The Albon Way

Episode 3 - The elusive off season

In this episode of The Albon Way, hosts Henriette and Jon Albon discuss the significance of taking an off-season for trail runners. They explore the mental and physical benefits of allowing oneself to recover fully after a long racing season, emphasizing the importance of a complete break from all things training related. The conversation covers how to define the off-season, the necessity of load management, and the role of nutrition during this period. They also share personal experiences and insights on how to optimize the off-season for better performance in the upcoming season.

Broadcast on:: 12 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

Welcome to the album way, a podcast dedicated to providing practical and actionable device to trail runners of all levels. This podcast is hosted by myself Henrietta Albin and my partner John Albin and today we're going to talk about why it's so important to give yourself some extra time off to recover on a deeper level once your trail season has come to a close. The first training update. For me I'm not even training in the moment but let's talk about you first. What's up Henrietta? Oh at the moment I'm well I went from having an enid niggle to an ankle sprain which has been bothering me and still is and in the past couple of days I got a bit sick so I feel like it's just thing after thing piling up. This is a classic Henrietta I'm sick but I'm not sick so I'm sure I'm sick but I'm not really sick. I do have an ordering to back up that my HIV is dropping but yeah I've just felt not good enough to train like I want to. So I've actually taken I'm on my second complete rest day now which is insane to me. We are conservative athletes this is like it's not out of the ordinary for us to take feeling sick but not being sick or even being sick quite seriously and then just think it's better not to train. Take the few days to try and recuperate and then get back to it properly when we can. We're not really people to run through pain of injuries or through any sort of sickness or I think it can then just linger and not go away and then impact training like longer term. Yeah definitely but yeah I mean I have considered cutting my season sort of shorter than initially intended and just calling it off season time but I've actually landed on doing one final race which will be New Yorker by UTMB which is coming up in actually three weeks today we're recording this on a Friday so yeah three weeks from today I'm hoping to do the 70K and I don't feel as fit as I would have liked to and I haven't exactly done done that many long long runs lately but I'm hoping to bounce back from this little sickness I'm currently experiencing get some long runs done and use that as a good opportunity to do a bit of a longer race ahead of what will be transfer and scenario classic end of February do we ever feel as fit as we want to be before race have you ever said I am a hundred percent prepared this is gonna go crazy good we've heard let's go no but I'm definitely one of those people who just prefers to know that I've done like I prepared 110% like I'm as well prepared as I could have bit yeah but you always can look back on a race and think you were prepared afterwards but you never feel like it before so I'm pretty sure you're gonna do absolutely amazingly you are well-prepared your numbers are actually looking good because you've kept the training going throughout the year they haven't dropped anywhere near as much as mine have and I think you've got any so I think it's gonna be grand it's gonna be great okay well let's let's just say that and pray and hope that things will go to plan anyway John you actually got back from Nice a couple of days ago and did a race there how did it go it went good thank you very much it was a very much a smash and grab trip I went out it was only out there for less than 48 hours before the race race to now it's traveling home again the evening of the race so the evening after the race so yeah I go out there did the race got home again couldn't have gone much better to be honest and now I have actually ended my season so I am officially in off season yeah do you want to go get your race yeah no we definitely want to go back and hear some more juicy details before we talk about what's up next but let's go actually back to your race sim I think that was the last time we spoke on the podcast and you were just about to to go and do a race sim in snowy conditions how did that go race sim never happened in snowy conditions it was terrible outside and in the end it happened I think two days later on the treadmill and I took the the Nice course and I broke it down into one kilometer chunks which then evaluated the gradient and then made a treadmill protocol where the downhill was for 0% because that's all my treadmill can do and then put the treadmill on certain gradients and did did that for two hours to kind of like replicate but miniaturize the the course and I've only done that once before and it wasn't particularly effective like it worked but you definitely missed that big piece of the puzzle which is downhill leg conditioning impact penalty so I was like a little bit worried but then again at least I've done some relatively similar race pace style running and it was a little bit warmer than treadmill that would have been outside so I lost the downhill but I gained a little bit of heat and what was your sort of game plan going into this race game plan as always is to follow my fueling strategy because fueling is everything in a in a longer race try and run well and powerfully not go too fast at the beginning but try and be in the in the league group and then try and win in the later half which pretty much that's actually helped how it panned out but we certainly ran a lot faster in the first half than I was expecting and we were a solid group of five for at least half the race which then we took down to a group of three and by that time I was kind of wondering whether I did have another gear in being I really had been cruising as as easy as I thought I had been like don't get me wrong I was pushing pushing hard but still figured like there was something else in there but then the longer you're running like that the more you are getting tired