351: Forced Recovery: How to Connect to Your Body to Avoid Injury

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This is the real life runners podcast, episode number 351. Forced recovery.

Angie: 0:28

What's up, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. This week, we are talking about forced recovery. And this is a topic that has been popping up a lot in our lives, um, with Kevin and with my, um, my sister and like other people that are just like in our lives as, as well as some of our clients. Um, this is like one of the common themes. That we have been seeing lately and so we want to talk about it because we're guessing that some of you are probably also Doing some of these things and experiencing some of these problems and Pains that we want to help you get out of so we're gonna have a casual conversation about Recovery today because it is not one of the things that we tend to value enough as runners and when we don't value it enough Obviously it will be forced on us in a lot of ways because recovery is necessary So either we take it or it gets forced upon us

Kevin: 1:31

Yeah I mean this is one of those lessons that you have to learn and if you kind of Pretend that recovery is not super important Then your body will let you know that recovery is in fact, super important. You're like, I, you know, I don't, I don't have to take a day off every week. Eventually your body's going to be like, yeah, now you're sore enough that you're going to need to take those, those last four weeks that you haven't taken a day off. Now there's going to be four days off in a row and that might not be mentally what you want to be doing.

Angie: 1:56

Yeah. And maybe it's even bigger than that, you know, and we're going to talk about, um, Kevin's experience here because he is in a period of forced recovery right now. Oh, most

Kevin: 2:04

definitely. Right.

Angie: 2:05

Um, because if you guys have been following the podcast and his journey for a little while, you know that he ran the Daytona 100 in December with a hernia. And surprisingly, the 100 miles did not make the hernia better. It, in fact, made it much worse. So Kevin had to have surgery this past Monday, um, and, um, We are very thankful, very grateful. Everything went well. So thank you to everyone that sent us messages of, you know, prayers and good thoughts and healing, um, all of those things. We appreciate that so much. Um, but we are happy to say that his surgery went very, very well. He is recovering well. We are day three post op today. So that's showing you he's here sitting here recording a podcast with me, so that's fantastic. Um, and that's a little bit. More extreme, right? So there, this can range from like, okay, you didn't take a day off. You're, you're going to get sick or you're going to have a little injury here. That's going to make you take a couple of days off for a week off, or you're going to have a major thing that's going to require surgery and is going to force you to take a couple of months off instead.

Kevin: 3:14

Right. But I mean, technically my forced recovery right now did not necessarily come from a running injury.

Angie: 3:20

And this is definitely not a running injury. However, running in the way that you did and the choices that you made did make this worse.

Kevin: 3:30

Yes, definitely. I could have continued to like race shorter distances and probably been fine. Like I've had the hernia for years and I'd run a half marathon without really having issues during the training or the racing of it

Angie: 3:45

and marathon and a

Kevin: 3:46

marathon during the training and the racing of it. Every once in a while, I'd have a day that it was like, Oh, that doesn't feel real great, and I would just sort of. Go easy on myself on that day. I really was kind of doing some of the things that we'll talk about in today's episode of kind of adjusting that particular training day. And then I would be fine afterwards and, you know, change how the strength training grow goes to sort of strengthen that area and make sure everything was good. But eventually I decided that I was going to push the distance limits and the time limits. And, and my body said that was fine. And, and there, there was the forced recovery, but the, the original issue was not a running injury. We're actually not entirely sure what caused the original injury. It was probably something stupid. Um, where I think it might've been kickball. Possibly soccer.

Angie: 4:35

Yeah.

Kevin: 4:36

Uh, something where I probably kicked a ball sideways and I stopped my soccer skills somewhere around fourth grade. So I don't actually know the correct way to kick a soccer ball. And that's probably where this came from.

Angie: 4:48

When did you kick a soccer ball recently?

Kevin: 4:50

I don't, it wasn't recently

Angie: 4:52

within the last five, 10 years

Kevin: 4:53

towards the end of cross country season when soccer practice starts.

Angie: 4:56

Yeah.

