Yeah for sure. Rest is underrated. I’d be afraid of 1 week off, but 2 days complete rest helped a ton, I imagine 3 days could work even better. Need to keep testing it by removing one day haha. For that mile I did on two days rest, legs felt so fresh, never felt any acid build up. All of the previous miles i’ve felt some acid build up, same in training etc. So that was surprising. IMHO, I just felt stronger. I think my body was giving me more stride length per stride, at less effort, and less lactic acid forming in the blood etc. So the extra rest resulted in more strength/bounce, and I was able to utilize that per stride - so I didn’t have to dig deeper effort wise to achieve the same pace. It also makes you more optimistic too because, it puts those slower times in training into context → being fresh/healthy/rested in a race environment = significantly faster.
One thing about the cold … I’ve found it to be almost performance enhancing at times. I’ve had colds where, I literally feel like i’m running better, or stronger. Not all the time but, it’s something i’ve experienced before. It’s weird… Not sure if you’ve experienced that or get what i’m talking about, but I remember having great runs & dunk sessions when sick, when expecting to feel like crap. One of the biggest “differences” I usually feel when sick (if I train), is perhaps some “enhanced focus”… Time can “slow down” when i’m sick, or even when I have a serious lack of sleep. I remember going into some morning dunk sessions on ~2 hours sleep, pissed that I couldn’t sleep, being in a kind of haze, and then jumping “out the gym”. If it’s a constant thing then it’s not going to help any, but these weird fluctuations in rhythm can sometimes work out in our favor. It’s just odd, not sure if anyone can related.
Being sick + lifting can be pretty awesome.
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As for advice, not a ton of it for 400m or less, i’ve never specialized in that. I think some of the same rules apply though: building up your overall work capacity at submax paces (ie handling more 400-500’s with less rest) - volume sessions, occasional max effort sessions (full rest, near max 400’s), and partial efforts (200-300’s at 400m pace), will probably help alot. Truly max effort sprints are much more risky IMHO, so intervals at < 400m but at 400m pace are safer, and building up work capacity to handle submax 400’s - but more of them, are probably a good approach. When you feel really good or you schedule some people to race, that’s when you drop the hammer. So a volume session could be: 4-6 x 400m @ > 400m pace with 2-3 minutes recovery, intervals could be 4-8 x 200-300m <= 400m pace with full recovery (3-5 minutes), max effort could be a ridiculously comprehensive warmup + strides + 10 minutes recovery + ~2 x 400m with ~5-10 minutes recovery between each.
TLDR: more reps + shorter recovery for work capacity, less reps + more recovery, more reps + higher intensity shorter intervals + more recovery, occasional max effort.
One thing though… You should probably take note of your strides (say 100m) and see how they impact your sessions. For example, if you can hit EASY 100m strides at < 15s, then you’ve probably got some serious power that session and might want to consider leaning towards a higher intensity session. If your strides are “sucking”, easy to go with a work capacity/volume day. So a bit of an autoregulatory can be really effective. I use my combined stride pace & effort to gauge how i’m doing. Sometimes I adjust my workout based on that. If it looks like I have some ridiculous bounce that day, I shift into the higher intensity stuff first and try to leverage my higher performance for that day. So sometimes I write out what i’m going to do before hand, but i’m just feeling so much better or worse that I adjust it on the fly.
My mind is all over the place right now though, sorry for the scrambled reply.
peace!!