WHY YOU NEED AN OFFSEASON (Even a Short One!)

Image courtesy of LiFT Creative Studios

by Chris Bagg

Ed. note—we published an updated version of this story over on Medium, if you would like to see my additional suggestions for keeping yourself sane during the offseason.

A few weeks ago I had to do something I almost never do: suggest to an athlete that I may have to end our coaching relationship. It’s happened fewer than ten times in the decade or so that I’ve been coaching endurance junkies, and I certainly hope this circumstance remains rare, but the interaction stuck in my brain, so I’m getting it out here, in the hopes that that unburdening myself makes someone’s life easier, simpler, or more understandable. The athlete in question had been trying to rehabilitate a stress fracture, and had finally decided to cancel the final race of the season and focus instead on getting healthy for 2020. We were talking on the phone, and our conversation went like this:

ATHLETE: I know this whole week I was supposed to be off, but I was stuck Canada with a visa issue, and I was antsy, so I moved some workouts from the previous week and did them during my week off.
CHRIS: Ok, I get it. That’s understandable. I’m just going to add a few days off, then, so you end up with at least a week of absolutely no workouts.
ATHLETE: What? Really? I don’t know if I can do that.
CHRIS: Ok, I’ve heard that before. So…here’s the thing: if you can’t take a week off of training, I don’t think I can continue coaching you.
ATHLETE: WHAT?

We talked it out, and in the end the athlete relented and took the whole week off. Believe me, I wish I could have gotten more time off out of this athlete. Stress fractures are no joke, and they are the hallmark of athletes that don’t know when to—or, more accurately, can’t—stop training. “I just don’t feel the same when I don’t work out!” they tell me, and I believe them. These confessions, though, have a similar ring to the ones I hear when I attend AA meetings, and although I am—certainly—biased in this regard, I worry when athletes refer to training as a need, rather than as something that can be taken or left alone. Sure, sure, I am very likely over-reacting, but a coach acts as an early warning system for the athletes he works with, a mirror that can show them when they are acting compulsively. Addiction happens “when our lives become unmanageable,” to paraphrase a much wiser person than myself, and what I think that person refers to is the moment when we stopped making decisions for ourselves, and an entity outside of us—alcohol, food, no food, cigarettes, gambling, sex, control, sport—took over and started managing our lives for us. There’s a reason recovery’s called recovery: we’re trying to get something back, something we waived our rights to long ago.

You’re tired—take a break

Shit, that got dark fast. Gosh, this is always happening. What does this have to do with your offseason? The offseason is a chance for you to experience yourself again, without sports or training, and to look back on what you’ve accomplished this past year. It’s a chance for your badly tired body (you’re probably a lot more tired than you think you are—as an endurance athlete you pretty much walk around exhausted, so you think that’s just your baseline) to relax and recover a little bit. Most of all it’s a chance for you to reiterate to yourself that you are an athlete who trains for certain events, rather than person who works out to stay fit, or to blow off steam from their work or home lives. Not that those are ignoble pursuits, but since you’re here reading a blog mostly focused on endurance racing I’m gonna assume that you want to be fast (or simply faster) on a few targeted days out of the year. Here’s the way that I see it:

Training: an undulating pattern of stimulus and recovery, aimed at reaching the highest performance level possible for short amounts of time (your primary races)

Working Out: a linear pattern of stimulus with limited recovery, aimed at maintaining one level of fitness all the time (people who work out for health are in this group, and they prove the model: their goal is to maintain their health, and working out is a controlled dosage of medicine for them)

Again, let me stress that neither one of these is better than the other (indeed, those in the second group are probably healthier and longer-lived in the final analysis), but if performance is your goal, you must end up in the first group and not the second, and if you’re in the first group, your training and recovery have to undulate throughout the year. What does that mean? It means there must be an extended period of complete rest for a few weeks at the close of the athlete’s competitive period. And I really mean complete rest. Here’s another conversation. 

COACH: OK, now we head into your offseason/rest period. I want you to take the next fourteen days completely off. I even added all those off days to your TrainingPeaks account.
ATHLETE: So what do you mean, off?
COACH: Totally off. No training. Just rest. Hang out with your family. Focus on work. Eat multiple burritos each day.
ATHLETE: how about Yoga?
COACH: Nope! No Yoga. Just rest.
ATHLETE: What if I feel really antsy? It’s hard for me to take time off.
COACH: I get that, and I feel it too when I take time off, but it’s really important for you to take time off now. I promise that it will make you stronger next season.
ATHLETE: What about some really easy bike rides?
COACH: [long pause over phone line as coach jumps up and down silently in frustration in his home office] Nope! Gotta be total rest.
ATHLETE: Hmmmm. What about…

This is the fitness profile of an athlete who trains vs “works out”

So why is this important? And how do we end up stronger next year? Forgive yet another metaphor, but your fitness is a lot more like the stock market than a zero sum game. If you train consistently for 46-50 weeks out of the year, your personal stock market will climb quite a bit. When you take two weeks off, your fitness will drop, certainly (a market correction), but it doesn’t fall all the way back to your starting point, which is what most athletes believe happens. Most athletes feel that they’ll lose all their fitness if they take more than three days off, let alone 14! Your fitness declines, certainly, but you will start back up at a higher level of fitness than when you started last year, and then next year you’ll start higher again, and the pattern continues: it’s the compound interest of the fitness world, and is the reason that endurance athletes really start to hit impressive numbers after they’ve been following this pattern consistently for years, not months. Don’t like this timeline? Then why did you pick endurance athletics?

Here’s the other magic of the break. Even though your fitness is higher than when you started last year, your acute training load is the lowest it’s been all year, which means you are finally fresh again. You are in a great position to begin laying the bricks of your successful season, and you will be rejuvenated, excited, and hungry. Contrast that with the athlete who doesn’t take a break. Tired and on the verge of injury, they have a few good weeks, and then stress and fatigue kick in, and they get sick, or just can’t rouse themselves to train, and they take a few days off, and then start pushing again, and the pattern continues. These athletes never develop, never climb to heights they couldn’t imagine a few years ago. They meander along, posting the same performances, wondering why their friends (who take all that time off!) have begun to leave them behind. 

And here’s the other worry, the one that I started with. If an athlete can’t bring him or herself to take a break at the end of the season, the tail has begun to wag the dog, and exercise addiction is a real possibility. If you’re in this warning area, then I’d really urge you to get some help (real help—sadly your triathlon coach doesn’t help in this regard, but maybe he or she was able to point out some red flags). One of my coaches said to me, once, “You can’t do mental fitness until you do mental health,” and I think about him every single time I have a recalcitrant athlete at the end of the season. “Don’t you want to be the best you can be next year?” I ask them, and they all nod, all of them. “Well, being the best you can be means everything has to work: your body, mind, and soul, and if I have some worries about your mental health, then it means you’ll never be able to optimize your mental fitness. So let’s see what the next fourteen days of rest and reflection brings you, and use this time as an opportunity to see who is in control of you—is it you, or is it your sport?”

I hope this wasn’t too dark or overbearing. Having experienced addiction of several sorts myself, I worry when I see the tendencies in others. For sure, when you’re a nail the world looks like a bunch of hammers, so there is certainly some degree of projection happening here, but I would hazard a guess that there is some truth, too, and I invite you to find yourself in it.