Kevin: 4:57

And then I would kick the ball back to like, if the ball goes from soccer practice off to the track, just like a

Angie: 5:02

random thing like that. Who knows? Yeah. So we don't really know, but the point is that there was still a physical issue and you decided to push beyond, um, and, and knowing full well that you were doing this, right? Like this was not an accidental thing. You, you made this. Consciously, um, so let's kind of jump in, but before we jump into the episode, I want to let you know that I am doing another free class because I love to offer free classes. Opportunities for you all to learn for free. Um, I want you to invest in yourself. I want you to invest in your running because you're running is very, very important. Um, and sometimes we make investments with money and sometimes we make investments with time. So I love to offer free trainings for you guys to help you understand a better way for you to train. So I'm doing A brand new free training on Monday, March 25th. You can head over to realliferunners. com forward slash half marathon. I want to show you how to run easier and get faster and have a lot more fun in the process. So if running is something that is kind of like a stress for you right now, if you're feeling stressed out about your running, if you're feeling, uh, Like running isn't giving you the results that you hoped for, and you want it to feel more light and more fun and get better results and see your pace improve without having to put in. Extra hours and hours and hours of training. I want to show you a better way to do that. So head over to realliferunners. com forward slash half marathon and sign up for that half marathon class today. This is great for you. If you are thinking about running a half marathon, if you already have a half marathon on your schedule, on the calendar, maybe you've got one planned for the spring or for the fall, this is going to be a great class for you. It would also be a good class for you. If maybe you. you think you might want to run a half marathon at some point in the future. Um, or even a marathon, a lot of what I'm going to be teaching you applies to all distances. We're just going to be a little bit more specific to half marathon stuff during this training, but you can gain a lot of benefit, even if half marathon is not your race distance. So, um, check out that class today and I hope to see you guys live with me next week. All right, so when we think about being a runner and we think about some of the things that we are taught on how to get better, on how to push our limits, One of the biggest mistakes I think that plays into this idea of recovery being forced on us, right? I think that we as runners have been conditioned to value the work. We've been value, put value on doing the hard thing. And recovery has, does not have the same level of value. But it should. Because We talk about what is known as the rest recovery cycle. And this is the way that we improve as runners, as athletes, really in anything we have to stress the body. Okay. We have, did I just say rest recovery cycle?

Kevin: 8:01

Yeah, I think you did. Okay.

Angie: 8:02

I meant stress recovery. Stress or the stress rest cycle. It's really the stress. Recovery cycle. So basically we stress the body when we do a workout, when we go for a run, when we do speed work, when we do weight training, whatever it is, we place a load in a stress on the body and that actually breaks the body down. And it is during recovery that our body builds back stronger than it was before. So. Oftentimes, we focus so much on the stress part, on what more can I do, how much more can I run, how much harder can I push myself, and then we kind of ignore the recovery. But that's the most important part of the stress recovery cycle. I shouldn't say most important. These, these two things are equally important. It's

Kevin: 8:46

a yin yang. You have to have both sides. It's

Angie: 8:48

a yin yang. But. If we ignore or try to shortcut the recovery with all these different hacks and different things like cold plunges and all these things that people try to do to shortcut their recovery cycle, then we end up breaking the body down, but not building back stronger than it was. So eventually. It's we're gonna get to a breaking point, you know, it's just a matter of when that occurs,

Kevin: 9:09

right? But it seems like you should be able to improve yourself by doing the harder things, you know That that's one of the the lines people love to use run. I'm a runner. I do hard things runners do hard things but sometimes the hard thing is Knowing when it's time to pull back like that can be the challenge and that's one of these really tricky things of like the hard thing to do or On the day after workout is to not go out and grind another workout to not go out and be like well Four miles seems good, but six seems better because six is a bigger number like sometimes the hard thing is accepting that You're not feeling great that day that you need to actually pull back and the difficult task is Mentally accepting that the pullback is necessary,

Angie: 9:55

right? Because We as runners value grit Like let's just get through it like using dedication. This is one of the things that I think is so interesting is I often see us and I say us because I do it to myself sometimes to I'm much better because I can catch myself earlier now. Um, but I've definitely done this in the past, but runners often use dedication as a weapon against themselves. They're like. Oh, I am nothing. If I'm not dedicated, I'm nothing. If I'm not committed and dedication, the definition that they use, I would argue is faulty because in some runners minds, dedication means I have to work out at this level of intensity every single day or four days a week, five days a week, whatever it might be, because I'm dedicated and they use that dedication as a way to. Um, essentially override the signals that their body is sending them.

