Track and Field Blogs - Christian Wagner

For the last five years, I have run for the University of Wisconsin. During my training, I studied Mechanical Engineering. The amount of time that went into that degree was staggering. Most nights I would sit in the Engineering Centers building until way past the time that I should have been in bed resting for my next run. Jerry Schumacher always used to say, “Good runners will always find a way to run fast. Even in conditions that don’t favor running and racing well.” To an extent, I do believe this. I ran 29:00 for 10k and was an All-American on the track even though running took a back seat to studying for the most part. However, I have found that even though you may be running decent for the conditions that you impose upon yourself, you still won’t run to your full potential if you don’t put everything possible into your daily life to facilitate rest and recovery in-between training.

In order to facilitate recovery, the two main factors that come to mind are diet and rest. For the most part, the diet part of this equation has come easy to me even through college. My diet primarily has always consisted of quite a bit of greens and a good amount of lean meat such a chicken. However, rest has never come easy to me. I would say that I probably averaged seven hours of sleep per night through college. With this being an average, it goes without saying that I had too many nights before or after workouts that consisted of only five or so hours of sleep. This is not enough time for the body to fully recover and is not conducive to training and competing at the highest level of collegiate athletics. As well, I was never able to get my body into consistent schedule. And I do believe that the body craves consistency, especially when being trained and stressed as much as collegiate training requires.

Moving out here to Rochester Hills, Michigan has allowed me to cut down on a lot of the stress that was causing my training to be compromised. I have now been getting at least eight hours of sleep per night. As well, I have been making sure to take a few naps per week to get quite a few more hours even. Because of this, I’ve been noticing that my legs have been feeling quite a bit better in training runs than they have since I was in high school. So I suppose that my message to anyone who actually reads this is to not only look at what you are doing in your actual training, but to look at what you are doing to become a better runner in your every day life.