When you hear interviews of elite athletes who balance, say, family commitments with training, they usually tell you about how they prioritise ruthlessly, waste no time, and so on. The problem with this, of course, is that for every such athlete you could easily find one who tried to prioritise but failed and started performing at a lower level. Or, what’s worse, maybe they continued performing at a high level but totally neglected their family while doing so. We just never hear about this in interviews.

It’s hard for me to see how having anything that’s higher priority to you than running, will make you a better runner. Yet it appears as if elite athletes feel internal or social pressure to state that having all sorts of other priorities, like a family or a side hustle, somehow also contributes to their athletics. (If you’ve spent any time in corporate America, you’ll know it’s also very common to justify having any outside interests as somehow contributing to your job.) I think a more realistic approach would be to acknowledge that time and energy are limited and you need to make trade-offs in order to live a good life.

That being said, here’s a rest week hack. Do not fill the additional time you have with low priority projects like installing garage shelves, assembling furniture, or reordering your books alphabetically. If you use rest weeks to catch up on too many projects like these, you aren’t truly resting and therefore not recovering. The same is true, at a smaller scale, for rest days. Another way to put this is: if you’re training in an intentional manner, you should rank resting pretty high on your list of priorities.

Not that I was remotely successful in following this advice myself during this particular rest week. Luckily for me, I’m still doing low volume. In a few short months, the weekly training load will ramp up to the high-for-me >100KM range, which is where I’ll need to really start focusing on recovery.