Kevin: 10:52

Well, I mean, the argument is dedicated to what, like if, if you're really dedicated towards longterm improvement, then you have to go back to your stress recovery cycle or rest recovery cycle, which I think is, is actually the cycle I've been on for the last few days. I'll take a nap and then follow it with a snack and follow it with a nap. Um, but the, the stress recovery cycle really is, that's. That's the plan that you should be dedicated towards. So if the most recent thing you did was a stress, then the next activity, if you want to dedicate yourself towards longterm growth needs to be recovery. If the most recent thing you did was recovery based, then it's time for some stress and you have to go back and forth off of these things. You can try and double up. You can be like, all right, I'm going to put some stress and then a little bit more stress on your body, but then you need to make sure that you pay that back with enough recovery. You can have some recovery. And then the next day you're like, okay. I don't feel like I'm fully recovered from that workout. I did on Monday, even though it's Wednesday and I, I want to feel recovered. I don't feel fully recovered. Well, it's time for more recovery. Like it's not a one day, one day thing. Every time, like every time. Maybe that works when you're like in your low 20s. I used to play that game, you know, you could stress, you'd recover in the next day and then you'd be fine. That doesn't always work anymore. Sometimes you need an extra couple of days to recover and it's still, it's a balance of finding the stress and recovery. If you dedicate yourself towards long term growth, I think I think the dedication works.

Angie: 12:23

Yeah, I really, really liked the way that you framed that. That is so true because it's dedication to the wrong thing, right? Like I think people are get very rigidly dedicated to their routines. Like I do my leg workout on Monday. I do speed work on Tuesday. I've got my rest day. day on Wednesday, you know, whatever it is. And so that's what they become dedicated to. They become a slave to the routine. Dedicated

Kevin: 12:45

to the routine, dedicated to the ritual.

Angie: 12:47

Yeah. Versus dedication to long term progress and growth dedication to. Actually doing what's best for your body,

Kevin: 12:55

which changes all the time. And that's, that's from it changes. Like I just pointed out, like the, the routine in your twenties, the routine in your thirties, the routine with no kids versus four kids, the routine with one

Angie: 13:07

kid versus two kids. Oh

Kevin: 13:08

my word. The routine with, uh, shoot me over the summer versus me in, in the middle of midterms week. That's a very different approach. Stress load on my body.

Angie: 13:18

Well, even now during spring break, right? Like you just underwent surgery and I did not. And my routine this week is, is definitely off. And I made that decision consciously. And this is an interesting thing for me to chat about because I definitely consider myself a creature of habit. Especially when it comes to my workouts. So I am that person that I just mentioned that does my, I do legs on Monday. I do speed work on Tuesday. I do upper body strength training on Wednesday. I do an easy run, maybe a tempo run on Thursday. Friday is usually yoga or rest day. Saturday I do my long run. Like these are my, these are my days, right? And I pride myself on that. I pride myself on always showing up. And this week. Was different because my priority is my family and that is you this week. I knew you were having surgery. Neither one of us knew how you were going to respond to that. I had a good feeling that you would respond well and recover well from it. At the same time, I did not want to be so rigid holding onto my schedule that I wasn't able to take care of you or be there for you when you needed me. So your schedule, your, um, Surgery was on Monday. Normally, I would wake up early and do speed work on Tuesday morning. But I wanted to make sure, especially like Monday night was kind of a rough night getting to bed. I didn't know if Tuesday morning you were gonna need me. So I didn't want to be gone because My priority my top priority right now this week is you and so I went out and I did my run So, you know Tuesday morning was good. Kevin's feeling well on Tuesday. Everything was going. Okay, so I was like, okay You know what? I looked at my schedule and I said I can get in a run Later in the day and normally I don't run in the afternoons So I did have to make some adjustments, but I went out and I and I did my run And I was like, okay, Tuesday is my speed work day. You know, I should do my speed work. Maybe I should just do recovery. But then my brain is like playing this game with me of like, yeah, but Tuesday is actually speed day. So you should probably do something speed work. But I'm like, yeah, but I haven't, you know, I didn't get a good sleep and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So I'm playing this fun back and forth in my head

Kevin: 15:33

during the warmup during like the first 10 to 15 minutes of your run. Exactly.

