Athlete Lab Virtual Studio

Recipe for happiness: friendship, trails and sunshine.

Last Breakfast Club virtual mobility and community chat this Thursday 8:30am. After, I’ll be heading down to Auburn to try my luck for the 8th year at the Western States Lottery. So appropriately, the icebreaker question for Breakfast Club will be: what’s one bucket list item of yours (running or non-running related)?

Mobility: 8:30-8:45am
Chat: 8:45am (we usually wrap up by 9am but you can come late, leave early, etc)

Link to register is on the app or website or just DM me and I’ll add you! Would be great to see you and close out the year together.

Feeling like fall 🍁 🍂 🌲

This time of year has always been a recovery phase for me. People ask me all the time what that looks like. So here it goes:

✨ prioritizing doing less as opposed to more
✨ running only when I want to and never prescribing pace or distance
✨ distributing volume evenly as opposed to having “big days” of training so no long runs, no intense workouts, and only 1-2 days where I might double up on a strength workout and an easy run
✨ taking 1-2 complete rest days a week
✨ listening to my body and if something doesn’t feel right, taking time to address it immediately as opposed to training through it
✨ planning my races and goals for 2025
✨ minimum maintenance miles — keeping the minimum base so I don’t feel like complete 💩 once I want to start building again (for me this is like 3-4 days of short runs a week)
✨ slowly getting back into a strength build. Prioritizing building and progressing strength over building mileage
✨doing a little more mobility work than I would normally. While this might sound counter intuitive, because my body is more sedentary now than it is during peak training, I find I need more of a movement practice to get it to feel good before a run.
✨ reconnect with my PTs post race and do a check in
✨ take time to do things other than run — cross train, hike with friends, socialize in a non-running setting
✨ and most importantly, taking a break from structured training and coaching. It’s nice not to have a schedule to follow and it allows me to feel like I’m listening to my body more

Right now, I’m enjoying having nothing on my race schedule for a while with the exception of the local untimed, unchipped, casual “I like pie” 🥧 run on Thanksgiving morning, and Boston marathon this spring. I know once December 6th hits that all change as I learn whether or not I got into Western States and plan my training accordingly. Until then, I’m milking this recovery phase as long as I can.