As we discussed in the previous chapter, TrainingPeaks is a wonderful fitness tracking tool, but on the downside, it reminds you in a blink the fitness you think you can lose by not training for a day. Yes, if there is anything to keep from this blog, it’s that when it comes to endurance — or even ultra-endurance in this case — consistency is crucial. Day-after-day for a year I was able to keep up with the schedule training sessions, and I missed only a very few. I didn’t count exactly but really only a very few… and for the very few I missed, I was so upset that I was still thinking about it some days after. If I was able to keep up with such an insane pace of 15 hours to 20 hours per week of training, it’s because I made a deal with my body : « Listen bro, we’ll be both suffering but I do promise to let you get the food you need to rebuild the muscles, the sleep you need to have the time to do so, and the rest you deserve to understand and adjust the training stimulus. » More importantly, I concluded the deal with this sentence : « If it ever happens that I understand you’re not recovered and primed for action; we’ll do the planned workout but I’ll lower either length or intensity to make sure you can keep up with it. But at the very least, we’ll give it a try anyhow. » You may think I’m doing some storytelling trick here, but that’s how it actually went throughout my season, and this is the very reason I succeeded in the first place.

Good thing of learning to swim is that I was able to have some fun in open water from time to time.

Recovery is key for any serious athlete for tons of reasons, but if some had to stand out and be part of these lines :

• Recovery is part of the training. When you’re taking a rest day, you’re not losing fitness, you’re actually gaining fitness. It’s that step behind that’s allowing you to make five others forward the next week. Regeneration is key to sustainable progress, and so I like the saying that « recovery can be taken as the yin to training’s yang. » If you’re doing the job the right way, training should break you almost completely down by the eve of your rest day. Allow the body to put itself back together, and take that recovery process as a complete part of your training block.
• Recovery allows you to perform at the intensity intended. I was just talking about the discussion I used to have with my body, about adjusting the length or intensity of my training when needed. This is obviously the last thing you want to do. When a training is set to go at a particular intensity, it’s for a specific reason. Getting away of it would make it… way less useful to your overall progress. Eventually, it’ll happen somehow to you, either because you’re training is too difficult for your current fitness or more concerning because your body has not enough rest to fulfil its duty. When this happens, it’s a clear alarm you should allow yourself a longer rest as soon as possible.
• Avoid mental burnout. I had some kind of “love / hate” relationship through my season with training. When I was in the middle of my training week i sometime questioned myself about the purpose of all this, why I shouldn’t go for the easy life like 99% of the people around me. Finally, when I was taking my rest day; my body was like « wish I could train today. » My mind never fell into the trap, and always understood it was critical to keep up with the same discipline of training like for all training days, but this time the other way around. On my rest day, I didn’t want to hear anything about TrainingPeaks, triathlon, running or Zwift. Just leave me with my cheat meal and my box-office winning movie at the theatre. Clearing the mind, enjoying the downtime was totally important to me to be able to enjoy the best I could the process on the other days and being completely committed.

I decided to have my rest days on “Friyay” because it was allowing me to have Friday evening available for a friend’s birthday, for example, clearly the best option possible in term of being able to socialize the least I can. Another reason is that my hardest training day was on Saturday with the long ride and brick run, so it was allowing me to be at my best fitness form possible. Interestingly now, my running coach Steve Palladino is giving me a rest day on Monday, the day after my weekly long run. So… let’s say you have to be strategic and assertive about your rest day whatever your choice.

Before moving forward, I also wanted to give a word about the training protocol of most professional triathletes. It’s difficult to get meaningful insights, but for the few ones I got, it looks like they don’t really deal with true rest days. Most of the time, they use that so-called “off day” to hit the pool with some very easy swim. Despite aiming for a #SUB10 performance, and being in the top 5% of any IronMan 140.6 race, we’re still miles behind their fitness level. They are being called “pro” for a reason, so my advice would obviously be to not try to replicate it.

That being said, what was the most efficient way for me to track and support my recovery ? I can clearly identify 4 things that I found to be significant :

1. Nutrition & hydration
2. Sleep
3. Massage and stretching
4. Heart rate variability — also known as H.R.V.

Nutrition & hydration being already the longest chapter of that blog, I just won’t go more into that and will focus on the 3 others.

