There is nothing wrong with resting but an elite athlete can rest by running easy for 90 minutes split between two runs. This slippery slope of toal rest has been tried before with pretty horrible results. All of this was around in the 90's when everyone was talking about "junk miles" and a sub 2:22 marathon became elite in the US. Ryan can get away with it for a while because he has a huge base built up, same with the Kenyans. The danger is when high school and college guys running low mileage start reading this and then start taking days off that they don't need. Then performances suffer, standards go down and we end up having one athlete per distance event at worlds and the olympics.