Angie: 15:37

Yes. And so I decide I'm going to do some speed work because it was like a it was a nice day The temperature was beautiful and I was like, okay, I'm gonna try some speed work. And so I get into it I decide I'm gonna do well at first I'm like I'll just do tempo miles and then I start running and I'm like, nope that I'm not gonna do a mile maybe I'll just do a Three quarters of the mile, which is like one loop of the lake. And then I'm like, yeah, no, that's not happening because I ended up going faster than I was definitely going faster than tempo pace. I was more like 5k pace. So then I end up going. Okay. Well, I'm gonna just do three threes. I'm gonna do three minutes hard three minutes easy. So that's what I decided to do and I'm like, okay Well, how many of these are am I going to do now? I will say A lot of, this is not a negotiation that you want to be making with yourself normally, because following a plan is the best way for you to make long term progress, right? So going out with kind of my goal in mind. So I did have this idea of, I'm just going to go out for like a nice easy run. And then I changed my mind mid run and decided to do some speed work, but long story short, I ended up pulling back on my speed work. I did three rounds instead of six because I realized that I was not fueled properly for that, that level of run. I had not eaten enough that day and I was trying to honor my body, right? Like it was, it's, it's sometimes funny how our brain gets us in this almost tug of war right between what we want to do and what is best for us to be doing at that time.

Kevin: 17:05

Yeah. What would have been really interesting is if you had gotten up. And tried to do speed on Tuesday because in your head you had said, I'm going to make sure that I've, I've got Kevin as a priority and I'm going to make sure that he's okay. So if you took off and did speed work with your friends, you would have had like your group that you would have run with. You would have had whatever the workout was that you would were aiming to do. But in your head you would have thought I'm not in the right place. So it would have been interesting to see how that speed work also would have played. I'm not sure either one of them would have. Worked out really great for you. One, you tried to kind of, uh, shoehorn it into the afternoon. Cause you're like, I, I have time. I could fit this thing in or putting it in at the beginning when you had told yourself before the week even began that your priority was going to be on me in both one of them, you were like, uh, I'm going to kind of adjust my week priority and fit in this run, even though that wasn't really what I was aiming for. So mentally you weren't ready for that workout. True. And I think that's possibly why, beyond fueling, it was difficult to put it into the afternoon. Even if you had gotten up and tried it in the morning, I'm not sure that you would have been able to go all in on it because your brain wouldn't have been ready for it. And that's part of the issue is we can get ourselves kind of over the, the initial bump of like, I don't want to do it, but I'm going to try it anyway. And sometimes that's great. Sometimes Our body is totally capable of doing a thing and we just mentally are not are not into it and we have to physically come over that thing and when you start running and this will happen during the warm up you'll be like actually I am feeling good today. I am totally ready for this thing. I just, I wasn't mentally tuned in but now during the warm I am. But if you are completely out of it and you are focused on something else, it's hard to get yourself to do the difficult workout and grinding through it and pushing yourself through it is going to dig yourself into a bigger hole than, than you want.

Angie: 19:05

Yeah. Because stress is still stress. And I think that this is one of the things that we often don't realize as runners. We see running as a way to de stress ourselves as to a way to handle some of the regular life. Stress that gets thrown at us. And we sometimes forget to recognize that running is also a stress on the body. It's a different kind of stress. It's a physical stress. It's not an emotional or psychological stress or, um, you know, lifestyle stress that some other things are, but stress is still stress and those hormones, those stress hormones are released in our body and have very. Real physiological effects on how we perform. And so. If you are stressed about something else in your life, like Kevin said, it is going to be harder for you to lock in, especially on a harder workout. And that's why I decided to connect with my body. And this is really the two big steps that we want you to think about here. When it talks, when we talk about forced recovery, there's two main things that you need to do, um, to make sure that you don't end up in a cycle or a section of forced recovery. We want you to take your recovery. Consciously and choose when to have your recovery in there so that again keeping that focus on long term progress and long term growth and overall health and wellness and well being. Um, so the two main things that you need to do are number one, connecting to your body. And number two, honoring your body. Okay. So when we talk about connecting to your body, it's really about you being able to determine what is your body trying to tell you today? You know, are you more sore than normal? Are you having pain? Do you even know the difference between normal post workout soreness and problematic pain? And I think that's one of the most important places to start is. If there is discomfort in the body, is this kind of like a normal thing that's expected that you can kind of just work through a little bit? Or, is Is this problematic? And that's one of the hardest things I think for us to determine sometimes.

