How Should You Feel After a Run

Audio Transcript

Michael: Today, we have a question about how you should feel after a run.

Nancy: Hi, this is Nancy, and I have a question about how I should feel after a workout or a long run.

For example, there are articles about how to feel during your run, like an easy run should be a conversational pace or a steady run should feel comfortably hard during the run, but what should it feel like after the run, later in the day?

For example, if a need a nap, two or three hours after a long run, or if I feel flat or kind of blur for the rest of the day after an interval workout, are these warning signs?

Is all of these just part of the process of recovery and really there’s nothing to worry about as long as I’m feeling recovered and ready in time for the next run? Thanks.

Michael: That’s a tremendous question Nancy and it’s really something that’s good to keep in mind at all times.

You know how you’re recovering in your training. You’ve got to keep up with your recovery in order to improve, so it’s a very important question that you should be keeping in mind, pretty much every week in your training.

It’s definitely a balance to strike.

Of course, you want to recover properly, you don’t want to be overly tired, you don’t want to over train, but of course you also need to get some training and hit your goals.

You’ve locked your goals and it takes a lot of training to reach those goals, so that’s definitely a balance to strike there.

First of, and this is definitely the most important message here, it’s better to treat these as warning signs than to ignore them completely.

If we’re talking about a black and white approach where you have one end of ignoring it, and one end of completely listening to it, it’s better to completely listen to it.

You’d rather err on the side of caution than overdo it.

Something I heard once is, you’d rather undertrain by 10% than over train by 1%. What that means is, if you undertrain a little bit, it’s not really a big deal. You’re not going to have any repercussions.

Maybe, you’ll fall a little bit short of your goal, because you didn’t quite train at the level that was required to hit that goal. You’re not falling apart, or breaking down, nor are you getting injured. You’re not getting sick, you’re not having to take several weeks off; you’re just undertraining a little bit. That’s really not that big of a deal.

If you over train, you cross that red line even by 1%; just a very tiny amount. Once you cross that red line, you’re overtraining, and once you’re overtraining, you pretty much are going to have to take a little time off.

You’re going to have to take, maybe at that minimum, just a little bit of a down week.

At maximum, we’re talking maybe an injury, maybe several weeks off or several weeks or just easy running.

We’re talking about potentially long-term issues in terms of your endocrine system being damaged and all of that.

It’s definitely playing with fire when you’re talking about that red line, so you’d rather undertrain by 10% than over train by 1%.

The optimal for any runner is to undertrain by like 2% or 3%, if that’s possible. If such a thing is possible, that’s where you want to be because as soon as you get close to that red line, it’s just way too easy to take that last step over it.

Being 2% or 3% below that red line, would be great. That’s a great place to sit otherwise it’s always best to be cautious for sure.

If you’re completely exhausted all the time, of course you’re probably over doing it.

If you’re absolutely dead tired, don’t have the energy to get up and all you can master each day is getting out for your run, then you’re overdoing it.

If you’re not feeling good, that’s obvious. We want to make sure we differentiate the very obvious cases where clearly, you’re exhausted, your body is tired, and that means you’re overdoing it.

With all of this, when we’re talking about taking a little bit of a nap here or being a little bit lethargic during your day, this is where the truth is somewhere in the middle.

We’ll keep talking about the more recovery oriented side first because that’s the most important.

This is the one that I want to touch on the most because I would rather anyone err on the side of caution, err on the side of recovery rather than just saying, “Oh well, it’s part of training.”

Needing a nap? That’s not really a big deal, especially if it’s after a long run. A lot of us get up early for a long run and get it done early in the day.

If you’re running 16, 18 maybe even 20 plus miles for your long run, then you’re going to be exhausted.

Just think about the amount of time that you’re out there on your feet. It’s not even necessarily just the fact that you’re putting in those miles, it’s the amount of time that you’re out there on your feet.

Even if it’s all at an easy pace, or even if it’s flat, it doesn’t matter.

The fact that you’re out there, for potentially well over two hours, sometimes even two and a half or three hours, means that you’re going to be tired.

Needing a nap after a long run is perfectly normal and I would even heavily encourage it if you can.

That’s a nice thing about doing your long run on a weekend, is that you can fit in a nap after. It will help you recover, immediately jump start the recovery process. That’s not a bad thing at all.

If you need a nap every single day when that’s abnormal for you, that might be a warning sign that perhaps you’re overdoing it a little bit. Perhaps you need to add in a little bit extra recovering, that’s something we’ll talk about later on too.

Feeling crappy, feeling lethargic, feeling tired the rest of the day, that’s another one that goes into the same thing I was talking about before with the long run.

When you have a long run like that, it’s hard on your body. But that said, you shouldn’t be feeling crappy all the time.