and then you're questioning whether you can use lies any more of yourself that's left over but I took a big caffeine gel on the final climb started going helpful leather and managed to put out into the lead and put a gap into the other two and then once I was outside I managed to keep that gap and it she grew and grew until the till the finish so successful like relatively tough and little bit tougher than I was it maybe expecting but still like satisfying race to have executed well why why do you say it was a tough tough one I think side logically I'm not that used to running in a little peloton and I don't enjoy running with other people with that much in that sort of like a racing scenario so normally I like to get out from try and put in a bit of a gap get out of sight and then just grind away at my own tempo so to be running with the others for two three hours it's like kind of tough mentally for me I'm not as used to it as I should be but then as trail racing is getting more and more competitive that's just how races will be and I should get a lot more used to roughing with other people yes for sure um I remember watching the the live stream of the race and I think it was in the final 45 minutes you pulled away created a bit of a gap but would you say that you were running scared did you know what the gap was to the people behind you or yeah what was going through your head at that point oh so running scared I think I've been in that situation a few times before and I could still feel like I was running as well as I had been throughout the entire race and there's sneaky suspicion that the others were going to start slowing down a little bit so I think I had good control but I was definitely trying to push keep up the road and keep out of sight and you know that's exactly what I had to do there was almost five kilometers of flat road I think at the end so I certainly didn't want to leave it down to a sprint finish and I wanted to keep that that gap that was good congratulations on bringing back another stone how many have you got now you got a little collection I've got enough to be qualified community and be and OCC and therefore I guess I can move up or down to to get CCC so my qualification for UTMB 2025 is well secured and now I get to plan out next year but first like take a little bit of downtime and yeah do some other things for a few weeks that isn't training related which doesn't happen so often for us yeah so I mean you've decided to then end your 2024 trail running season with Nice right yeah so I'm done so yeah it was like a little bit of a maybe I'll do templates but then I'm always wanting to do like a little bit more and trying to push my luck and I was just thinking to be honest I don't need to do any more racing this year I feel like content with how the season has gone and the plan is to try and Scranton area which is in February which is a really early race for the 2025 season so it's better for me to take an earlier off season now start a new good trading block into transplant can area and you know try and be as best prepared for that's for sure hmm sounds like a good plan of action but yeah let's jump into our main topic of the day then off season yeah which is very topical for me because I am five days into it now six days into it and beginning to be really bored which is I guess part of the whole whole reason we do this is to make ourselves realize that we love being athletes we love training and not training yeah the grass is in green of yeah so before we dive into all the juicy details about the so-called off season let's just clarify what we mean when we say off season because I think when it comes to trail runners it can be anything from sort of a couple of days rest to two months of no training and some people even think of off season as a time to train so let's just establish some of the basics here what to sort of we classify as off season oh yeah for me at least off season is a period of absolutely no training so I can give the both the body and mind a complete rest to yeah just recuperate on a deeper level and it's just a week or two really to provide that reset that you need and then I'll move into base building and then later on sharpening a tapering foot for more racing when we start a new season there's very much yeah it's definitely off season it's not like being out of season as if I as if I'm not racing it's like kind of that period when I really do completely take it off so just to clarify what is the difference between sort of like post race recovery where you take one two weeks recovery versus this period now where you're calling it an off season I think they're extremely similar but off season is slightly different in a sense that it really does draw the line under your season and you would normally start another base building block after off season so you're not kind of like even thinking about trying to get back into some sort of quality training or thinking about how there is a race coming up just around the corner once you've recovered after the the last race it's really much a sort of you can completely forget about training completely turn off and be a completely different person for a week or two before starting again and rebuilding up and it's actually really important like both from a psychological standpoint also definitely a physical one just to yeah really make sure that you get rid of all niggles all injuries and you're recovered and ready to go for a whole another year you're really like resetting for for another season and these seasons do take a lot of mental willpower so you do at some point have to take a really good break yeah I think for me personally as well when I'm doing like a post race recovery I'm still thinking about how can I sort of optimize what I'm doing now for what's coming around the corner whereas when I'm taking off season it's literally like okay now I don't want to do anything related to trail running I'm sort of just not thinking about it doing the stuff I normally don't have time for that's unrelated to training and yeah just like you said as well you want to sort of recover on a deeper level than what you would do during in season when you're sort of doing these smaller post race recovery cycles yeah for sure and I think it's actually really important not