Kevin: 21:13

Right. Because we can always try and convince ourselves that it is simply soreness. It is not actually pain. And it is, it's a gray area because what it is, is discomfort. And during the warmup. You're like, Oh, I don't feel like I'm firing on all cylinders, but I'm probably just sore from yesterday. I'm probably sore from the lift I did yesterday, the workout I did yesterday. Instead of actually accepting that maybe that is a new pain that's right now just in like baby stages of pain. And we're feeling discomfort, we're going to pretend that it's soreness and just push on through. We're going to grit our way through because the routine says this is the plan, this is what's on my schedule, I'm going to do my thing. And let's just go with it's soreness because if I tell myself it's soreness, then I can stick with what the schedule says. But sometimes it's, it's pain and we need to adjust. Sometimes it's, it's more than soreness. Sometimes we can feel that there is something off in our body and that's why you were able to adjust on the fly on your workout. Yes, following a plan is a good idea, but you still kind of stuck with Tuesday is my speed day. You went out and did speed. You just adjusted the volume, the intensity of it on the fly. And that was, I think, going to set you up for longer term success.

Angie: 22:30

Yeah. And that's really, so pain and soreness is one thing that you need to connect to. The other one is fatigue. And that's really what I connected to yesterday is, is the fatigue is, okay, this feels harder than. It normally does, right? Like what is my body normally feel when I'm running at this pace or when I'm running at this effort level? And is that what's happening right now? And I had decided essentially when I went out to do this speed work, um, that I wanted to hit a certain pace. Because that's just what I wanted to do. But when I was hitting that pace, maintaining that pace for three minutes was feeling a lot harder than I wanted it to feel. So that's when I decided, like at that point I could have adjusted in multiple ways. So essentially I did the step one. I connected with my body. Like this is feeling harder than it normally feels, or this is feeling harder than I know that I have the energy for, and I could keep pushing through. Right. And I think that's where a lot of us default to is like, I I'm just going to grit through this, right? Like I'm just going to do the hard things and keep pushing myself and I'm just going to go for it versus, okay, this is feeling harder than I want it to. I know I'm not fueled well. I know I haven't got good enough sleep. I know that there's extra stress going on in my life. Is it worth it? And the answer to me was no. The answer was no, it's not worth it for you to do three more rounds of this. Even if you can. It's not going to feel good and will you feel better about yourself at the end of the workout? Maybe you will have a little bit of pride, but is that going to be best for your long term health performance and how you feel the rest of the week on your workouts? No, it's not. And so I made the decision in that moment to adjust the volume. I could have also decided to pull back on the intensity. So instead of running the, um, The workouts at like that 5k pace I could have pulled back to a tempo or even a steady pace that was a little bit harder than easy pace but still Um, not to the level that I was pushing to.

Kevin: 24:32

But your body had, for some reason on the pickup portions, it had naturally dropped into 5k pace. And so then you're like, well, this is what I'm doing. And this is another thing is when you're doing the workout and you're trying to find the difference between 5k effort and 10k effort or tempo effort or whatever, all the different things are sometimes. That is mentally challenging. Sometimes that if you're fatigued It can be difficult to dial up the different paces and you're like, well, my body seems to have dropped into this pace So I'm gonna need a workout based off of the pace that my body is dropping into because I just don't have the mental Capacity to adjust that pace. I can't seem to find the appropriate gear. I'm just going too quick and I think that's part of what you did. That's why you adjusted the workout down in volume, because you're like, this is the pace that my body is naturally dropping into. Let's come up with an appropriate workout for that. That still allows me to get in some speed, but it doesn't bury me in a hole for the rest of the week.

