It Was Not a "Good Break"

We used to joke in the Marine Corps about those last two months of the year - no man’s land on the calendar. Between the Marine Corps birthday and New Years we had Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas. Now in Canada we add in Boxing Day and it’s an essential eight weeks of long weekends with some “work” days interspersed throughout. 

It’s the perfect time to rest, recover, reorganize, and get reinvigorated for the new year. 

I love a new year. I love a fresh start, a new page on the planner. I love the start of a training program, the start line of a marathon. There is so much possibility there, so much anticipation and eagerness to get into it. I may even love starting something more than I love finishing it (and I love finishing things, have I ever told you the weird outsized satisfaction I get from finishing a bottle of shampoo?). I’ve never been huge on making (ok keeping) new year’s resolutions, but I always love looking forward to 365 days of what comes next.  Probably because that new year comes right after those two months of rest. That rest is what resets us, not the date on the calendar. It’s the two months of reconnecting and recuperating that reminds us the joys of work.

Well up until this year. This year I did not go to bed on December 31, full of energy for the coming day. I didn’t have a list of goals or changes I wanted to implement. In fact I felt a little discouraged and maybe even a little bit of dread. 

Then it hit me. I wasn’t rested. I wasn’t recovered. 

One of the foundational principles of training is progressive load with periods of rest - rest between micro, meso, and macrocycles. This typically looks like three weeks of building mileage and/or speed followed by a week of lower mileage and lower intensity. We call that a cutback week. After a goal race, we have an even longer recovery period. This rest and recovery is critical, perhaps the most critical piece of the training plan, of the growth puzzle. 

I know that principle applies to life in general too, which is why I always took my rest days - in running, school, and work. It is why I’ve written about the role of rest before. It may not always look like it from the outside, because rest and work periods look different for everyone, but I have always been very careful about burnout - in all areas of my life. It’s one of the greatest gifts of endurance, the ability to look at the big picture, to commit to the long game. To step back in order to move further forward. 

When I program cutback weeks for my athletes I always ask them to check in  - with themselves and with me. How were they feeling? Were they itching to get back out there? Or at the end of that last rest day did they dread returning to the trail/road/treadmill? I urge them to listen to their cues over the calendar. If they’re not feeling rested, we take a few more days. 

Which is why I scaled back this holiday season. I skipped a couple races I had been looking forward to. We opted for a couple small wire trees instead of our traditional live tree. We took a friend up on her offer to babysit and got not one, but two date nights. I slept in, vegged out, and slowed down. I did all the things I normally do this time of year, all the tried and true recovery methods.

And still, I wasn’t rested. I wasn’t recovered. I wasn’t ready for the next training cycle. 

Then it hit me. My normal recovery methods didn’t work because my workload wasn’t normal. My building phase this year looked very different from previous years. We had a new baby, a new toddler, and a newly minted tween. I’d gone back to work, demanding work just as the seasons turned in a country known for long, dark, and cold winters. My body was one life thicker and one year older. I was juggling school - both teaching and attending, and dropping balls left and right.

I’ve had busy seasons before, and thrived in them. But I wasn’t thriving - not in work, play, or rest. Maybe it was age, or babies, or hormones. It’s probably a combination of all of the above, but one thing is for sure: my rest this cycle wasn’t enough, and when we hit those points, where we’re off harmony, we either need to increase or rest or decrease our workload. Usually we need to do both. 

My holidays themselves? Those were wonderful. My family was together, my heart was full, but it was not restful. So my “break” was not “good,” thanks for asking. Because breaks are only as good as the rest they provide.

But it was useful. It gave me the cues I needed to avoid burnout, to scale back and rest up. To shift my mindset, recalculate and reconsider my “must dos” as “maybe laters.” 

And perhaps, in the long run, that's the greatest gift of all.