Sleep solves (almost) everything

Sleeping is a story of turmoil for me as far as I can recall, and IronMan training quite didn’t help to settle it down, to be honest. Throughout my life, I’ve pretty much experienced all the sleeping patterns possible, and none of them turned out to be really something I felt comfortable with. Still, I quickly understood how important sleep was for any kind of athlete, and especially for me. Getting the hours of sleep needed is something completely difficult when training volume and resulting schedule are going head to head with family, work, and friends. It’s obviously the easiest thing to sacrifice, and I’m in all honestly amazed by the age grouper able to put only 6 hours of sleep to wake up at 5 in the morning to make sure they can carry their everyday routine. Kudos to you guys, you’re straight legends !

My sleeping pattern throughout my training week was usually getting to bed by 10 in the evening, and giving me some sort of “cool-down” in bed mostly reading on my Kindle ebook reader. As soon as I felt like I was ready to sleep I was just turning off the lights. I quite noticed that I was needing a far more greater buffer when I had an intense evening workout, and dealing with a high stamina was my worst nightmare. Some days I was so tired, yet unable to sleep for two hours because of it. The problem is that I couldn’t allow myself to compensate for it in the morning, and so I had to wake up every morning at 7. Yes, it’s already quite decent when you look at most triathlete schedules. Looking at my Whoop information, I slept on average 7h34 throughout the season. No question, it was below the ideal sleeping time for someone putting in 15 hours of training a week, but I managed somehow to make it work.

Some quick tips that helped me when it came to sleep :

• Black is black. I’m now living in Singapore, pretty close to the equator, meaning that day and night are swiftly coming at the same time every day, all year round. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, but I have to say I pretty much like it as it helps me a lot to get into a regular sleeping pattern. It was definitely not the case in Paris, when during summer, night is coming at 10 in the evening, and day at 5:30 in the morning. I had to use a sleep mask to make sure my body was not naturally adapting to the outside light, and it quite frankly made a pretty successful difference over time even though you need to get used to it.
• Napping is always a risky move. When your full-time job is being an elite athlete, napping is more likely to be part of your daily routine. It’s quite another story when it’s your hobby, and you’re working at an office for example. My body made me understand several times that it was in need of some rest in the middle of the day, but it was just not possible for me to allow it. It eventually happened that I took a nap when working from home, and usually it didn’t turn out to be a great idea as I was unable to keep it short. As a result, it almost always interfered with my ability to sleep through the following night. The only time I was able to make it work the way intended was when the nap was shorter than 30 minutes or so.

No need to say that in endurance sports, with such volume, any poor-quality sleep will lead eventually to injury. This is because without sufficient sleep, your body is — among other things — :

• Exaggerating your perceived fatigue and exertion while in training.
• Not producing enough cytokines, a protein directly responsible for protecting you against infection and inflammation.
• Lowering your levels of pre-exercise muscle glycogen levels.
• Increasing the production of the stress hormone cortisol.

Fair enough ? Consider that with a lack of sleep you’re two thirds more likely to get injured than those who get enough sleep. I know it’s hard to get the sleep we should get in the modern society we live in, but make sure you’re not trading it for something else, there is just too much at stake for your body ability to rebuild and restore its whole system.

Listen to your heart (rate variability)

I remember once during the season sharing my Whoop screen — we’ll talk about it in a few lines — on my Instagram account and getting some messages noticing my resting heart rate — also known as RHR — sitting in the low 40’s. Quite frankly this is not what I was specifically looking for, but I understood that day that I was definitely sitting with some decently trained athletes — just for the record Miguel Hindurain had an RHR of 28 beats per minute¹Living legends - Outside online. Most of the sedentary people though, like your friend telling you to stop this stupid IronMan thing, are in the 60’s to 70’s range. So RHR is a very useful indicator of your fitness level, but when it comes to your recovery level, I found out another input way more valuable : the heart rate variability — HRV.

Despite being discussed for a few years now, it’s still a fairly new method compared to others when it comes to assessing the effects of stress on the body. How does it exactly work ? The principle is easy to understand : it’s measuring the time gap between your heartbeats as you breathe in and out. There are always small variations for any human, and they are very meaningful to provide a wealth of information on your body system current level, especially your heart and nervous system. The higher your HRV, the more likely you being in good shape and ready to tackle the training. The lower your HRV, the more likely you being in fatigue and stressed.

This measure was originally applied to assess the risks for patients who suffered a heart attack, but it has now moved to the athletic field and is becoming a standard tool thanks to several companies.

