Recovery Strategies for Peak Performance in Ultra Running

By Chase Parnell  —  November 18, 2020

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The ability to recover is one of the most crucial and often overlooked skills in ultra running. It may not seem so obviously important when your training volume is low to moderate but when you start pushing up your weekly mileage and intensity, especially during those final 12 to 16 weeks before a race, that’s when your recovery processes become just as important as the training itself. 

When you think about it, training for endurance events is fairly straight-forward. The name of the game is to slowly increase the workload and stress on your body, triggering adaptations and fitness building stimuli, and then you taper and recover before your race as you prepare mentally and physically for a big effort. Hopefully over time, year over year, your body not only adapts in the short term during the block itself, but also longterm, blocks building on blocks.

I’ll note that the goal isn’t always to train your body to recover so that you can just do more and more volume. Instead, the goal is to get to a place where you can improve the quality of every run so that you get every possible fitness gain and adaptation you can as you aim for your absolute peak performance. 

But before we can achieve those longterm improvements, we need to have the here and now dialed in. So let’s get into the routines and rituals that can help you recover well and maximize your training.

Ultra Runners Need Mucho Sleep

I’m not going to tell you how to get the best sleep but I will say that you should be trying to get as much of it as you can. There are all sorts of techniques for optimizing sleep: see Tim Ferriss’ 13 Hacks if your problem is quality, not quantity. But in my opinion, the dilemma is far more often about not getting enough because we don’t intentionally structure our lifestyles around this goal. 

And remember, sleep requirements can ebb and flow with training volume. If you’re in the thick of 100 miler training, your routine is likely going to need to change. Maybe it’s cutting out that 60 minutes of Netflix before sleep or your pre-work newspaper reading. Look for the non-essential comforts and try to replace them with sleep. Every extra minute counts.

We each have our own personal durational requirements, but in general, more is better. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t get enough sleep. I’ve told myself for many years that as long as I get 6 hours of sleep a night, I’m good, but that’s not really true. My problem is that I like to wake up really early. I love those pre-chaos morning hours to read, write, run, etc. Going forward, I need to be diabolical in prioritizing sleep if I’m going to better handle the training load.

Because remember, when day after day you’re asking your body to perform, it’s the little things that are going to make the difference between nailing a workout and feeling great about it or missing the mark and losing your mental and emotional momentum. 

After perusing the research on sleep for endurance athletes, most studies will recommend at least 8 hours of sleep per night. That seems to be fairly universal as a floor. The only thing I’ll add to that is if you are shooting for eight hours a night, then make sure you’re getting an average of eight hours a night. If for some reason you wake up in the middle of the night and toss and turn and only get four hours of sleep one night, then try to make up for this by allotting nine hours for the next handful of nights. I know this is easier said than done, and life gets in the way, but remember that it is while you are sleeping that your body is most efficiently restoring, healing, and recovering.

Nutrition Basics for Ultra Runners

If you grew up in sports I think pretty much everyone knows the importance of getting some high-quality food into the system shortly after you finish a workout. Your body is yearning for protein and nutrient rich calories to jumpstart the recovery process. So it makes sense that the quicker you start that recovery process on the nutrition side the quicker you’ll be ready to go again that afternoon or the following day. 

Much like prioritizing sleep, this will take a little sacrifice. It means intentionally shopping for the right foods and making sure they are stocked in your home. It means taking a couple extra minutes to prepare the food. It means making sure you have access to the food right after the workout. 

For example, if you are doing a group workout and know that everyone stands around and chats for a half an hour after the workout, make sure you have your recovery food available so you can eat it while you chat. If you are hitting the gym treadmill this winter and know it’ll take you 30-45 minutes to get home after showering and the drive, consider preparing the food beforehand so that you can have it immediately after your workout. 

I won’t tell you exactly what to eat; I’m no nutritionist and everyone has different tastes and their bodies respond better to different foods. What I will do is tell you what I do. 

I’m a smoothie guy. Even in the dead of winter I’ll have smoothies after every hard workout or long run. I’m a little more relaxed on easy to moderate days. I can have a smoothie ready within 5 minutes of walking in the door from my run. It almost always includes the following: greens like kale, swiss chard, or spinach, almond butter, chia seeds, spirulina, flax seeds, and fruit for taste such as strawberries, pineapple, or mango. I try to get organic and local whenever possible but admittedly could do better in that regard. So that is my super-recovery mix that I never get sick of. You can play around with the ingredients, especially if you have a refined palette and need everything you ingest to be enjoyable. 