just for us who are professionals but also everyone that at some point they give themselves the chance just to not put any pressure on themselves that they should be training when they're not because that's usually what happens like you might have periods where you're unable to train because of like extra life stresses or work stuff yeah like anything Christmas holidays and stuff but they're still a part of you that knows you're not training that you need to train or knows that there's a part of you that wants to train whereas for us off season is a time when there's just no pressure whatsoever and you just completely turn into the in person yeah so I mean why should every trail runner independent of the level they're out whether they're an elite or more of a recreational trail runner why should they bother taking sort of a set period of so-called off-season time I think there's like quite a few reasons one of the main ones I think is you you can improve as an athlete through load management and generally doing slightly more training week on week but unless you drop in load it's very hard to then increase again and then surpass where you managed to get before so it's important that you let your fitness drop and that you actually get worse so then when you do start training again you can you can train well gradually build up and time that build up in towards the next racing season so you can be at your best and naturally form a peek in shape using that sort of like progression in load yeah and I also think going back to our episode last week about closed body and sort of burn out by taking a proper reset and rest you do sort of reduce the likelihood of that happening I think further down the line I for example had one year where I went from a ski mountaineering season during the winter straight into a trail season without taking a prolonged period off in between and I quickly found that just mentally and physically as well my body didn't have the deep reserves required to sort of push um push really hard during the trail season which did in the end result in an injury as well so yeah I do think it is really important just to have like that deep deep reset mentally and physically which will then just help you respond a lot better to the training coming up and the racing yeah we went off to talk about having deload weeks like every three to four weeks when you're in a good a good training period but this is sort of like a deload week just on a bigger scale so you're having a really big deload at least once a year so then you can then train again and surpass where you were before and I really do feel that will make the longevity possible so you can be an athlete for many more years than you would have been and you can reach yeah bigger and better levels because you're actually taking time off and then taking that time off actually does give you a chance test whether the grass is greener so you might be pretty miserable following training plans the majority of the year and just feeling like it's it's not actually what you want to be doing I guarantee that if you if you stop training whatsoever for one or two weeks you probably actually realize that you actually enjoy your lifestyle and you actually do like to train and neither grass isn't greener um so yeah it's also a time when you can actually give back to the people that are so patient with you for the rest of the year when you've got to sort of like kind of miss birthdays or miss special occasions because you're out on your long run or you know you're you're just going to celebrate all your friend's birthday during the off season you're going to do it for a big party and family during the off season and be that sort of you know person that you can't always be because you're so dedicated to your training you can try and give back to all those people during your off season I think or just get a lot of housework done which tends to be my approach uh yeah decorating building things trying to prepare everything that isn't training related for another 50 weeks of training yeah so take us through what does sort of the idea off season look like I think it's different it's different for everyone and um I definitely think depending on how close to burn out you are will result in different lengths of off season also how soon your next race will be will can influence how long your off season is going to be but for me it's normally always after the last race of the year to take one week completely off training just don't do anything like just go to the cinema eat more ice cream hang out with friends uh do stuff around the house just stop being an athlete for one week and then the second week is getting back into training gradually but just doing things that are fun just doing things that I want to do and usually I try and keep those things more kind of cross training related or maybe some hiking or or climbing so not thinking about needing to go out for a run or have any goals or aspirations for that training it's literally just enjoyment focused and then from that point it's kind of like base building starts and you start training very gradually and just training for the the amount of training you can manage at that time and then gradually build up as we would usually do you tend to like look at a training plan during an off season do you have some structure in any way do you try and limit yourself what sort of the guidelines you go by uh obviously you have something going on in your head maybe as well to be honest I mean that time is it's like it's hard to describe how how completely I try to switch off from being an athlete and that means nothing sport related whatsoever and usually I wouldn't even look at or open the app which actually has been different this year this year during off season I have been opening the app because we made a protein calculator uh for how much protein I could should be consuming base from my body weight and my my training load so every day I don't train the uh quantity of protein I should be aiming for goes goes a bit a bit down and I've needed to look at the app to kind of like see what I should be aiming for because I'm still recovering from all the training I've been doing over the previous weeks it's still important for me to have that information but that's about it