As someone over the age of 40 it is important to focus on recovery as much as if not more than my hard workouts. If you are over 40 you should understand the why of this. If you are not yet 40 then get ready. 😂

As we age our bodies get slower and not as good at recovering from injuries. Exercise is in effect a mild form of injury. In order to grow muscle you have to push it to its limits and cause small tears in the muscle fibers. The muscle repairs itself and overcompensates to make itself stronger than it was before the exercise.

If you don’t give the muscle enough time to repair then you make no progress in gaining strength. If you do this often enough you can achieve something known as over training. Generally the rule of thumb for endurance training is 3 weeks of progressive overload followed by 1 week of recovery.

I say generally as this is applied to athletes in their 20’s and up broadly, but if we circle back a few paragraphs we see that as we age our ability to recover gets worse. To compensate for this the training program I am currently following does 2 weeks of progressive overload followed by 1 week of recovery.

That was a long way of saying that this week is my week of recovery. 😎

Today I had a 1 hour recovery ride which means I pedaled about as easy as I could without falling over for 1 hour on a flat road. My heart rate stayed in Zone/Level 1 and I could have easily held a conversation for the entire ride.

It was a beautiful morning with a light southerly breeze. Riding around Tubac for the last 5 weeks has been really nice and I will miss it, a little. The roads here are not in the greatest of conditions and there isn’t a lot of shoulder. The nice thing is that the drivers have pretty much all given be a wide berth which is always appreciated.

I listened to a number of podcasts this morning:

ReWork – The Soul of an Entrepreneur – Great discussion about entrepreneurs from an angle that is less typical these days. Turns out we don’t all have to be Elon Musk or a Kardashian to be successful.

Short Wave – On Earth Day, What You Can Do For The Environment – 50th Anniversary of Earth Day is tomorrow. 3 things to focus on: 1) Educate yourself, 2) Make conscious purchase decisions, and 3) Reduce travel. While individually we might not make a huge impact on climate change we will change our thinking and perspective. This will then force our representatives to adopt our thinking and perspective. Maybe.