There is a story told in David Epstein’s book, “The Sports Gene,” of Jim Ryun — American Olympic silver medalist, and the first high school athlete to run faster than four minutes in the mile. Mid-career, Ryun abruptly took a full year of rest, due to burnout. Epstein describes, “The pressure of expectations and the ceaseless slog and drudgery of interval training got to him. The runner was less than halfway through a race at the national championship when he simply stepped off the track and refused to run another step for an entire year (1).”
Prior to his year of rest, Ryun had an exceedingly high VO2 max (2), “reportedly about double that of an average, untrained but healthy man (3).” In his time away from the sport, Ryun’s VO2 max dropped by 20 percent. After a year, he started jogging again, then resumed training in time for the next Olympic Games. Epstein describes how, upon restarting to train, Ryun quickly regained the aerobic capacity he lost (4). He was physiologically no worse for his time away. Rather, he was better — because he was eager to train and could engage productively with the sport again.
All it took was a fallow season.
Jim Ryun (right) with coach Pete Todd at the 1972 Florida Relays, Gainesville, Florida. Photo: Rochester Institute of Technology, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The Concept
A fallow season is an agricultural term that refers to a period in which a field lies idle (5). Repeatedly planting crops depletes the soil of its minerals. Fallow seasons allow these minerals and the available soil water to regenerate (6).
What looks like unproductivity is actually the active process of repair, and it is part of the rhythm of sustainable cultivation. Without a fallow season, growth cannot proceed indefinitely.
The application to running is straightforward. Like soil, runners benefit from extended rest to restore depleted bodies and minds, in ways we may not even detect we are depleted. When a runner takes an off-season, the deep fatigue (physiological, psychological, and otherwise) that comes from accumulated training dissipates. Athletes come away restored.
I have already provided the example of Jim Ryun’s fallow season. A second example is distance runner Bernard Lagat. Lagat reports that, throughout his career, he took one rest day per week and a full month off from training every fall (7). This may explain, in part, Lagat’s unprecedented longevity. He raced in five Olympic Games.
Bernard Lagat racing at the 2010 Internationales Stadionfest Track and Field in Berlin, Germany. Photo: André Zehetbauer from Schwerin, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
A Case for Fallow Seasons
As someone inclined to lament single unplanned days off from training, stories like those of Jim Ryun and Bernard Lagat rattle my sensibilities. They are good reminders that extended rest is productive. We cannot infinitely accrue fitness without stepping back.
Admittedly, these stories are also surprising. In my athletic imagination, those who hold their training more tightly — who work relentlessly and fastidiously without release — are the ones who succeed. But Jim Ryun does not follow this narrative. He was not tight-fisted with his training. I am not sure he even counts as being loose-fisted! He was open-handed. Ryun was absent from the sport for an entire year.
But it is not working hard that yields fruit. It is working hard in intelligent ways — in ways your body can absorb, with sensitivity to your own limits — that yields fruit. Ryun’s period of complete rest permitted him to train as hard as he did throughout his career.
With these things in mind, here are three reasons why we might embrace a fallow season, or at least be at peace with a period of extended rest.
1. Rest Is Not Idleness
Earlier I described how fallow seasons appear unproductive. No crops are gathered that season. But fallow seasons are not absent activity. They involve the active restoration and repair of the soil. This is part of the rhythm of sustainable cultivation, without which we could not continue to harvest crops.
It is easy to conceive of rest as negative space, or the absence of work. But this is not quite right. Rest is not negative space. It consists of the body’s reckoning with, and adaptation in response to, training. It is part of the rhythm of work, rather than a break from it.
2. Fallow Seasons Extend Careers
Certainly, a farmer can choose to proceed without a fallow season. He can decide to override the feedback he is receiving from the field and decide to harvest crops anyway.
There are perhaps short-term consequences for this decision. The crop yield garnered from a depleted field may be paltry. But the greater impact will be on the long-term health of the field. From the perspective of long-term health, harvesting the field now is the wrong decision.
Often when professional runners are asked how they became ascendant in the sport, they do not describe a single season of pushing hard. Instead, they describe consistent toil, building a broad foundation, and pressing further over a period of years. In the same way that focusing on a single harvest season can obscure how we ought to approach a field, focusing on maximizing the present in our training can distort how we view rest.
When we take a long view of our running, extended periods of rest seem less intimidating. Also, having a long running career becomes possible. Rest reduces the likelihood of burnout or premature retirement.
3. Life Has Many Goods
I used to be queen of the mornings.
I had my routine down to a science. I slept in my running clothes, ate breakfast within five minutes of waking up, and headed out the door so quickly that my legs would be running before I had the chance to worry about my training plans for the day. This routine was my version of binding myself to the mast (as Odysseus does) to make sure I stayed the course and accomplished my training (8).
I was reminiscing about those days recently, in the middle of a frenetic morning full of diaper changes, coaxing tiny humans to eat, and performing zoo animal impressions. (I do an excellent giraffe.) Now I am the queen, not of mornings, but of chaos.
And I love it.
Sabrina Little with baby Frances. Photo courtesy of Sabrina Little.
These days, I am in a fallow season of sorts. It is a season marked by letting certain capacities go fallow. But it is also a season marked by harvesting in other areas — like family time. Maybe a better agricultural metaphor here is crop rotation — substituting in other activities (or crops) that stress and fatigue the soil in different ways, resulting in conditions of renewal for the original activity (or crop.)
The point is, extended time away from the sport has profited me in two ways: by providing rest from the deep fatigue of consistent training, and by affording me time to delight in other goods. Extended rest can be wonderful.
Final Thoughts
There is probably a reason I keep writing about rest and the recognition of physical limits. These are things I tend to dislike, and maybe I am convincing myself of their value. But if there is anything we learn from Jim Ryun and Bernard Lagat, it is that extended time away from the sport is not something to be feared. It can restore us, extend our careers, and provide opportunities to focus on other things.
For the sake of both running and a good life, a fallow season seems like a good idea.
Call for Comments
- Have you had a fallow season? Either enforced by injury or life or by choice?
- How did you find the comeback?
References/Notes
- David Epstein (2013). “The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance,” Penguin Books, p. 97.
- A VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen an individual can use during intense exercise.
- David Epstein, “The Sports Gene,” p. 97.
- David Epstein, “The Sports Gene,” pp. 96-8.
- I am not a farmer, but I did accidentally grow two squashes in my compost pile this summer.
- C. Nielsen & F.J. Calderon. (2011). Fallow effects on soil. Found in “Soil Management: Building a Stable Base for Agriculture,” edited by J.H. Hatfield & T.J. Sauer, 287-300. Madison: American Society of Agronomy and Soil Science Society of America, 292.
- Nicholas Thompson. Meb Keflezighi, Bernard Lagat, and the Secret to Running Forever. “The New Yorker.” 16 August 2016. Web < https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/meb-keflezighi-bernard-lagat-and-the-secret-to-running-forever> Accessed 7 October 2023.
- In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Odysseus tethers himself to the mast of his ship in anticipation of the Sirens, because he knows he will not be strong enough to resist their enticements.
