Good to Go - Striving to optimize recovery

Gauging recovery has always been a challenge for me — in the past when I have paid close attention to whether or not I am fully recovered and sought to wait until I am totally “good to go” - my training has dwindled to almost nothing. 

Last month was particularly difficult.  I had to deal with preparing for the three races in three weeks in three different sports and incorporate several dedicated, weekly obstacle course training sessions on top of my usual swimming, cycling, hill repeats, and track intervals.   Plus I needed to recover from the stress of the events themselves.  Moreover I had some travel and work issues to deal with.

So in an effort to better assess whether I am sufficiently recovered,  I try RestWise, a “fatigue monitoring system”

I sign up for a month of RestWise and every day I input various objective measures such as resting heart rate, oxygen saturation, sleep quantity along with subjective assessments of mood, muscle soreness, energy level, appetite, etc.

The RestWise app spits out a Recovery Score which informs me whether I should exercise that day:

You can see from the output how I struggled with recovery throughout May and early June.   I was already worn out from doing a variety of training during the Golden Week holiday in early May.  Then, while at first I seemed to have recovered well from the 10k on May 12th, the obstacle race and probably the anticipation of the triathlon took a toll.   Then once fatigue hits it takes a while to get back on track.

I am influenced by the new book “Good to Go” which had positive things to say about RestWise.   And Good to Go takes a very skeptical view of most recovery products.  Good to Go’s focus is on the billion dollar sports recovery industry that has sprung up to accomplish something that is basically just the passive process of resting.   The "active" recovery things we all love (foam rollers, massage, hot/cold baths) do seem to really work and make us feel better — however most of this benefit isn't a direct effect of the treatment, but the fact that the treatment simply helps you relax more.  

I find RestWise helpful.  But unfortunately the process of inputting this data on muscle soreness, sleep quality, appetite, mood, etc, seems to lead to me dwelling on my fatigue and creating a negative feedback loop.