Angie: 25:28

Right. Because a little bit of speed is still better than nothing. Right. And I think that oftentimes we look at a workout and we're like, if I don't do the workout exactly as it's written, I failed, right. I didn't do the workout as planned. And While it's true that you don't want to be short cutting and modifying every single workout, absolutely true, sometimes, in like these circumstances, it is a good idea. You know, because again, that goes from connecting to my body, realizing I'm more tired, there's more going on, and then moving to step two, which is honoring. My body honoring your body because that's the second part and oftentimes. That's where we get it wrong A lot of times we can connect with the body and we're like, oh, I'm feeling more tired. Oh, I'm more stressed Oh like we notice things and then we tend to override it and just grit through and push through anyway Right and so step two is really Honoring the body, right? Are you able to modify your plan accordingly? Like if you are noticing that you are more tired, you are more stressed, you have more soreness or an actual pain that's there, can you modify your plan? To help accommodate that to give yourself a little bit more rest and recovery so that it what is happening in your body does not force you into recovery and like when I see people that get sick all the time, this is one of the things that I often think about is like you are probably You're probably doing too much and pushing your body too hard, and you're probably not fueling your body and getting enough sleep. Like, those are really what's going on. You know, if people are constantly sick or constantly injured, like, it's not just what's going on in training. Like, yes, the training is a part of it, but it's so much more about, like, what are you doing for recovery? Or lack thereof that's allowing, you know, that's essentially just making your body break down time after time,

Kevin: 27:23

right? I mean, this is one of the challenges that we face coaching the high school kids is there's constant stresses on them Like they have the stress of being an adolescent Navigating high school like that just on its own creates a whole heck of a lot of stress and so, you know, sometimes it's the Listening to them talk to each other in the 10 to 15 minutes before practice begins, where I'm like, okay, well this is going to be the workout. We are doing six by a half mile at goal race pace, and we're keeping the recovery tight because we've got this big race coming up in three weeks. And I'm listening to the kids and they're like, Oh my word, I had three tests today and I've got another test tomorrow and then so and so broke up with this person and I'm trying to comfort my friend and I'm like, Oh my word, we're definitely not doing that workout today. And it's that adjustment of having the appropriate perspective to look at it and say, there are way too many stresses on the body to drop physical stress on top of this. You've got so much stress and like part of that is physical. Like I didn't sleep last night because I was studying for three tests. put that into adulthood. Well, I was up late because my, my kids were sick and I was up trying to keep them comfortable or I woke up repeatedly throughout the night. New parents waking up, trying to feed kids and change kids and whatnot. All sorts of things that could have adjusted, that could have affected you before the workout even began.

Angie: 28:47

There are those of us that are in perimenopause or menopause and all of a sudden You're fighting yourself waking up at 3 a. m. every single night to go to the bathroom or because you're having a hot flash or like other things that are going on. This is a real thing too. And so it's very important for us to honor our body. You know taking more rest days like Kevin said our bodies as we get older as we get into our fourth fifth Six decades of life and beyond we need more rest It's just there's nothing saying you can't still push yourself. You absolutely can and we want you all to To challenge yourself safely and continue to see, you know, how long can I run? How fast can I run? There's nothing saying that you have to automatically get slower as you get older, you know, like, Oh, I guess I'm just getting older. So I'm just naturally going to slow down. No. However, you do have to modify things. You might need more recovery during the week. Then you had, you know, then you needed when you were 20 years old, like you might not be able to push yourself to the same level. And then get up and go to your 8 a. m. class the next day, right? Like it's this, it's just a different time of life and it's totally okay, right? So when we talk about honoring your body, after you connect and kind of figure out what is going on, ways that you can honor your body, okay? Like, number one, modifying your plan. Number two, taking more rest days when you need them. Um, another modification would be skipping speed work, right? Or, like, you know, What I did modifying the speed work, you know, I could have skipped speed work day yesterday. And that's when I headed out on my run, that was my plan. My plan was just keep it an easy run. I was going to make it shorter. And then my brain started yapping at me. And so I gave in, you know, and I was like, okay, fine. I'll, I'll do some speed work. You know, I'll do a little bit more. And then as I did that speed work, I realized, nope, this isn't, this isn't a good choice, you know, so I, I modified that and, you know, adjusted the volume of the speed work that I was going to do. Maybe it means decreasing the weights in your strength exercises because your body's tired and sore. So you just decrease the weights. I did that one also this week. Okay. Like when. Um, Monday's my leg day. I like to lift heavier, um, with my legs on Monday. Monday was the day of Kevin's surgery, so we were up at 5 a. m. so that he could be at the surgical center at 6 a. m. I was tired, you know, like, and obviously, The stress of having your husband in surgery also creates more fatigue, right? Because you're just your stress level is high. You're you're worried about things And so on Monday when I wanted to get my strength workout in I decided I was gonna do the workout That I wasn't had planned. I just was gonna do it with no weights, right? So instead of doing step ups with holding dumbbells, there was no dumbbells right instead of doing squat Goblet squats with dumbbells. There was no dumbbells, right? I just took the weights out of the equation So I still felt good because I got my workout in I just made it a little bit easier than it would have been because I knew that I had a different level of energy and focus and availability for that workout that day.