So there, make a plan of action. Find the foods that your anatomy responds to. Develop a routine and build in the time to prepare the food for consumption as quickly after the workout as possible. You can do this!

Mental Recovery is Important Too

Let’s face it, we are not limitless in our determination, perseverance, and grit. We just aren’t. And training for ultras is hard! If you’re really pushing yourself and trying to see how much you can achieve in this sport, it takes a lot of effort and motivation over a long period of time. In order to do that, you are going to have to commit to the process. Is this going to be your thing? 

If it is, then I’m going to recommend you whittle away other hard things in your life. Especially those that might take away energy from your running. What I mean is that when you’re in the throes of big volume leading into your racing season, it might not be the best time to try to learn to play the guitar, build a deck, or pick up a foreign language. 

I would also caution you from doing anything too crazy with your diet. Sure, try to eat healthy but an extreme diet that causes you to put forth tremendous effort to abstain from certain foods is likely to backfire. Play around with that stuff during the off-season when you have the bandwidth for it. 

Another variable in the equation is knowing when to take the foot off the gas. Again, ultra running training is HARD. Getting out there day in and day out is not always going to feel super awesome. You aren’t always going to feel inspired, but you have to get out there anyway and get the job done. The exception is when getting out there is actually going to do more harm than good. This line isn’t always clear. Are you on the brink of throwing in the towel altogether? Does it feel like a massive chore to get out the door and you’d literally rather do anything else than run? These are signs you might need to say screw the plan and take a day off.

In a recent interview with Jim Walmsley he said he doesn’t plan rest days into his training plans. If you look at his running schedule it will say that he will run 365 days a year. Of course, he doesn’t actually end up running that much because he’s learned to listen to his body and mind, strategically react to how he feels, and take days off accordingly. I try to approach my training in the same way; go hard when the body and mind are cooperating, take time off and go easy when they aren’t. This type of flexibility is key to staying healthy and keeping the fire burning hot.

Ice baths, Massage, Yoga, Rubs, Pills, et al. 

First, sports recovery is big business so be careful out there when considering investing money in a product or service that claims it will magically take care of all your aches, pains, and ailments. Unless, that is, you are interested in Treeline’s new groundbreaking recovery product. Yes, you heard me right! LunarFade! CBD infused moondust. It’s a salve; makes you 2x faster, healthier, and more attractive. 50% off! Only $149 for 2 ounce carbon capsule. Buy NOW!

Okay, okay, that’s a little harsh. Some of these tools and products can work, but you have to put in the work to research why it’s effective, how to use it properly, and find the best practitioners. I’m a fan of yoga and have been for many years. The problem is that I get lazy with it and during the pandemic is has all but gone away. Consistent massage from a real sports massage professional has always financially been out of the question so I can’t offer much guidance there. I do soak my legs in a river after a hard run if I’m dealing with an injury but don’t do it consistently when I’m healthy, and that’s a bad thing. In an ideal world, I’d be sipping on my recovery smoothie waist deep in ice cold water immediately following a good leg shred.

I guess I’ll just say to use your common sense here. Far be it from me to dissuade anyone from trying to find the magic bullet, but in general, I guess I’m a little old fashion. Similar to how Rob Krar said he wouldn’t use a sauna to train for Western States, because for him, that just goes too far, you also won’t see me investing $1,000 in Normatec recovery boots. It’s a balance. Find your balance.

Conclusion

Looking back on my competitive running career (I say that as if it’s over … it’s not!), I’ve probably done a pretty poor job overall in the recovery department. I’m chronically not getting enough sleep, my nutrition habits never stabilize, I suffer from quantity over quality syndrome, and I still have a tendency to blame my genetics for any shortcomings instead of the hard concrete actions and decisions I make in my training. But I also tend to be a little harder on myself than I should and don’t often take a step back and look at all the things I do do right. I’m working on it. 

I hope you found something useful to latch onto. I’ve been at this running thing a long time so if I have any authority on these subjects, it’s been earned through experience alone. Like I said, I’m no nutritionist, I’m not an exercise scientist; I’m just a sardonic ultra runner who doesn’t know everything but is at least confident enough to write something down and put it out into the world. 

I’d love to hear any tried and true recovery techniques, approaches, or frameworks that you’ve found to work. I do believe that if I’m ever going to take my running to the next level, I need to be more diligent in many of these recovery practices. So here’s to hoping and praying the alchemy comes together and we can all knock the next training block and race out of the park! 

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