The most-known solution is Whoop which is a full-time wearable device costing 30 dollars a month. I used it for over a year, and to be honest, I never ended up to be completely satisfied by it for several reasons :

• The need to charge it every 4 days or so.
• The difficulty of using it in the pool with the wristband provided.
• The complete mess up of the heart rate provided.
• The so-so connectivity of the device to the phone.
• The calculation method of the HRV.
• 30 dollars a month, like seriously ?

Elite HRV is quite a decent app to track your HRV variation from day to day.

It was still the most affordable way for me to get an idea of my HRV and the trend was most likely following my perceived rate of fatigue, so this is what I used for the season. I’ve since then cancelled my subscription, and found what I think a much better replacement. I’m quite sure you've never heard of Elite HRV, but I’ve been using it for quite a few months now and it’s just working like a charm, with exactly what I’m looking for as someone deeply seeking reliable data :

• The ability to know if I am rather parasympathetic dominant or sympathetic dominant — am I constantly in fight or flight (stress) mode ?
• A fixed lifetime price of 165 USD — 6 months of Whoop subscription.
• No wearable device to keep 24/7.
• Two minutes of my time to give every morning, being measure with their CorSense device, comparable in accuracy to a hospital grade 5-lead EKG/ECG for HRV.
• An easy daily score to understand, ranging from 1 to 10, the higher being the better.

I’m not sponsored in any way, I always bought absolutely everything — ask my banker. It’s just that I don’t like being taken for a fool, and so I’m happy to share this godsend. That being said, as you can compare to other people with Elite HRV, I was glad to see my HRV being in the high-end here despite some rough training weeks, being usually on a 66 HRV on a 7 days rolling average if it can be of any help.

Moving to HRV tracking won’t be a miracle tool, let’s be clear, but it can be a great help to manage and get confirmation of your recovery. Just have a look at it every morning, and if it’s dropping significantly, this means you had a rough session on the days before — but you should know that already, again it will be a confirmation. And it’s okay, as long as it goes up again in the following days. If that’s not the case, then you could be on the edge of trouble and that’s the beauty of HRV to let you know that.

Massage and stretching are the best rewards

When you aim to be a sub elite athlete — or at least being close to it — your body is starting to be your working tool — or at least again being close to it — and this is why you should ensure you’re giving it all the love you can the moment you have some spare time ahead of you. If you don’t, find it, because it can make quite a difference on your training output through these various way :

• Massage. I was lucky enough to live in France where physiotherapist sessions are almost free thanks to the healthcare system. I took full advantage of it with medical prescription up to date, seeing my physiotherapist once per week. Most of the time it was not to get rid of an injury, but more about prevention, and there was always something wrong with my body. That’s part of the job. If you can’t afford it, just check YouTube as there are plenty of videos about it just around the corner.


Your legs are everything when it comes to triathlon. Give them the love and massage they deserve.

• Foam roller. It’s how torture looks like I guess… deep tissue sports massage through a foam roller is an experience in itself with sore muscles. I was very doubtful for quite a long time before starting to use it and noticed indeed some real help in my recovery. Using it once a week on my rest days by applying 30 seconds pressure to pinpointed spots on muscles, tendons and ligaments, foam rolling can loosen soft tissue and can definitely improve blood flow. It hurts, but it works.
• Stretching. Last in this list, but definitely first in your recovery routine. Some days where I should have stretched, I was just too tired and/or lazy to do so and give myself 15 minutes to execute properly. I noticed that I paid the price almost every single time with some muscle strain the following days. Having your muscles shorten and becoming tight is the last thing you want. You need this flexibility to maintain a range of motion in the joints, and that’s only possible through proper stretching. The thing is that we’re triathletes, and so the stretching we need to do is far more important than for a runner, for example, as we’re using way more muscle groups through the 3 sports. I was stretching twice a week, on my rest day and at some point during the training week when I felt it was the right moment.

As I promise myself to not let you down, I've taken some time to describe my stretching routine in a few pictures.

Hip and Tensor Fasciae Latae

Inner thighs

Inner thighs

Shoulders & inner thighs

Hamstrings

Achilles tendon

Quads

Quads

That may sound like some “Captain Obvious” kind of stuff, but the deeper you’ll go in your training block, the more you’ll need all of these things to support your recovery. If you don’t or can’t be consistent in that process, you will not give a chance to your body to adapt to the training stimulus you’re beating it with. Then comes the injury, even overtraining potentially, leading to forced rest, which in return is blowing up the “all about” consistency we’re talking about since you’re reading this blog. Get the mix right.