You shouldn’t be feeling exhausted all the time, that’s a warning sign.

If you’re always tired and you have a tough time getting off the coach, tough time going about your day, tough time at your job, or tough time with anything else, then that’s definitely a warning sign that you need to add in a little bit extra recovery.

A huge thing here is making sure you’re taking your easy runs easy. This is absolutely essential to any proper training plan – making sure you’re taking the easy runs easy.

It’s even more important when you’re talking about not recovering super well or your workouts are tough and are taking a toll on your body.

Your easy runs should be almost like a jog pace, nice and slow. You should be able to have a full conversation without needing a breath between every other word, and finishing those runs without feeling all that tired, because you need to recover from the hard workouts.

A couple of things you can do. You can take a rest day. Let’s say you’re a little bit tired, it’s not necessarily been going on for weeks, maybe it’s just a couple of days, maybe just add in one rest or even a cross training day.

Go get in the pool or go biking for the day, or take a day completely off. Maybe take a hike or like I said, do absolutely nothing.

That can help jumpstart your recovery a little bit, maybe even one or two days. That’s something we do at Runners Connect a lot.

We’ll say, “Hey, listen, let’s just nip this in the bud.” You’re tired, or maybe you’ve got a little injury creeping up a little bit, and let’s just take a couple of days completely off, let’s give it some time immediately before waiting until we’re going to need a month off. Let’s just do something really quick to give you some time off.

Another thing is down weeks; down weeks work really well.

This is something that we think anyone should be building into their schedule pretty regularly. I would say maybe every third week for most people will work pretty well, in terms of building in a down week.

We have volume, lower intensity, maybe if you normally do two workouts in the long run, you only do one workout and a reduced long run.

Basically just a week where you take things easy and it will really help absorb your training better overtime.

Even if you don’t need it, down weeks are one of those things that are going to help. Building that into your training plan, like I said, every third week or so is going to make a huge difference in your training.

Last thing on that, sometimes there’s just going to be other things going on in your life. Maybe there are stresses from work, your family, whatever it is that’s going on, other things in your life are absolutely going to spill over and potentially make you more tired from your training.

That’s something to pay attention to, but it’s not something to just disregard, it’s very important.

If that’s going on, then these same things apply. You may want to take some rest days, maybe you want to give yourself a week, where you don’t really do any organized training, just maybe do a little bit of jogging when you feel like it, other than that just rest.

All these things can help to rejuvenate your system, get you feeling better, and get you back on track.

For the other side of the equation, fatigue is just a necessary part of training.

If you’re training for a long distance race, especially if we’re talking about a marathon, you’re training for a very long race, and you’re doing a lot of mileage.

That’s tough on your body and you’re going to have some fatigue there.

This all goes into the workout recovery process, something that a lot of people misunderstand. You don’t improve when you go do a workout, and if you do a hard workout, you’ll only get worse technically.

Technically, as soon as you’ve finished that workout, you have become a worse runner. You improve when you recover from that workout.

As you recover, your muscles regenerate and then you do what’s called super compensate. This is where, basically, you get back to normal and then you go a little bit higher than that in terms of your fitness and muscular strength.

You improve when you recover, you don’t improve when you work out.

That means there is a workout and recovery process, and obviously fatigue is going to be a bit of that recovery process because you’re breaking your body down.

When you do a hard workout or even a long run, you cannot fully recover in just 24 hours; it’s going to take longer than that.

Science has shown that it takes typically up to 14 days to 100% absorb and recover from a workout or a long run.

That’s 14 days – that’s pretty crazy to think. That doesn’t mean that you can only workout every 14 days of course. What that means is that you’ll only see the full physiological changes 14 days after a workout.

Something we implement at Runners Connect, is accumulated fatigue. One of our big workouts is we do the steady long run combo.

Basically, you’ll do a steady run the day before your long run. That means that you do some of that accumulated fatigue to where you go into your long run fatigued.

This is super helpful especially for people who can’t handle super long runs, so it’s a way to get a lot of miles in a 24 – 36 hour period without doing those long runs.

That said, it’s definitely something we don’t want to do super often.

Basically, you don’t want to be purposefully accumulating fatigue consistently overtime. You want to take some rest in-between that. We do that every other week when we’re under the marathon specific phase.

All that is to say, while you should absolutely pay attention to your body, you should also know that fatigue is normal.

It’s normal and it’s not always something to worry about.

It’s a normal part of training but yet again back to the former part, pay attention to your body, listen to it and if you need rest, just take it.

It’s better to do that than to go the other way and potentially have to miss a month of training.

Okay Runners Connect fans. That’s it for today.

Don’t forget to submit your questions at runnersconnect.net/daily-running-podcast and we’ll feature your question on the show.

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