While watching the high school and collegiate XC seasons come to an end I cannot help but think about my own experience with the hills and mud of cross-country racing. I will not pretend to be some great XC runner projecting some secret to successful training or racing on the reader, but I will share one lesson that I learned all too late. That lesson was the importance of rest.

No matter how my XC season ended I was always fired up for track. If my last race went poorly or our team did not qualify for the next race, I simply wanted another chance to prove myself and I wanted to start putting in the work to make that chance worthwhile. If the season ended on a high note then I wanted to keep the momentum and use that positive energy to carry me into my next cycle of training. What I never did in the beginning was simply rest.

The high school and collegiate seasons are long. Anybody who has lived through two races a week in high school or an 8k every other weekend in college can tell you, it takes a toll on both body and mind. With an equally long (or longer) track season on the horizon I believe it is important to acknowledge the end of one season and the start of your training for another.

I cannot tell you how that gap should look. I learned to take a solid five days completely off, some take more, some less. Others prefer a week of easy running. The important thing in my view is breaking up the year. No matter how much you want to go pound workouts and get ready for that big race in April or May, the physical work you do now will mean nothing if you are emotionally drained or cannot recover properly down the road.

I still use this methodology now even though my road racing does not fall into seasonal schedules. Every year there are a couple of races that I train for specifically. These races mark the end of several training cycles and serve as the end of my “seasons”. I find it important to then take time after these races, to let my body recover and reflect on what I did well and what I did not. This training time is not wasted even if I am not running a ton of miles as it sets me up to begin my next set of cycles.

Every week of training is important, but there is no definition to what a training week has to look like. Listen to your body and give it every chance to succeed in the future. Give it the rest it needs and that “easy” training week may pay big dividends in the future. Enjoy the end of your XC season and good luck this spring on the track.