We all (hopefully) know that both your hard workouts and your easy runs/rest matter. The hard days are the stimulus for improvement but recovery is when the improvements happen so you need to make sure you’re recovering adequately. Not to mention, if you don’t recover adequately, you’ll eventually break down and either get burned out or injured.
But what classifies as rest? Well, that’s a difficult question.
The most difficult part of that question is that it means different things for different people.
For example, I will use myself and my daughter as examples. Consider our wide difference in experience and you can hopefully see why we might have different needs for rest. She is still not just a young person, she is also a young runner without many years of training behind her. I, on the other hand, have 34 years of sometimes extremely high levels of training behind me. I’ve built my fitness to the point where I need less rest to adequately recover from a hard effort than she does.
For my daughter, most of her easy runs still need to be quite slow relative to what she is capable of in races and workouts. For me, I need some easy runs like that on occasion but most of my easy runs can be a fair bit faster, relatively speaking.
For me, I’ve built up enough of a base that I don’t need regularly planned days off. In fact, I haven’t taken a day off in a little over a year. I just haven’t needed one. I also have decades of experience that I can rely on to know when I need a day off. For my daughter, she doesn’t have that base and she has found that she needs a day off every week or she begins to find herself getting beat up.
Of course, these are just examples based on training experience and the actual act of running. Even if you’re running an hour a day, there are still 23 other hours. I plan to write about those 23 hours some time soon and how they affect your running but, for now, just realize that what you do during those other 23 hours greatly affect what your easy days might need to look like.
The one thing I would encourage for everyone, though, is to err on the side of caution. You’re better off getting a little too much rest than too little.