While this should be a welcome time of year for everyone, it can be confusing to excessive obsessive, compulsive athletes. The concept is simple for most of the year you push your body and your family relationships to the max, now is the time to let both of them recover!
Training for specific sports makes you more efficient in those sports, it also stresses the muscles, tendons and ligaments that support those movements. The off season is the time to focus on building supports for those groups so you can become stronger + faster = more efficient next year.
What I hear a lot from clients I coach and other athletes is, now that my triathlon season is over I am going to work on my limiter running and do several marathons over the winter. Fortunately none of my current clients are saying this. The problem with this line if thinking is that training for marathons takes a lot of specific training, which limits the amount of time to train as I said above and to spend time with the family. Not to mention that marathon running has little benefit to triathlon running.
What I recommend to my clients is for the first few weeks just do unstructured exercise, whatever you feel like doing go do it. Have fun, enjoy the fitness you built! Then gravitate to off axis work to build the muscle groups I mention above. Then find ways to have fun running and riding off road, this helps to build strength and agility for both. If you are looking to increase speed in any of your disciplines then I recommend doing form work, it will make you more efficient and does not require all the miles and time commitments that running marathons do, thus pounding on the body.
The main thing is to have fun, enjoy your healthy lifestyle and prepare your body and mind for next season of training.
I suppose I should put in here that if marathons are your thing and you want to do them for fun, go for it. Just be honest with yourself, it is not recovery!
Train smart, enjoy the holidays and spend some time with your family!
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