Kevin: 31:51

Yeah, I, I hope I'm not going too far off off topic here, but one of the things that you point out is modifying your plan. And we're doing a lot of like, you know, recognize what your body is feeling and then make appropriate adjustments. But. One of the other things that we've highlighted a couple of times here is as we become more mature runners, let's say, there are ways to modify your plan that just make good sense. You don't have to have as much mileage as you used to when you were younger. You don't have to have the same level of speed work coming in as you did when you were younger, because Because you might have all of this stuff built up in your body. Like your body doesn't lose it. You've been gaining the benefits of running for however many years that you've been running. Like I've been putting in decades of training. And so, well I feel like I haven't done squat for the last few months here as I've been trying to, you know, deal with a hernia and now recover from surgery. I still have this stuff built up from when I started running when I was 14. Like this is the way that I train myself now is different than the training that I was doing in college. Like my schedule in college and my optimum schedule right now don't look the same. Both of them have a couple of speed days during the week. Both of them have a long run on the weekend, but the amount of speed, the type of speed, it just varies as we get a little bit older. I think it's important that you're still hitting some higher end speed. I think it's important that we're still being able to get a long run if you're aiming for longer races, but I used to, when I was in college, every Monday, we just pushed the pace for no good reason. And it seems to be just a rule, especially on guys teams across the NCAA from one side of the country to the other. Mondays, you just push excessively hard for no good reason. There is zero chance that I could do that now, that I could hit a long run on Sunday and get up and just push aggressively on Monday. But there's also no reason to, I'm not gaining a benefit from it.

Angie: 33:48

Well, and I think that's part of it too, is that you're smarter. Like you're, you're much wiser now. So you realize there's no benefit to this,

Kevin: 33:55

right? And when I was in my late teens and twenties, There was probably a small benefit. The risk reward might have gone in the favor of you might get something out of it and it might not destroy you as much. But right now that risk reward is not even close to balance anymore. So there's no point in trying to push a temple on Monday followed by a speed work on Tuesday. It just makes no sense.

Angie: 34:18

Yeah. And I think that's really important for us to honor. Um, that just honoring where we are in our lives right now. And that's a good thing. You know, there's people that I know, um, would be in your situation. Someone that is just post post op and not able to have been training the way that they wanted to over the past few months. Like, oh my gosh, I'm all the way back to square one. Right, but like you just pointed out you're never back to square one. Your body still has so much built up inside of it Like you've you've built up the endurance you've built up strength and have you taken a couple steps back? Sure. Yes, you have Okay, and that's okay, but you're not back to square one You never will be because the body remembers things and this is one of the things that I'm You Uh, personally excited to see here with Kevin is how he gets back into it, you know, and how he recovers and resumes his mileage and everything because he is much smarter and wiser than he was before. He's not going to do the stupid things that he might've done when he was in his twenties. And so I'm very

Kevin: 35:22

into the details of the stupid things I did in my twenties.

