How to Recover: Learning from The Pros

A Story

On a chilly, very early September morning in 2024, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, 31-year-old Tara Dower was sitting in her tent. It was 3 am. Her best friend was spoon-feeding her breakfast, to conserve Tara’s energy. Today, Tara would run about fifty miles of the Appalachian Trail. She’d done the exact same thing the day before, and the day before that. Tara was determined to run the entire trail, which stretches almost 2,200 miles from Maine to Georgia, in record time, raising funds and awareness for Girls on the Run. And she did. On September 21, 2024, she completed the trail after nearly 41 days, averaging 53 miles a day, breaking all previous records. 

Tara’s pattern of exertion and rest was like this: She slept about five hours a night, typically beginning her day at 3 or 3:30 AM with a quick breakfast and then hitting the trail. She would occasionally take one to three minute breaks or actual naps on the trail – “dirt naps” as she called them. She would break for food sporadically, and run until around 8:30 or 9:30 PM, to go to sleep around 10. A small group of her best friend, mother, and a couple others acted as her support team. They set up and took down camp, carefully attended to Tara’s calorie and nutrition needs, paced her on the trail, and managed all logistics. Tara thought of herself as a race car, and her team as her pit crew. 

And then, it was done. Tara summited Springer Mountain in Georgia, completing the trail at 11:53 PM. She was triumphant. She went home to Virginia to rest. On her youtube channel a couple weeks later, Tara shared how she was doing. She described how she still felt “exhausted… physically, but most importantly my mind.” She noted her brain fog. She talked about her low mood. “Going from doing something so simple… to coming back to society…” She said, “there’s a level of post-trail depression, post-trail blues. Being home is difficult.”

In an interview, she told a reporter, “Because it takes so long and is more abstract, recovery has felt like another endurance effort.”

The Research

After physical exertion, rest isn’t just something to enjoy, it is critical for the body. It’s the pause after the physical activity that makes an athlete stronger, not the physical activity itself. During the pause, the body restores physiological balance or homeostasis, restores tissues, and rebuilds energy stores. These things can’t happen during exercise itself. And without sufficient recovery, athletes risk injury or overtraining (becoming exhausted). Similarly, we know that psychological recovery beginning soon after highly stressful or traumatic experiences, whether through mental health treatment and/or cognitive/behavioral strategies and rest, is critical to prevent burnout, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and support general wellbeing and resilience.

As it turns out, the processes of physically recovering from exertion and mentally/emotionally recovering from stress are quite similar. In both, stress leads to temporary depletion, then recovery happens, and finally the body/mind adapts. The depletion is uncomfortable. While physical training creates micro-damage and fatigue in muscles, stressful emotional/mental experiences can create cognitive fatigue, emotional dysregulation and neurochemical imbalance. Tara was going through all of it.

So What Can We Do?

Given the remarkable similarities between physical and mental/emotional recovery, here are some evidence-backed ways I think we can apply principles from athletic training to our mental health:

1) Normalize and name challenge. There’s a principle in athletic training that gains come from experiencing challenge, not eliminating challenge. This can translate to mental/emotional challenges by recognizing an endeavor or obstacle, not eliminating or over-analyzing it. Rather than asking yourself “Why am I so tired?” or “Why did this happen to me?” and potentially blaming yourself or becoming caught in rumination, you could ask yourself “What load have I been carrying?”

2) Regulate your nervous system. Getting in touch with an emotional and felt sense that we are safe is key for both physical and emotional recovery. Practices that often aid our feeling of safety include slow breathing, physical warmth, gentle movement, and predictable routines. 

3) Try to get quality sleep. Sleep is the most powerful tool for BOTH physical and mental/emotional recovery. Make any adjustments you can to your sleep hygiene. If you're having trouble sleeping, first see your doctor to rule out anything physical, and perhaps consider engaging in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia.

4) Process and repair. Just as muscles repair and rebuild during rest, so do our minds and mental perspective. To recover from taxing experiences our minds process memories and information, make meaning, and integrate experiences into our sense of self, beliefs, values, and/or view of the world. We all have different ways we do this, but some evidence-backed ways are journaling, talking with loved ones, talk therapy, trauma therapies like EMDR or CPT, and even taking a walk, particularly in nature.

5) Pace yourself. A common way athletes train is by carefully timing periods of challenge, whether it’s pacing themselves or alternating hard days with easier days. This is also a key way to recover from a mental or emotional experience. ​ After particularly taxing days, consider building in lower effort days, whether they have less stimulation, fewer activities and therefore transitions in the day, more time to adjust in the morning and/or wind down at night, and/or fewer decisions that need to be made.

6) Gently do things that feel good, rather than shutting down. On the whole, active recovery is more effective than passive recovery. This is to say, gentle movement usually helps physical recovery more than staying sedentary. To aid psychological recovery, it’s helpful to do things like connect with supportive people and engage in gentle reflection – rather than isolating and avoiding.

7) Return with care. Return to activities mindfully and perhaps gradually. In athletic training, particularly after an injury, it’s important to return to activities slowly to prevent re-injury. When it comes to mental or emotional recovery from stress or trauma, slowly but actively re-engaging in routines and meaningful daily activities helps.

Where Do We Go from Here? And How’s Tara?

Recovery is essential, but not as glamorous or news-worthy as a major accomplishment. And with its uncertain timeline and process, recovery can take just as much – if not more – time, patience, and psychological flexibility than a major accomplishment or stressful experience. I think mainstream American culture has a ways to go to fully recognize and value recovery. If someone needs to lay low for awhile, we can be quick to conclude they are weak, depressed, or giving up. That doesn’t seem fair or accurate.

Just when I thought I’d finished my research on Tara, I found a podcast interview she did six weeks after completing the trail, in which she talked more about her recovery. At the time of the interview, she’d moved from her home in Virginia Beach to a rural area 30 minutes outside Boulder, Colorado for an extended housesitting/cat-sitting gig for friends of hers. She reported feeling solace in nature, the quiet, and the wildlife. She said she was gradually getting back to working out, and loving that. She described how being interviewed by reporters and podcasters about the trail run had actually helped her process the memories, emotions, and experiences of it, and she speculated all this reflection time accelerated her mental and emotional recovery.

Thanks to her amazing mindset, support, strategies (including many of the ones I outlined above) and maybe a bit of luck, Tara’s recovery was sounding promising. I felt hope that she was regaining strength, clarity, perspective, and a brighter mood. Well done, Tara.

Whether you’re coming off of one of the most demanding experiences of your life, or just tired at the end of the week, I hope you’ll give rest and recovery their chance. 

P.S. Want to learn about more amazing female athletes and their recoveries? Watch the Netflix documentary “Simone Biles Rising,” and follow Taryn Smith’s Instagram account documenting her ongoing solo row across the Atlantic Ocean.

Let’s Look at You

What activities or habits are you finding restful and restorative lately?

Wanting to rest but not sure how exactly? Here are a few practices to try:

• Take a Tech Sabbath, a friendly spin-off from a religious Sabbath or Shabbatt. Turn off any or all screens and devices for twenty four hours, to focus on activities that feel more restorative to you.

• Take a nap. Take it further, and read Tricia Hersey’s two books on rest as resistance, and follow her work in The Nap Ministry.

• Go to a restorative yoga class. Classes feel a little like community nap time.

This blog is for educational purposes only, and not a substitute for mental health treatment.