Recently one of our clients had run a great race at Northburn100. She was so excited about her results, that her first question after the race was: When can I start training again? I told her that it is important for athletes to rest. Two days after that she texted me and asked how long she has to wait. The truth of the matter is that, that is a hard quetsion to answer. Current advice seems to range between an arbitrary number and subjective self analisis. Both of these are of very little help. In order to give a coherent answer we need to do better than this. We need to be able to empirically tell wheter an athlete has recovered.
Challenges
One of the main issues relates to individualim. Every athlete is different. They have different ages, biological sex, ability, experience, physiology, psycological makeup and contributing factors. In training there are a lot of rules and a lot of exeptions to those rules. We tend to look at the numbers, make a general observation and then add tests to confirm those numbers on a case by case basis. What does this mean? We will give you a rule and a test. Apply the rule and test the result.