When and How To Take Time Off

Audio Transcript

Fisher: Hello everyone. It’s Coach Fisher here.

Today’s question comes from Angelo. His question is, “I’ve been training nonstop for about 14 months and have done two marathons in that time. Should I take a break? How do you know when it’s time to take a break? And how long should you take off? How do you maintain fitness during the break?”

We’ll start with that first part. The first part of the question, “Should you take a break?” the answer would be yes.

After each marathon, you should take upwards of 2-3 weeks, not necessarily of complete rest but some kind of down time, where you’re doing some cross training or working in the gym to correct some imbalances that running has created, or taking a complete rest, or doing some swimming, or biking.

The purpose of this is to let your body heal up some nagging aches and pains, or allow your body to recover from all the big training cycle leading into the marathon, and to recover from the marathon itself. You put it through a lot. To give it some downtime to heal up is always the best bet.

Do this to minimize risk of overuse injuries down the road as well.

This gives your body time to become more durable, and basically catch up with the training that you’ve put it through the past couple months. I also find it’s a good time to take a break after a marathon, or after any training cycle on the mental side of things, to allow your mind to refresh and reset.

Set new goals for the next training cycle. Go into the next training cycle excited and looking forward to the hard work and the long hours you’re going to have to put in for the next marathon.

I also think there’s another direction you can take this question about taking a break. It might be taking a break from the marathon.

A lot of us get into the habit of doing a marathon in the spring; doing a marathon in the fall each year, year after year. That puts you in a bubble of only training one particular part of the running spectrum.

You’re not doing as much of the O2 max or the pure speed workouts that also contribute to making you a faster marathoner. I always try to recommend doing three marathons every two years.

You might do year one, a spring and a fall marathon, and then another spring marathon in year two.

Then let’s train for a shorter race, maybe a half marathon or 15K in the fall of year two, just to get away from those long tempos and those long runs that only train one end of the spectrum.

Let’s do some work on the other end of the spectrum where you’re doing a lot more of the traditional track work, or short tempos, then to carry that speed segment, or that training cycle, we focus on more of a speed emphasis.

Take that into your next marathon cycle and be a lot quicker and to try to create endurance at that speed. That’s another way I was looking at that question of, how you should take a break.

Question number two in this was, “How do you know when it’s time to take a break, and how long should you take off?”

The way I see it, hopefully you don’t know when it’s time to take a break. That means your breaks in your training have already been pre-established and you’re at a point to where you’re feeling or you’re saying to yourself, “I need a break.”

Either that’s mentally, or heaven forbid, physically.

Sometimes you have to take some time off because you’re injured, or things get run down and overused, but most people take breaks after a marathon, or any kind of training cycle.

That’s the missing piece of a sound training cycle.

You have your different phases: your foundational, base phase, and your stamina phase or whatever your coach calls it, then your specific phase, or peak taper.

And then the last phase is after the race; your transition phase where you reign the volumes and intensity way low. You might be doing 20% of the mileage that you had been putting in and no hard workouts.

That is that refreshing period, a transition period that you have between two training cycles, and that can be anywhere from three or four days.

Some people take three or four weeks and some people will take 5-6 weeks each year of doing nothing. What you do during those breaks is totally up to you.

After a marathon, I always try to recommend one week completely off of full rest.

No physical activity on the bike, swimming, or running. We pretty much leave it flexible to the athlete.

Let them run as many days as possible. I try to put a cap on how many miles they can do. But it’s also very easy running. A rule of the thumb is for you to rest one day, after each mile you race.

If it’s a 5K, you need to recover; you don’t need to rest.

You do easy running for three days. With a marathon, you need to have some down time. But you generally would see resting, upwards of three weeks of doing unstructured runs and keeping the intensity light.

And then the last part of that question is, “How do you maintain fitness during the break?”

I think it’s natural to lose a little bit of fitness and that’s okay. You’re going to get that back just as quick.

It’s like riding a bicycle, so to speak.

Doing a lot of cross training; a lot of cycling too. A lot of people like to swim. Like I said, you get in the gym and work on a lot of the imbalances in your hips and the lower legs.

Getting stronger and balanced out to be more durable and injury resistant, is one way of keeping fit.

A lot of people like to jump rope. Any kind of cardiovascular exercise that is not too intense is perfect after a training cycle.

Not to get too scientific, but to increase your fitness, it takes a lot more work than it is to maintain it.

So don’t think you have to be putting in the workouts that you were leading up to a marathon to maintain your fitness.

You only need to be doing maybe 20% or 25% of the workload that you had been doing to maintain the fitness level that you are.

Just because you’re putting in 15 miles a week, whereas you were doing 40 or 45 leading up to your race, doesn’t mean you’re going to be any less fit after two or three weeks of 15 miles a week.

You’re going to maintain the fitness you have and then carry that over, right into your next training cycle.

Angelo, I hope that answers your question pretty well.

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Have a great day everyone.