i thought rest was for people who were not serious
the data looked perfect
my garmin watch said i was ready. training load: optimal. recovery time: 12 hours. hrv looked good. so i laced up for another tempo run.
it was tuesday. i had already run sunday, cycled during the week, and crushed a threshold session on thursday. but the numbers said i could handle it. and i trusted the numbers more than i trusted how i felt.
halfway through the run, my legs felt like concrete. my pace was 30 seconds slower than it should have been. my heart rate was 10 beats higher for the same effort.
i finished the run. logged it in strava. added it to my training plan spreadsheet. felt like i was doing everything right.
two weeks later, i could not finish a workout i had done easily a month before.
the engineer's approach to training
when i started preparing for my first ultra, i did what any software engineer would do. i optimized everything.
calculated weekly mileage ramps. tracked macros down to the gram. scheduled every workout six weeks in advance. bought the premium supplements. upgraded to the garmin 255 for better metrics.
if i could measure it, i could improve it. that is what worked in my career. that is what would work in training.
i was hitting my weekly volume targets. my nutrition was dialed in. my equipment was perfect. but i was getting slower, not faster.
what the data could not tell me
rest days felt like wasted days. if i was not actively training, i was falling behind. every hour not running was an hour someone else was getting better.
so i would add an extra 5km here. swap a rest day for an easy run there. cycle to work did not count as training, right? so i could still do my planned workout after.
the thing is, the data could not capture what was actually happening. the spreadsheet did not know i was also studying for aws certification. the training plan did not account for the stress of pushing for promotion at work. the metrics could not measure cumulative fatigue.
i was optimizing individual workouts while destroying the whole system.
the injury that was not an injury
three months before my first big trail race, my knee started hurting. not badly. just enough to notice.
i took two days off. the pain went away. back to training. pain came back. took three days off. same cycle.
the doctor said nothing was structurally wrong. no tear, no damage. just inflammation. rest was the prescription.
but rest for how long? a week? two weeks? every day off felt like watching my fitness disappear. every skipped workout felt like failure. what i did not understand then: i was not injured. i was undertrained in recovery.
the shift
my turning point came from watching someone else train. a friend who is slower than me on paper but who actually completed a 100km ultra last year.
his training looked inefficient. rest days when he felt fine. easy weeks that seemed random. sometimes he would skip a planned hard workout just because he did not feel it.
but he showed up to every race healthy. and he finished them. i asked him how he knew when to rest. he said "when i stop looking forward to runs, i take a break. when i start again, i actually want to be there."
it sounded soft. unscientific. the opposite of optimization. but he was achieving what i was not: consistent progress over months, not weeks.
what i learned the hard way
rest is not the absence of training. rest is training. your body does not get stronger during the workout. it gets stronger during recovery. the adaptation happens when you sleep, when you eat, when you do nothing.
pushing harder is not always better. sometimes the optimal move is to do less.
now i plan my rest as carefully as i plan my workouts. i track my readiness, not just my output. i ask myself "what does my body need today" not "what does my plan say i should do."
some days, the answer is a hard tempo run. some days, the answer is a walk and a nap.
the parallel nobody talks about
the same lesson applies to work. to relationships. to everything you care about improving.
i used to think productivity meant maximizing every hour. coding late into the night. studying on weekends. always shipping, always building, always on.
but the best code i write comes after a good night's sleep. the best decisions i make come when i am not burned out. the best version of myself shows up when i have energy to actually be present.
rest is not what you do when you are done being productive. rest is what makes you productive in the first place.
the real optimization
my ultra is in 151 days. my training plan has built-in rest weeks. recovery days where i do nothing. periods where volume drops by 30%. on paper, it looks like i am training less than i was six months ago. in reality, i am training smarter.
the metric that matters is not how much i can handle this week. it is whether i will show up healthy on race day.
turns out, the hardest part of training is not the long runs or the hill repeats or the early mornings. the hardest part is trusting that doing nothing is doing something.
maybe being serious about your goals means being serious about rest. maybe optimization is knowing when to stop optimizing.
the watch can tell you a lot. but it cannot tell you everything. sometimes you have to close the data and listen to what your body already knows.