there's no looking at sessions there's no ticking obsessions or doing anything really it's just me being a completely different version of me an important follow-up question there are you still looking at straw but other people's training uh I'd like to say no but I don't know if scrolling is a uh is a habit and an addiction so there has definitely been some some trial of scrolling in now I need to stay up to date you know we need to need to keep up to date with what Zach's doing otherwise I'll just be in the dark and I've spent a couple of weeks trying to catch up okay so moving on to perhaps the next interesting topic within that how do you know when to sort of end your off season you're talking about roughly one to two weeks here maybe longer depending on how hefty your season has been and what you feel is right for you um would you consider extending your off season if you're still addicted to Strava at the end of the two week period I mean I think uh there's the best made plans and there's what actually happens and to be honest for me what actually normally happens during off season is I get sick because I've been kind of like pushing my body to its limits all year and then suddenly I say okay body here's uh here's a break here's a little holiday and my body says great thanks I'm going to get sick now because I've been putting it off for so long so normally I always always get sick so far so good this week I'm still feeling relatively fresh like we feel like we've got a little bug but no I'm in here I like bug yeah I think you brought it back from France sorry um so yeah so usually I get sick and then that extends how long the off season turns out to be because when you're sick you're not really recovering on that deeper level your body is still fighting and it's still stressed out so usually it turns into sort of like two or three weeks before I feel like I'm exceedingly bored and I'm very ready to start training and at this point usually I always wait an extra day just to make sure I am feeling those those things and then I start training again but that training is always very very gradually down very like kind of like conservative just following the numbers to make sure I'm not doing too much but also following how I feel and trying to just sort of like definitely keep the enjoyment factor there rather than stressing about doing anything too strenuous and do you want to see your HIV and resting heart rate when you sleep for example like HIV and sleeping resting heart rate I monitor all year round and it's been really helpful actually especially this year to have that data and it's interesting to follow it during the off season because things can get better but then I've actually found that then they can get a little bit worse as well so the body definitely is reacting to doing nothing and I'll be interested to see what the numbers do when I do start training again because that's that's a big telling point is to the first run back if your numbers suddenly react like crazy that's a clear sign that you probably should take some extra days off and that's that's a clear sign I got off to western states my first run back the resting heart rate while I was asleep jumped the HIV plummeted but I thought nice fine I'll uh it'll be fine and it wasn't I should have taken some extra days I didn't I continued to to keep running and that was me tapping my head against the wall which gradually turned into me hitting my head against the wall until I was smashing against the wall and I should have looked at that data and taken it seriously so I learned that less than the hard way and that was sort of an example of a post-race recovery phase where you were still eager to get your shit together essentially because you had another race around the corner yeah but you shouldn't have just taken that as a as a type of off-season but I was very motivated for UTMB and motivation is a dangerous thing so there's sometimes too much of a good thing is about thinking definitely motivation is one of those yeah yeah because I mean for me that that itching motivation to get back to training is a good sign that okay I'm probably ready to sort of end my off-season and gradually build again but like you say there you know it's a double edge toward in the sense that sometimes you can be so motivated and keen to go that uh your body body might not be but your head is saying yes yes yes so yeah it's it's important I think to consider more than one factor when you're making the decision of am I ready to return to my normal training routine or not um there's also touch on niggles I mean which a lot of people don't understand why niggles is like a very life injury which isn't really an injury which is going to completely limit how much training you can do or what type of training you're doing but definitely there's something not quite right there and it needs to be needs to be managed or or thought about yeah and and we have experienced actually that sometimes it's when you start resting that these niggles start surfacing and that you notice them maybe because I don't know if there's any signs behind this but you your muscles in your body is sort of just relaxing and letting things surf is a bit more rather than sort of tensing and protecting them yeah which doesn't mean that you shouldn't rest like you should you should let them bubble up to the top and sort of you know you should let your body manage them well and keep burying them down into more layers of fatigue isn't going to help in the long term and a lot of the um yeah the philosophies we have in place and not only there to try and improve your performance and make you a better athlete in the short term they're also uh there to try and make you be able to be an athlete for many many years and that is sort of like pop the whole point we want to have fun and we want to be able to have fun for as long as possible so yeah in in in the short term maybe it's it's better to bury those niggers down but to be honest you need to let them come up you need to deal with them let the body heal fully before you um continue and then start on all the training go yeah and also I mean if you get sick or if you get some niggles perhaps tag on a week or maybe two more weeks so that you're looking at a month of an off season because it might be