wound healing as an indicator of recovery?

You raise an interesting point, but it is way too subjective. Every cut or abrasion is different, and location on the body matters too. So you'd have to standardize a way to ensure the exact skin wound every time. Then there's many external factors- temperature, humidity, anything that affects the skin. Furthermore, healing a skin wound is different from repairing microscopic muscular damage incurred by muscular exercise. Especially because training conditions muscles to recover more quickly. If you repeatedly cut yourself, that spot isn't going to start healing faster

A thread with a legitimate question and the first reply is a legitimate intelligent response. It's a Christmas miracle!

That seems like a sensible idea. Very interested to hear the responses.

I have a very rare condition that leads to me getting a lot of cuts on my body, and I find this to be true as well. When I'm training hard, they take longer to heal. But over the short term, there are a lot of other things that can affect how quickly my body heals, primarily sleep. I think there are also certain foods that will help... for example, salmon but not tuna... it may be an omega 3 thing.

Your idea is neat, but there are a lot of variables. I'm sure training load has an impact on your immune system.

Given experience, it seems my subjective desire to push hard as well as sweat rate seem the best indicators.

As sometimes as we become overly focused on the goal, we can easily loose a sense of the process. What ever possessed us with the will to set the goal in the first place most likely came from a place of feeling good. This is easily forgotten.

Most often, over the years I have become too idealistic for my own good and trudged through un needed, or rather I should say, unproductive training when rest or easy training was most required. Seems as I think "I should" is a response to expectations most often not met ( e.g. pace or miles not met).

Funny, that works both ways. If I'm feeling good and running unexpectedly well or more than I would have expected, my surprise would hold me back when perhaps adding more wood to the fire would have been a better response.

Thinking, expectations, schedules and hope never are a good fist hand tool for indicating where we are at and what we should do (i.m.h.o.). Given enough attention and willingness to be honest with our internal world, perhaps we can self regulate our trajectory. Drive, vigor and possibly amount of sweat soaked on my shirt tell me much more than anything I have experience with. Took 30 years for this to become clear.

Clumsiness? That's not that rare.

Here's my theory, FWIW: our body's white blood cells (WBCs) are in charge of rebuilding the body after a run. Running involves a tearing down of cells and their rebuilding through rest which gives our WBCs a chance to do their thing. Many WBCs are used up in the recovery process. Therefore fewer WBCs are available to take care of things such as wound healing, ergo the longer recovery time for wound healing.

Nice idea. Might be more useful than heart rate or creatine kinase assays for monitoring systemic recovery rates. However, I think its usefulness in preventing injury is limited because many injuries are in areas that have poor blood supply and therefore heal slowly, e.g. tendinitis.