My wife’s event is a running but had a groin injury last winter that forced her to take off almost four months from running. At first she could hardly even walk and when she did start running it was a gentle re-entry at first. During that injury period she didn’t do near as much exercise as normal, confining herself to a couple of swims a week and some upper body weight lifting as she also had trouble riding the trainer or x-country skiing due to the injury.
Now she is running faster than ever and just dropped two minutes off her PB 10 kms in a race last weekend with an AG win. Prior to the injury, I always thought she tended to run too much, but then I’m a definate under achiever when it comes to running. She’s running a bit less now and going faster.
A lot of triathletes seem very concerned about “losing fitness” if they take any time off from training, but based upon my wife’s experience it seems the time off due to injury may have been a good thing and allowed the rest of her body to recover also. It makes me wonder if taking some time off from training is a good thing. This no doubt would be tough to do for the typical obsessive triathlete personality. I know you’ll lose fitness and feel it when you start training again but at least in my wife’s case, it seemed to be beneficial in the final result. Any thoughts on this.