your body sort of trying to tell you that hang on a second we really need a deep reset here two weeks isn't going to cut at this time but it is true that like letting your fitness drop and your low drop is not a bad thing and if anything that just means that you can build it up gradually and the longer off season you have sometimes the longer than you can train for afterwards well and then that means you can surpass the fitness levels you have before the off season so definitely is um is a good thing to try and lose fitness at certain points in the year so then you can train yourself up again yeah I mean I think we've both experienced having a foot operation taking a significant chunk of time off because it's like a forced rest you just have to do nothing for a couple of months essentially uh and then actually building our fitness to higher than what it was before the operation after yeah I think uh normally after an operation you then have at least two years of super focused you are 100% dedicated and you can go on to do pretty special things uh within your discipline and I think that's kind of like what we're trying to achieve within off season make it a little bit shorter than it only lasts another year before you take another off season but just give yourself that time so you can then start a fresh and go on and fully execute another good 50 weeks of uh training but I mean should anyone be worried about losing fitness during the off season I mean how how will you feel when you go for that run after being well after not having run for at least say 14 days to be honest I actually think that after 14 days you might feel sluggish but you also might feel really fresh and really good but that's almost as dangerous as feeling sluggish because then you'll you'll run a bit too fast you'll bit do a bit too much and then the next day you'll be stiff because after two weeks of not running for example the muscles relax off and they lose their ability to to be able to handle that that pounding so no matter how you feel it shouldn't really make that big of a difference you've got any months until your next race you just have to get going stop gradually think about the long-term plan and the most important thing is to not do too much and we have gone through a lot of effort to try and make load management a lot easier within the app and definitely when you do start training if you quickly go up towards the green and then maybe up towards the roads like there is absolutely no point you do not need to gain fitness that quickly so just aiming to gradually get up towards the green then just hang out in the low green area of the training stress graph is more than good enough and it's just going to be better that you can build your your load then very gradually all the way through to the race rather than getting too fit too quickly and having to maintain it through to the race such as much however more frustrating yeah I think it's just really important to underline the fact that after taking two weeks off from running your your muscles will have forgotten a little bit what it's like running downhill for example and the reality of it is your fitness hasn't necessarily dropped by more than roughly like five ten percent which really isn't a lot you'll gain that back pretty quickly but yeah your muscles will have forgotten and they just need to re-adapt so the first run you do shouldn't be like a long run in any way a 40-minute recovery or easy run is adequate just to get the ball rolling again and I actually remember it was two years ago that I took a two-week off-season proper dealer did nothing apart from some long walks with my parents then I decided to head out for a long run with John that was like three and a half hours I think I pretty much got injured on that run so yeah don't do that is is the main point John have you got any other uh don't do this stories about off-season I think one of the biggest mistakes you can do during off-season is to do these little sections and little bits of training just because you know you want to get out and that's like you should just take some training yeah it's not a bit sneaky about it just take some time off fully relax into it and I think embrace the off-season you know become a slightly different version of yourself and let yourself go and then when you do get back to training you'll be surprised with how quickly the fitness does feel like it starts to come back and you'll be able to yeah get better results by taking that that down time yeah and I mean what do you do you eat like you normally do during off-season you spoke about protein a little bit earlier do you indulge in a lot of stuff or do you stick to your normal routine or yeah what's your sort of go to nutrition wise during this time I think yeah like I mentioned the protein intake is dropping slightly because the training load just isn't there but generally I'm less hungry usually during the first week I'm still like relatively hungry because I'm still recovering and fueling for the training I've done the previous weeks and months but gradually the hunger dissipates as the training loads dissipates and I just try and embrace that and eat to sort of help how hungry I am also I do tend to sort of not overindulge but allow myself some treats during this time we drink very little alcohol during the during the year especially just when you see what it does to your HIV and you'll see it quality it'll probably make the majority of people drink a little bit less bit of glass of wine here or there during the off-season maybe the odd scoop of ice cream just because I can and that's what I want to do really so I did actually have a little bit of ice cream can I just say you walked in from having been out you've been out shopping and you walked in and you bought eggs a beer and a big tub of Ben and Jerry's and you actually had Ben and Jerry's for I'll call in afternoon snack considering you had lunch earlier in the day but yeah no I do think that is important it's not something we do every day although if we're training a lot it wouldn't be out of the question but yeah this time of year you don't even have to explain why you decided to sit down have Ben and Jerry's at two o'clock in the afternoon because it's off season it's not cranking during the rest of the year