For the Runners — new and seasoned — Here’s How to Recover PRE + POST Colfax Marathon
Contributions from Alli Armstrong: Marathoner, Studio and Community Lead
When training for a race, you’re putting your body through additional stress to elicit adaptations and improve week over week. With proper recovery — in between trainings, not just after the marathon — this can become positive stress, allowing you to get stronger, faster, and improve endurance!
When taking the time to properly recover from your trainings, you increase blood flow, which aids in nutrient delivery to the muscles, facilitating repair and growth by:
Reducing inflammation
Reducing soreness
Reducing recovery time
Quality of Sleep
Can’t squeeze in more hours? We get it. While actual sleep is an extremely important part of recovery, there are other ways you can help improve the quality of sleep you’re getting — so that your body can truly recover, and keep going!
Restorative movement is essential to your training plan. Luckily, Upswell offers Restore, 50-minute restorative yin-yoga class that incorporates breathwork and soft tissue release. In these classes you will follow a light breath-to-movement flow, land in a restorative yin posture, and seal class with Upswell’s signature moment of constructive rest.
Uniquely, each class at Upswell offers a moment of soft tissue release techniques to help reduce recovery time and injury risk. Book a class after your run or even on your on rest day to help down-regulate and prepare for a good night’s rest.
Consistency
The key to success is consistency — and recognizing that without the recovery, you cannot truly optimize your training program, or results.
As busy athletes, it’s important to work smarter, not harder. A speedwork session at the track can help develop speed and endurance, but if you’re not giving your body a chance to absorb the session, it’s not going to improve your pace.
An active recovery session at Upswell can help activate your parasympathetic central nervous system, signaling your body to reduce stress, build muscle, and utilize the fuel we intake to replenish our glycogen stores. This allows us to gain more from each session, and feel better faster, to increase quality training sessions if we choose.
For Alli, she started to see the benefits during her marathon training cycle for the 2024 California International Marathon, Alli incorporated infrared sauna, cold plunge, Normatec compression boots and Upswell Restore classes throughout the week. She was able to add a day of running from her previous training cycle, and felt less tired after her long runs. Marathon training is never easy, but having more energy outside of training sessions and being able to show up more fully during the sessions has been a game changer for her life in and outside of training.
Research-Backed Routine Recommendations
Upswell is dedicated to active recovery and mindful movement — so that you can always get back doing what you love most, more often and pain free. Each offering is designed to help you recover faster, so you can crush your training, reduce risk of injury and feel amazing!
Try this runner’s protocol on any rest day, or after any run. Recovery isn’t all-or-nothing, so feel free to shorten/skip/adjust any portion to customize your recovery routine!
20 minutes in Glow, our Infrared Sauna
3 minutes in the Cold Plunge
3 minutes in Soak, our Warm Plunge
or 10 minutes in Sweat, our Traditional Sauna
15-45 minutes in Revive, where your legs can recover in Normatec Compression Boots with our heated Align PEMF Mats
We’d love for you to stop by our studio and see how a sauna session, cold plunge, and revive time can support your training! Colfax Marathon runners get a complimentary visit to test it all out!
Big thank you to our friends at Colfax Integrated and OOFOS for collaborating and sharing recovery resources — we’re looking forward to meeting you and diving in even more, at Upswell Studio!
Stay Vibrant!
