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📣 Our community has moved!
After several years of incredible discussions, we've moved our community to a new home on Reddit where we can better serve our growing family of mountain and endurance athletes.
Join us at our new subreddit forum /r/evokeendurance for:
- Training advice from our coaching team
- Peer support and motivation
- Gear discussions and recommendations
- Trip reports and inspiration
This forum will remain archived so you can still access all the valuable content and conversations from over the years. However, all new discussions and coaching support now happen on Reddit.
Join us on Reddit
“You can’t bludgeon yourself into fitness.”
I love it! 😀 Admittedly, because I catch myself trying to do so from time to time. But it has become rare and I know better now. They say you cannot grow the gras by pulling at its leaves – but .. it is tempting. 😉
@Adam: I’ll share my experience and maybe you can draw something from it. If not, that’s perfectly ok.
Each person is different but some time ago I intensively pondered how I could flee a similar cycle of overstressing and exhaustion. There is a slogan “what gets measured gets managed”. So I thought, if I put all my focus on recovery, maybe I could shift my mindset to beat yesterday in terms of recovery instead of performance.
Consequently, I did an orthostatic test every day, tracked my sleep each night, wrote a journal of my body sensations, my emotional feelings and made that the benchmark to strive for – sleep better than yesterday, feel better than yesterday, become ill less frequently, etc. Instead of climbing mountains I watched documentaries about the mountains to at least imagine how it would be to be there. I have a wildflower meadow nearby and after rainfall it smells slightly similar to that fresh air we breathe in the alpine, but it’s only a short walk away. I also found it motivating to become better and better at noticing even more subtle sensations of lingering exhaustion, because I think training that is not turned into gains via enough recovery is more or less wasted time and effort.
Over time I noticed a psychological mind shift: Instead of being proud of how hard I can push myself, I now have a much more caring relationship with my body. I wasn’t sure whether one can point a type A personality at a different target. For me it proved to be possible over the course of about a year – with several relapses, of course. However, every mistake made me a bit more competent in reading my body. In the process I figured out that currently a 1-1 cycle with a recovery week of 50% is what feels best for me. And miraculously the aerobic threshold in my drift tests started rising. 🙂
I hope it is only a matter of time until you figure out the best way to train for your body. And I hope it is a valuable journey!
All the best
Christian