it's just something I don't do so I just saw it in the shop I felt like it so I did it you go for it yeah I do think just yeah listening to your cramies a little bit is nice always and yeah this time of year you're definitely allowed to overindulge a bit extra here and there but with that being said I do think it's important to touch on the fact that nutrition is important for recovery as well so you don't just want to have Ben and Jerry's obviously all the time and beer that would not not bode well for the longer term nearly to cover as a recover as well as possible and sleep quality is actually massive for recovery so anything you can do to to sleep better you should do and then yeah the quality of your diet is absolutely huge as well so allow yourself a bit wiggle room but then there'll probably be a little bit of that around christmas time as well so you don't want to push the boat out too much now but um considering we've got like a quick turnaround and a really big race as soon as February it feels like I'm gonna I'm gonna push the boat out a little bit extra now and then I'll probably be extra extra good during christmas time very good uh and just like finally touched on like how often do you take an off season are we talking more than once a year or every two years or are we actually talking like once every 12 months now that's once every year I do like that's just how trail running seasons have worked out for me that it's race race race race race come the last race then it's some really good downtime and then back into winter training which usually consists of a lot of cross training so it's a very different training to what I was doing before the off season and then after a month or two of that base building in the in the winter time it's back to the back to the running so it's definitely something I do at least every 12 months with the exception of the corona year I think because that was just a different year for everyone and without the racing it wasn't sort of like a thing I felt like I needed to do yeah so it's very much a case of okay you have your race season with your shorter recovery phase is built in and then when you get to the end of your race season you have that longer deeper reset yeah for sure actually corona I had my full operation during that year as well so I had a lot to enforce downtime so yeah normally is always always twice a year oh I'm seeing it's not twice all right so to round things off then how can you optimize your off-season potential we suggest taking one to two weeks of proper proper off season you don't think about training you overindulge a little bit extra and you celebrate all your friends birthday at the same time this even if you're not a pro trailer I know this applies to like everyone recreational as well as professionals and you should really enjoy not exercising try and embrace it and do stuff that you normally don't have time for and at the end of the day yes your fitness will decline accept that and move on your weight might even increase in the short term and that's healthy and that's supposed to happen it's sort of for a greater peak in the longer term but when you do start up again training wise be sure to start up very gradually when you return easy slash recovery runs every other day for example is a good way to get get back into it gradually and then do that for one or two weeks before you sort of return back to normal training routine with a training plan in hand and build towards your next goals you definitely want to get to the three week mark having started training again with energy to continue and feel like what you're done was super manageable and you can continue for another three weeks you don't want to get to the three week mark i think oh crap i'm tired okay i think i want another office like that's not the point you want to try and you want to try and do the amount of load you can manage for long-term sustainable gains rather than just three weeks until another craft yeah i mean you always want to you almost want to start lower than you think you need to in terms of training load because you want to build week on week on week for probably at least 12 weeks plus yeah that means dropping back to progression one on the uh on the workouts maybe dropping a commitment level or two in the first weeks and then keeping an eye on the load management in the dation analysis to make sure you're not going anywhere near the red because going up towards the red will just skew the numbers and make the system think you can manage more training than you can so then later down the line it'll be harder to to stay in the green even and look for their sustainable improvements it is always a balancing act but um yeah try and listen to the body aim lower than you think you need to and really use those first couple of weeks to ease back into it because if you don't you'll regret it later on okay john so i was going to get you to read out this week's whereas the wisdom seeing as think you wrote them down it's big i wrote all the lines of wisdom and i think you've been you've been adding in some here and there which then i've been critiquing yes i mean in the app for those that aren't users of album app we have got a words of wisdom which pops up a new one every day yeah uh and it's quite fun to to read it uh i'd like it otherwise i thought i wouldn't so today's rest until you feel motivated and ready to train then rest one more day for good measure hmm do you do this john uh i wish i did more to be honest it's hard i'm addicted to training and there's an emotional side to planning and doing training and i wish sometimes i could uh look at it and just follow exactly what the app says but now i live and learn and learn the same lesson over and over again so hopefully one day i can do and to be honest considering i mean off season now maybe i'll take that one extra day at the end of it so we're looking at 15 days this year not 40 what was it very good all right thanks everyone who turned into this episode of the album way if you enjoyed it be sure to share it with your friend you can also check out album app for more trail specific training advice and tips we'll talk to you next time and if you are in off season try and enjoy it and if you've still got some races left this year good luck thanks everyone