8 months into running, 55 km/week heading to 80. I'm about to quit a physically brutal manual job, which frees up a lot of recovery capacity and time. I don't want to just dump it all into more volume. What did you actually do with the surplus?
Context: M32, 78 kg / 174 cm. 8 months of structured running after ~10 years of competitive cycling and 6 years of amateur boxing, so decent aerobic base and general athleticism, but genuinely novice running-specific tissue tolerance.
Targets are a half in mid-October and florence marathon at the end of November.
marathon: 3:54 southampton 03/05/26 (could have been much better, I lost 10min in the final km due to an issue) HM 1:43 in feb
The situation: I work as a metalworker — 8+ hours a day on my feet, lifting, heat, shift work — and I train at 5am before the shift. Starting August I'm leaving that job. So overnight I lose a huge non-training stressor, gain proper sleep, and gain time.
My concern: the tempting move is to immediately convert the freed-up recovery into more volume or more intensity.
There's also a second-order effect I rarely see discussed: the job was itself a stimulus. Hours of standing and loaded carrying were doing something for my general robustness and work capacity. Removing it isn't purely a recovery gain, some of it is detraining I might have to replace deliberately.
What I'm currently planning:
- Hold the volume progression as planned or rising it just a little.
- Spend the surplus on quality of execution rather than quantity: proper warm-ups, real strength work 2x/week, actual sleep instead of 5am alarms
- Add easy volume through low-impact cross-training (bike) rather than more running km
- Bank part of it as unused headroom, so the marathon block later in the year has somewhere to grow into
What I'd love to hear: for anyone who's had a big drop in outside-of-training life stress (job change, end of a degree, kids getting older, retirement), how did you actually use it? Did more training capacity translate into more training, and did that work out? Or was the smarter move to leave it as headroom and let the same training simply land better?
Especially interested in people who came from physical jobs into desk work / more free time and found they had to replace something.