The Endurance Athlete’s Weekend

TGIF!

Written by: Linzay Logan

The weekend—those two short glorious days following the workweek.  For those training for an endurance event, Saturday and Sunday are much different than for those other folk who consider running more than five miles or biking more than an hour at a time to be a bit nutty.

For the latter group the weekend means it’s time to relax, get chores done around the house, go out to dinner and enjoy a few glasses of wine with friends. For the other group of people who are training for events like marathons, ultras, and triathlons the weekend means it is time to train. We still have to try and relax after the workweek, get the house in modest order, catch up friends over dinner who accept us even though they don’t understand why we do what we do, and also wake up earlier than we do during the week to go for a three-hour run or a five-hour bike ride or maybe even both.

On Saturday we get home around mid-day from training, eat a recovery meal or drink a recovery drink, which never satisfies us enough and we end up eating everything else edible in the house. After pealing ourselves off the couch and moan and groan to a standing position we clean the house in spandex while listening to our iTunes training mix. By then it is dinner and time to go to bed to do it all over again the next morning.

Over the course of the weekend it is not uncommon for someone at the peak of training to take two, three, maybe even four showers a day—Shower to wake up in the morning, shower after a quick swim sesh, shower after a bike ride and then maybe if we have the energy, a shower before dinner. I’m surprised the water company hasn’t come up with varying water prices for homes where a runner or triathlete resides. I can’t imagine the water bill for a household with more than one endurance athlete, which is usually the case. We travel in packs. No one else understands why we do this to ourselves or why we think Road ID’s and running shorts tan lines are fashion statements.

However, every weekend for an endurance athlete is not always like this. Often enough we have to taper and for a few weeks a year we get an “off season,” whatever that means. These few weekends are strange though.

Speaking with a coworker who is training for an Ironman about weekends like this his response was: “I have no idea what to do when it’s 8:00 in the morning on a Saturday if I don’t go for a five hour bike ride? Eat breakfast—but then what?”

****Linzay Logan is the copy editor for Competitor magazine and cares about punctuation probably a little too much. She particularly loves to avoid commas as well as add exclamation points whenever she can get away with it! She also loves to run marathons and half-marathons—probably a little too much. Don’t let her small size fool you; she’ll still try to outrun you anytime. Even though chances are she probably can’t. Have a question or comment for Linzay? Email her at Llogan@competitorgroup.com