I questioned every rest day and every lighter session. I couldn’t believe that recovery would ever work, but six months down the line, my back and hamstring are cured and I am mentally more stable than I ever have been.
When I feel uncomfortable or low I turn to exercise to pick me up, this becomes a lot trickier when the reason I feel uncomfortable and low is because I cannot exercise…
It took a couple of hours of coercion to get me to call a physiotherapist because ‘they’re going to tell me not to swim for the foreseeable future and I can’t cope with that… Does this sound familiar? Read how Georgina coped.
I had always felt like my routine was dictated by pool and gym hours. Strangely I had never set myself recovery hours. Never set aside any portion of the day for doing things to promote recovery; napping, meditating, visualisation etc. and subsequently recovery was being neglected. The irony then, of complaining of free time, when there were already more swimming related jobs for me to be doing than I was fitting into a day.
In my examination of the challenges of recovery, this is, for me, the strongest and trickiest feeling to deal with: the insecurity of doing what is perceived as ‘nothing’. Training feels like taking control, being active, pursuing your goals and making use of your life; sitting still does not.
Full time Sprint Swimmer Georgina Gardner Stockley introduces her upcoming blog series ‘Why does it remain so difficult to recover?’