Do most U.S. elite runners take at least one complete rest day a week?

What exactly are you calling complete rest?

24 hour period of no running or 24 hours of not leaving the bed?

I do not believe many elite runners take a day off from running each week.

Maybe every 4-8 weeks.

Most elite Americans do not take a day off each week.

Superhuman wrote:

I have always been advised by fellow runners to take one complete day of rest a week. Although I think it is a good thing for the most part, I am wondering how many of our best runners in the country and the world actually take them.

A lot of Kenyan runners take Sundays off for religious reasons but not all of them. Look in the book 'More Fire' by Toby Tanser and about half of those schedules have no rest days at all.

In Jordan Hassay's latest interview, she says she runs for thirty minutes on her 'rest' day. On Dathan Ritzenhein's blog he gave sample weeks of his training and I didn't see any rest days there so.... Do we really need them and do a lot of runners actually take them? I'm just really confused here.

You're only going to get more confused if you try to determine whether you need rest days based on what others do. As you already pointed out - some elites DO take one rest day per week and others don't. If you feel like your body and mind can handle the stress of training 7 days per week every week then go for it. If you feel like you become stale and need that one day off per week to look forward to... then take it. It is not rocket science, and certainly nothing to be confused about.

Superhuman wrote:I'm just really confused here.

True.

I feel that because elite runners are older in terms of athletic age and have endured or built up to point that allows them to maintain a certain work load that a rest day is a day that would include some kind of alt. training and serve more as a recovery day than a rest day. However depending on injuries and progression of season would play a factor in that. I wouldn't recommend a complete day of rest for an elite in season.

according to a not-recent S.I. article--lance armstrong was quoted as allowing for 10 "rest-days" in an entire year--this while he was going for his T de F titles.

i would assume its about the same for ELITE level distance runners.

Mr. Lo-Fat wrote:

according to a not-recent S.I. article--lance armstrong was quoted as allowing for 10 "rest-days" in an entire year--this while he was going for his T de F titles.

i would assume its about the same for ELITE level distance runners.

No, many (most) elite Kenyan runners DO take off one day per week. They are also a LOT less obsessive compulsive about never missing a day i.e. when they feel tired or sick, when they are travelling, when it is raining, etc.

when u say "take off one day per week"...do u mean they do absolutely nothing in terms of training? like, not even a short jog.?

i've heard that about the kenyans--but honestly, i've always thought that they just liked to give the impression of a casual approach to training--when it fact they train as hard as anybody

i wouldn't know--i merely make a surmise.

No, I RARELY take rest days.

Yes, they take the day COMPLETELY off (no short jog, no crunches, no cross-training). They usually "sleep in" (not very late, but later than on a training day), go to church, and then (in many cases) do laundry. Keep in mind that i Kenya doing laundry means hand-washing dirty, muddy training clothes so it is a physical process that could take 1-2 hours. I suppose that is a form of cross-training, but they don't do it for that purpose. In fact, when they are well-established they will usually have someone else do it for them. Other than that they will "stroll" around town or visiting friends, etc. Don't take this to mean they don't train as hard as anybody. I believe that by taking a day off they allow themselves mentally and physically to sustain a higher intensity of training.

Most US elite runners are sprinters. There are like five US elite runners that are distance runners. Of those, only Lagat should take a day off cause the rest suck.

lagat takes a day off each week

That could be why he's not reaching his potential.

Superhuman wrote:

I have always been advised by fellow runners to take one complete day of rest a week.

Who in hell 'always advised' you of that? No one has ever told me to take a day off, since freaking middle school; and I have no reason to believe that doing so would have benefited me. No one I know takes a day off--and I know some decently fast people, i.e. Olympic trials qualifiers, American record holders, world champions, and world record holders. Only person I've known who took a day off was a pretty damn good Mormon runner. Take a day off when you need it; there's no need to take one when you don't feel like it's worth it; hell, there's no reason to plan that obsessively anyway.

Well, if you finished a run on Monday morning at 8:00am and then started your next run on Tuesday morning at 8:00am you did take 24 hours off. Which is a day. So it's possible that you could run 7 days a week and still take 7 days off a week.

Maybe if US runners trained hard enough to NEED a rest day each week like many Kenyans, more would be competitive on the world stage.

ding ding ding! GAME OVER! Congratulations Coach D, you just won the award for "dumbest post in the thread"! What are you going to do now?

If I run for an hour at 7am Monday and then 8am on Tuesday can I count that as a full day's rest (24 hours) ?

Put another way, would it be safe to tell me running buddies that I take a full days rest per week ??