2 Insight: recovery is training

Chrissie Wellington trained obsessively hard when she gave up her civil service job to become a full-time athlete. She states that ‘recovery is training … spending the day shopping or gardening doesn’t count as rest. It has to involve sitting down, preferably on a sofa’ (Wellington, 2012, p. 150).

Figure 2 Chrissie Wellington

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A full-length photograph of Chrissie Wellington, triumphant at the World Ironman Championships. She looks as if she has just finished the competition, holding aloft the finish line and a Union flag, and she is shouting in delight.

Figure 2 Chrissie Wellington

Activity 2 Is Wellington’s view of recovery realistic?

Timing: Allow about 5 minutes

Watch this video of Wellington describing how she massively reduced her risk of overtraining once she changed her approach to recovery. Is her idea that it is only possible to get full mental and physical rest by sitting or lying on a sofa realistic for most everyday athletes?

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Transcript: Video 2

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.

End transcript: Video 2

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Discussion

Wellington was at the very top of an extreme physical endurance sport in which legs were important in running, swimming and cycling. Her extreme version of rest is perhaps uncommon and difficult to comply with for those who work and/or have family caring responsibilities. Her comments about resting her active mind are also interesting since for most people going shopping or light gardening would be one easy way of helping to switch off.

The important point is that recovery in itself is training, and overtraining can be prevented by appropriate rest.

But if an athlete doesn’t allow for appropriate recovery – what are the potential health risks? You will look at this next.