[Christian]

“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