Angie: 35:25

I'm very interested to see, you know, your, your comeback here. On on how you you come back into running after after the surgery. I'm really excited about it because I think that you're going to recover a lot quicker than Most people think and that maybe even you realize because you have such a huge base underneath you

Kevin: 35:45

I mean there was a study I heard about on on a different podcast But it was it was related to strength training and they had taken a group of athletes that had been strength training for years and for whatever reason one reason or another they They had taken a substantial pause and they were trying to figure out how long it took them to get back to where they were. And regardless of what the pause was, it seemed like the answer was whatever half the time of the pause was, was how long it took them to get back. And it was like, you get back way faster than you think. And the more. Training they had put in the longer that they had really focused on their strength training the easier It was for them to get back not that they had the same strength level, but that they felt back in their rhythm Very very quickly Which was amazing how quickly they got back in and then their strength came back to where it was supposed to be in Half the time it took them to lose that strength. They were back and then able to progress Farther than they were before whether the the first Forced recovery on them was some sort of injury. It was some significant event in their life. It was something that forced them to stop training for a decent period of time. I think like the longest group took like six months off and they were back to their original strength after three months, some of them took even faster to get back, but on average they were coming back in three months. Which is crazy how, how we're able to get back as long as we don't do dumb things. So yes, sometimes we have this forced recovery, but as long as you don't do a dumb thing on the way back, you don't have to live in the forced recovery for longer than necessary. You're going to be able to come back as long as you do. Stick with the whole connecting with your body and honoring that connection. Not like, yep, I feel fatigued and I'm going to pretend I'm not. That's not usually a safe way to come back.

Angie: 37:31

Yeah. And this is the exact conversation I had with my sister yesterday. You know, she hurt her knee and she's like, well, can I go back? You know, and I go, Gina, are you going to learn the lesson? You know, are you going to learn the lesson this time? The, the universe, God has been trying to give you this lesson for the past, like six months now and it started smaller. And now it's getting bigger. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger because you keep doing a little bit and be like, okay, I think that's probably enough. Now I can get back to where I normally was. And a lot of times that's what we do. We're like, okay, I'll honor it for like a couple of days, but then I'm going to jump right back into where I was, right? And so honoring it isn't just honoring it for the amount of time that we want to, it's honoring it for the amount of time that our body actually needs.

Kevin: 38:16

Ooh, that's a good one. Like honoring for the actual required amount of time, not just, not just until we're bored of honoring our body anymore. Right,

Angie: 38:24

until we're done with it. Yeah, I'm done with that. And

Kevin: 38:26

I'm over the honoring portion. Can I just grind it out again? Right. No, you can, you can, you can grind yourself into the ground again and you'll be right back to where you started and that's, that's the hurt or the burnt out. Like there's also the physical, the mental aspect of this. Yep. It's not necessarily the injury that gets you. It's that you just don't have the motivation to do it day upon day upon day, because you've pushed so hard for so long that you just feel mentally shot every time you wake up, every time you want to start the run or the workout, you're like, I just really don't want to do it today.

Angie: 39:00

All of these things are connected, right? Like all of these things are connected and they, you know, there's a. A story or a saying or things that I've heard in the past, or it's like, when, when God tries to give you a message, first he sends the feather, then he sends the raindrop, then he sends the pebble, and if you just keep ignoring it, then it's finally the boulder that you get hit with, right? Like, these messages are coming to you, and it's the same thing with our bodies. Usually it's not just like, All of a sudden, you know, something is, is broken and torn. Usually it starts off with these small little signals and it's up to us to recognize them and then honor them and be like, okay, yep, I see that. I'm going to modify. I'm going to, I'm going to get more sleep now. I'm going to eat more food. I'm going to modify my workouts however I need to, so that this huge, this little feather doesn't automatically. Automatically become a boulder.

Kevin: 39:49

Yes. Yeah. The, the honoring at the early stages, recognizing that soreness needs adjustment before soreness becomes pain, recognizing that pain is pain and not soreness. Like sometimes you can push through a little bit on soreness as long as you recover, but pretending that actual pain in your body is just soreness and that you can push through is usually not a setup for success.

Angie: 40:10

Exactly. All right, you guys. Go out there this week, this month, train, but honor your bodies in the process. Okay. Like we want you guys to be able to train for as long as you want for the rest of your lives and whatever capacity makes you feel free and happy and strong. And part of that is learning to connect and honor your body and not override it all the times. Okay. So, um, We'd love to hear what you guys thought about this episode. If you haven't yet, please go over to apple podcasts and leave us a review, um, and leave us a five star rating and a review there so that more runners can find the show and we can help more people to become the strong connected runners that we all want to be. And as always, this has been the real life runners podcast, episode number 351. Now get out there and run your life.