Your No Nonsense Recovery Plan (2024)

FAQs

How many days to recover from Ironman? ›

Allow a good three weeks to get over an IRONMAN: it may even be more! The kinder you are to yourself and to the recovery process the stronger you will be as an athlete in the future. Physically, you will do better by taking it steady. If you push now, you stand a good chance of picking up colds, illnesses or injury.

An active recovery workout involves performing low intensity exercise following a strenuous workout. Examples include walking, yoga, and swimming. Active recovery is often considered more beneficial than inactivity, resting completely, or sitting.

Recovery runs should be kept short, with 20-40 minutes being plenty to get the blood moving. The point of this session is to make it so short and so slow that you feel guilty by the time you finish. That's how you know you're doing a recovery run successfully, it will feel like the opposite of a hard workout.

Triathletes who immediately jump back into racing and training after a triathlon often suffer from overtraining symptoms, including higher resting heart rate, moodiness and disturbed sleep patterns. These post-race issues can be avoided by giving your body the proper care and time.

An Ironman can be hard on the body. From a physiological perspective, there's something to this perception of Ironman completion as a kind of sudden aging. A lot of overlap exists between the processes that make you feel old after an Ironman and the actual aging process.

For men the average IRONMAN finish time is 13 hours, with women typically finishing in 14 hours. The cut-off time to finish IRONMAN and other full distance races is usually between 16-17 hours.

If you're feeling slightly fatigued but not too much so, active recovery may be your best choice to help your muscles recover. If you're experiencing any unusual pain or have been injured, you should take a full rest day and consult a healthcare professional to make sure you don't exacerbate the situation.

According to various studies, light walking promotes blood circulation, essential for transporting nutrients and oxygen to the muscles, aiding in faster recovery from muscle soreness and injury. Additionally, walking can help rebuild muscle, particularly after periods of inactivity or recovery from injury.

By getting the blood flowing to your muscles again, you're aiding your recovery. With a recovery run, you should do a short, slow session at a relaxed pace. If you find yourself sweating, picking up the pace, or trying to push yourself, then slow down or stop altogether.

Can jogging be active recovery? ›

Typical active recovery activities include walking, swimming, cycling, jogging, yoga, or active stretching (Ortiz et al. 2018). The key is to find an activity that's low-intensity and keeps your heart rate at 30-60% of your maximum heart rate.

I generally recommend easy/recovery runs to be at least 60–90 seconds per mile slower than your marathon pace. For the 3:30 marathoner, that means somewhere between 9:00–9:30 per mile on your easy runs, if not slower.

A 70.3 triathlon is half the distance of a full Iron-distance race. The distances are a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and 13.1-mile run.

During intense bouts of fitness, the body is flooded with stress hormones (like cortisol) and the immune system reacts by kicking into defensive gear. Once you cross the finish line that protective immune response decrease more rapidly than the stress hormones making you more vulnerable to viruses and bacteria.

The 70.3 in particular can feel like the Goldilocks of triathlon distances – not so manageable that the challenge doesn't feel big enough, like a sprint- or Olympic-distance triathlon, but not too big a challenge for your first event the way a full Ironman might be.

The last long bike should be 14 days out from the race. Athletes can swim at normal training volume and intensity until nine to 10 days prior. It's very important to introduce complete rest days during the taper, but not so many that you will start feeling lethargic.

At least one full day per week should be assigned to active recovery. Allow for one to three complete rest days within periodization; more as needed.

On average, athletes burn 6-800 calories per hour during an Ironman. *fat utilization increases during sessions lasting more than one hour. 160 lb 13 hour guy = about 9100 cals. 9100 – 1800 stored glycogen = 7300.