Before I got started with this, I saw plenty of mentions of rest days and recovery days, or recovery runs. I figured they were all talking about the same things, just different terminology.

Well, thankfully I did a deeper dive to find more. I was initially looking for ways to incorporate more exercise on days where I wasn’t going to run very much at all without overtraining. Basically, I was looking for a way to “cheat” a rest day by sneaking in some exercises to boost my training regimen and hopefully get in shape faster.

I should’ve known better. I read more carefully and realized the words were not being used interchangeably to describe similar courses of action, but were quite different. Nope, not at all.

The consensus is that “Rest” days are ones in which you don’t exercise at all. You give your muscles time to rebuild and relax (repairing the microtears created by useful exercise), rest the joints so you don’t end up with stress fractures or inflammation, stuff like that. Actual, true rest, not go down to 2 miles from 5 or something. Just live life without programmed exercise for the day.

“Recovery” days, from what I understand, are more about just scaling back your workouts and runs to a much lighter load so that you’re still active, but not overdoing it, or you’re taking it easier to prevent injury while still training.

Recovery days are more flexible and depend on your level of endurance and exercise, what you’re trying to accomplish, all that stuff. I’ve joined different runs in the iFit program to train for the marathon, and a quick browse of how they work shows flexible mileage going on between days and weeks. So recovery days are already built into the programs, which are very helpful.

I just need to learn to curb my impatience, because if anything is gonna get me into trouble with this marathon training, it’s going to be impatience. I don’t intend to be down for the count because I pushed myself too hard. I already have a job that gets me walking all the time; a day where I don’t have designated miles to achieve should be looked forward to as a positive.

I need more time, anyway, to do the best I can and learn. It’ll be easier to do if I’m not distracted by pain. Just another learning curve to go through. There is so much more to learn as I go along on this training journey.

232 more days til the starting line, and I need every bit of it.