From rope climbs to legs up the wall

I’m sure you’ve been there.

Round two of five. Your legs have turned to jelly and you’re staring down the remaining three rounds thinking: How am I going to get through this?

Five rounds. Two-minute intervals, with three minutes’ rest between each. Two rope climbs, followed by max calories on the Echo Bike. If you’ve never experienced an Echo Bike, you’re lucky. If you have, you’ll know exactly the particular kind of misery I’m talking about. By the time I got onto the bike, I had 1:12 left.

One minute and twelve seconds.

When you’re pushing as hard as you possibly can, that is a very, very long time.

There are workouts you forget. And then there are workouts that leave a mark. This was one of them.

By the fifth round, I was hanging on. When it finally finished, I practically fell off the bike. My legs were shaking. Everything felt completely spent.

I made it to the floor and curled into child’s pose. Not elegantly. Not as part of some beautifully constructed yoga sequence. An instinctive reaction. I just needed to disappear for a minute.

I needed to block out the noise, the people, the room. Fingertips by my heels, hands on the floor, forehead down. Letting the ground take some the weight. A few slow breaths into the back of my body. Nothing complicated. Just breathing and trying to convince my nervous system that the hard bit was over. The recovery had started.

On the drive home, I kept coming back to my breath. Long, steady inhalations. Longer exhales. Trying to let go of some of what the workout had left behind. Because sometimes the physical effort and the mental effort are difficult to separate.

When I got home, there was still a working day waiting for me. Laptop. Emails. Meetings. But before I could do any of that, I went into my yoga room.

Five minutes. Legs up the wall. My favourite recovery pose. I put a bolster underneath my hips, stretched my legs up the wall and let myself properly stop. And rather than feeling like I was lying on the floor, I tried to feel as though I was being held by it.

For five minutes, I didn’t have to perform, push, or achieve. I just had to be there. I worked with my breath again, gently making the exhale longer than the inhale. Five minutes. That was all.

When the timer went, I slowly brought myself round and headed downstairs. I wasn’t miraculously recovered. But I was different.

Energised. Re-vitalised. Ready for the day.

Sometimes training is about pushing yourself to find out what you’re capable of. And sometimes the lesson comes afterwards. Knowing when to stop. Knowing how to recover.

And knowing that recovery isn’t weakness. It’s part of the work.