my thoughts on: the Off-season

The off-season.  A real misnomer.  time off from racing perhaps, but I have always looked at the off season as a time to improve and enhance my abilities.  The off season represents a huge amount of time.  Time is a triathletes most valuable resource.  More valuable than anything except genetics.  I have heard stories of people who take months of rest during the off season.  I have also heard of people who do not take any rest and continue to train as normal.  There seems to be a balance between the two that needs to be reached.  People who train consecutively without ever fully recovering (fully recovering takes several weeks typically) end up sick or hurt or have general health problems.  However people who take decent rest typically seem to be fine.  As a matter of fact it seems like rest in the long run is preferable.  My reasoning for this is that I have trained HARD like 20-25 hours a week for two years but I can still get smoked by guys in there late 20's or thirties who train a few times a week.  It seems like this accumulation of time for training with recovery is really what matters, not how much training can be packed into a brief period.  Perhaps training when fully recovered is really the best way to train, after all don't we race when we're fully recovered? and shouldn't training reflect racing?  It's a complicated subject.  In the words of doctor Suess "Life is a great balancing act".