What to Do with Time You Didn’t Expect

The schedule gave you something this week that it doesn’t give you very often: time.

Not a lot of time. Not unlimited time. But more than a normal week — a gap in the competition calendar that opens up space that doesn’t usually exist. And what you do with that space will either help or hurt where this team is in three weeks.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

He makes me lie down. The shepherd doesn’t ask the sheep if they want to rest. He makes them. Because the sheep, left to their own instincts in a demanding environment, will graze past the point of sustainability and ignore the quiet waters in favor of the next patch of grass. The rest has to be deliberate, sometimes enforced, because the competitive environment does not naturally produce it.

A bye week is the shepherd making you lie down. The schedule, for once, is not demanding your full competitive output. And the athlete who treats the bye week as a week to train harder, to make up for every deficit, to push through every nagging physical thing rather than addressing it, is the athlete who arrives at the next competition more depleted than the one who used the space well.

Using the space well does not mean doing nothing. It means doing the right things. The body that needs recovery gets recovery. The preparation that requires fresh eyes gets addressed. The relationships in the team that have been running on fumes get some actual investment. The rest that makes the next five weeks sustainable happens this week, or it doesn’t happen.

Lie down in the green pasture. It is not weakness. The shepherd provides it because the journey requires it.

Two distinct questions. The physical question and the team question often produce different but equally useful answers.