Transcript

CHRISSIE WELLINGTON:

To me, resting was absolutely tantamount to weakness. So to have a rest day was like saying I'd failed. If someone said to me, did you run today and I said 'no,' I felt like a complete failure. So you also need to see rest as part of training and not an add-on or a luxury.

It's absolutely fundamental because training breaks your body. That's what it does. That's why you train. You train to stress your body.

But unless you rest, your body can never rebuild. It can never recover, so you continually stress and continually stress it. It can take it for a little while, and then eventually, bang. Oh, dear, I've got a stress fracture. I wonder why.

And coupled with that, I couldn't rest my mind. So I overanalysed everything. I overanalysed if I had a bad race, if I had a bad session. I thought about everything.

You have to be able to rest your mind, and you have to be able to rest your body. And for me, that was so incredibly challenging. And unless I got a handle on my brain, I would never have achieved what I did.