Its winter time, the evenings are dark, its cold, there are Christmas get-togethers and life just gets busier. You get flu or you get injured after working hard all season so as much as you’d like to be out there you just can’t. Three days off turn into seven which become ten and then the panic starts to creep in. I don’t find running easy at the best of times, it doesn’t come naturally so I worry that all my efforts are going to undo themselves as I lie sniffling on the sofa binge watching some Amazon drama.
In an attempt to cheer myself up I did some research. Now I have just celebrated one year of running/exercising so in the big scale of things I’m still a bit of a novice but I’ve hit a couple of goals so I’d like to think I’ve done alright. Popular thinking is that loss of fitness depends on the individual but it also depends on where the athlete is at in terms of fitness. “If you’re at peak fitness, then it goes really fast,” says Ann Alyanak, a marathon and 10,000m champion and coach. But, if you’ve been training for a long time, then you can maintain some baseline fitness longer. Long-term athletes are often in a better position than those who have been running or working out for a shorter period of time. That can be true even after months of inactivity. “If you’ve done it in the past, it’ll come back faster”. Age, unsurprisingly, plays a role too, youngsters lose condition more slowly than oldsters, something you never appreciate until you are an oldster.
How long before I’m back where I started? Spryliving.com has the answer:
One week:
Don’t panic. Experts reckon taking a week off is highly unlikely to affect physical performance, in fact, it may help. Ample recovery time is crucial to repairing tissue damage, easing muscle fatigue, and strengthening the heart and other muscles. So relax and when you get back out there, you’ll be raring to go.
After two weeks off:
Good news for body builders, bad news for runners. Aerobic fitness tends to slide faster than muscular strength. This is because the prime measure of your aerobic fitness (VO2 max) declines after about two weeks of inactivity by about twenty percent. Muscles, on the other hand, are resilient, so they won’t atrophy as quickly. So after a fortnight you might notice that your usual four-mile run seems more gruelling and challenging than before but generally speaking a two-week break shouldn’t sabotage your progress too much. Muscles grow stronger after you workout, not during, so a recovery period might give fatigued muscles and tendons a chance to grow and repair.
After more than two weeks off:
Research shows that taking more than two weeks off will begin to chip away at your progress. At this point, cardiovascular endurance levels will continue to plummet, and muscular strength will start to decline too. A study in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise found that muscular fibre strength doesn’t decrease too much, even after a month of inactivity, but, specialised muscle fibres (fast-twitch or slow-twitch) begin to change to couch potato fibres, so you will be less efficient at either sprinting or endurance runs.
I’m at the two week stage and about to go out for a Tuesday night session and honestly I’m a little apprehensive but the upshot is that the longer I leave it the harder it will be. And maybe I’ll surprise myself …
Keep active over Christmas:
Check out Lymm Runners “12 Days of Christmas” activities
If injury is stopping you from running try cross training:
http://www.active.com/cycling/articles/the-best-cross-training-for-runners