Vilovecka

This week I have vilovecka, which is rest week in swedish. Having vilovecka is awesome: I don’t have to plan my days in detail to get all the training done and I get a lot of free time to do other stuff. During the vilovecka you can really enjoy yourself!

The last years I have been using a periodisation system of 4 weeks in my winter training (or preparatory training, since it goes on for longer than the winter…), with 3 hard weeks followed by 1 rest week.  This system suits me really well, since it enables me to train really well during the 3 weeks of hard training, and then I get 1 week to fully recover and be able to train really hard again when the next block starts, without totally breaking myself down. It is also very good psychologically to know that you get to rest at a certain point in the not too distant future – that makes me able to push harder during the 3-week-block, and I think that I get better (and more!) training done this way, than if I had just trained evenly throughout the winter.

But it is not only from a training quality point of view that this 3-1 system is good, it also really helps me to stay healthy and injury free. There is always a danger that some of all the minor injuries that you inevitably pick up as a elite orienteer develop and become something bigger than it was at first, but during the rest week you get an opportunity to lick your wounds, and really make sure that you heal properly in every way. This means that I can enjoy the luxury of being injury free every 3-week-period, and that enables me to do quite a lot of running, which I think is a big key to succes.

The resting week is not, of course, 7 days spent on the sofa. I do train, but not as much. Usually I have 2-3 complete rest days during this week, where I do absolutely no physical training whatsoever. I have 3 training sessions that I plan during this week, and those are 1 interval session, 1 long run (2h+) and one gym session. The rest of the days I only do what I feel like doing, which varies a lot. Usually, the total training amount during the rest week is somewhere between 7 and 10 hours, which is quite much less that the 13-16h I have during the hard weeks.

Now I have finished my first 3-week-block for this year, and finally get to rest. And I have only 7 of these blocks left before it is time to go into WOC-preperation-mode! 1/8 done already!