Short Layoff, Long Comeback – New York Times:
Good piece last week from Gina Kolata on how the body reacts when training is suspended and what sorts of activities do or don’t help performance in specific events (if you’re a cyclist, walking ain’t gonna help a lot with that, no matter how much you walk. …).
“WHEN Helen Betancourt, an assistant coach at Princeton, was preparing for the World Championships in rowing in 1998, she suffered an overuse injury: stress fractures of her ribs. She competed anyway, but then had to take five months off.
“Like most athletes, she did her best to maintain her fitness, spending hours cycling. Finally, she returned to her sport.
“ ‘I lost half my strength,’ she said. And rowing just felt weird. ‘It was like I had stepped off another planet.’
“Yet a couple of months later, much faster than it takes to get that strong to begin with, Ms. Betancourt felt like her old self on the water. Four months of rowing and she was in top form.”