d either sneak in runs without telling my coach, be in the gym swimming every day, or go on a week long hiking trip. I lived in fear of losing fitness, or losing my love for exercise. But during this last build up I finally ran my body into the ground. That was a tough and heartbreaking lesson to learn. I plan on having a long and successful career, and I now know that’s only possible by giving my body the rest it deserves. And this full break has deepened my desire and drive even more and I can’t wait to get back after it.”
Chris Lundstrom is the head coach of Minnesota Distance Elite – formerly Team USA Minnesota – which includes some of the top distance runners in the USA, including Annie Frisbie and Dakota Lindwurm.
