Recovery

With recovery being the theme of the past week for me, I don't have any cool training stories/pictures to regale you guys with this time round, instead I meander my way through my recovery philosophy and the challenges of applying it to real life.

As my old coach Mike Vieira says: "Wolverine would be the perfect athlete; his body regenerates instantly so he could load on tough workouts indefinitely and he would just keep getting fitter and fitter! He would be the best xc skier ever!!" *Also, Wolverine has sweet claws and sideburns.

Unfortunately, not all of us have super regenerative powers, sweet claws or sideburns (I do happen to possess one of these traits though... can ya guess which?).
Because of these shortcomings, getting solid rest is absolutely 100% as important for us mortals as throwing down during workouts--indeed, if you don't get good rest when you're supposed to you won't be able to "throw down" during workouts at all! When you're out there pounding the pavement (no matter what surface your "pavement" happens to be) during your favourite workout you are damaging your body. When you're lying down for a nap, your water bottle half full (that's right, half full) beside you, that's when your body is actually becoming stronger. That's when your muscles are repairing themselves from your solid gym workout or from your sweet interval set.

So be patient young padawan; treat your time between workouts as sacred and the nordic-skiing-force will become strong in you!

Me, recovering HARD.

For me, time between workouts has been plentiful these last few days as I happened to be on a rest week! Rest weeks always provide a bit of a conundrum for me because on one side I feel like I should be following all of my above recovery related advice to a T, but on the other side I really want to stray a bit from my usual "what is the best possible activity I can do at this moment in time to ensure 'great success' come Winter?" I mean, getting solid physical recovery is all well and good but you do need some time to distract your mind from the rigours of ski training so that when you get back to it you can feel physically and mentally refreshed. So that's the rest week kicker for me: how to best balance the mental and the physical sides of the recovery equation. I guess you just gotta play around with it for yourself and see what gets you to the start of your next big training block feeling like you're ready to take on the world.

Whatever the case is, this rest week has been a good time, but, as they say, "all good things must give way to better things" (that is the saying, right?). And this good rest week is giving way to another 3 week block of better-than-ever training!

Dream Big, People!

P.S. I'm off to Whitefish Montana for a training camp this month so look for a sweet blog write up, with pics, in the next blog post!