One of the questions I get a lot is in regards to spacing out SOS days and when to do so. Many times it’s because they are a masters runner and they just don’t recover as fast as they used to. Is that necessarily true, though? I myself catching myself claiming so, but it might be in my head. I mean, let’s face it, we simply are way busier than we were in our 20’s. However, this article from Alex Hutchinson provides some interesting insight. The truth is, it’s rarely a simple answer. As Alex talks about, it’s just harder as we age. Physiologically, there may not be any statistical significance in differences, but the reality of things can be quite different- finding time to train, a lack of sleep due to family or work, and just more responsibility in general.

A topic like this with can have a lot of tentacles to it. For instance, I wrote THIS blog post in 2016 that started the conversation, but left a lot of questions. So today, let’s pick it up again and continue. I think the best place to start is with the very basics of training methodology. That means that we have to understand some basic ideas and philosophies.

Stress/Recovery Principle

There are lots of ways to describe the Stress/Recovery principle of training. You may have heard it referred to as the Supercompensation Principle and runners will describe it as the Hard/Easy Principle. Regardless of the title, the premise is the same. Your body likes to be in balance (homeostasis), and when you exercise above what you are used to doing, you break that balance. So, when we exercise at a harder intensity (or longer duration, or combination), it causes the body to be fatigued. The body is really good at adapting to a stressful situation, so it will begin to adapt and prepare itself for the next time it is exposed to that stress. In other words, it supercompensates to the work that it was exposed to. Now, if we recover from that work, we are becoming faster. If we never allow for recovery to hard work, or expose the body to hard work before it is ready, then we don’t see these adaptations and make it really hard for our bodies to adapt. In most cases, we are sick, injured, or burned out in several weeks.

So, in short, for all the hard work you do, you have to recover a certain amount.

This idea can be sound for the 1-2 days right after a workout to the full year of training for different races. We’ll get into that later. For now, hard work has to be followed by recovery of some form and duration.

To close out this discussion of the principle, look at the figure above. While doing hard workouts too close to each other exposes the body to the stress too often, the opposite can be just as bad. If we only do a workout every 4-5 days, then we don’t expose the body to the stress often enough. This will mean long training segments to make marginal gains in fitness. It’s a delicate balance and means that you (and your coach), should learn over time what that balance looks like for you.

So what we just discussed was the most basic of situations. The question becomes how does that look over weeks or months? Luckily, the model can really show us how a week and even a while training cycle may look, depending on how you approach it. Below is great representation the 5 most common scenarios of how a runners training typically goes. This can represent a week or two, all the way up to an entire training segment.

Factors

Tradition says that a single bout of hard work take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours to recover from. Now, that’s a big range- from 1 to 3 days! Of course there’s a number of variables that affect that number. Most of these factors are within your control,