This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to to pick up a copy. You can buy copies in ebook. The paper should be out in a month or so. Here’s a link to the ebook on WMG Books.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from December of 2025, and is in the third section of  the book. I often do a reset in August for the last part of the year, probably because I was raised in a college professor’s household. The start of school was always the start of the year. So, I figured, this is timely in an odd way.

REST

 

From 2025

About fifteen years ago, I broke a small bone in my left foot. I was fifty pounds heavier than I am now, and I had decided to start running. We lived on hills, and even though I followed some training program or other, my body simply wasn’t up to putting that much weight on my tiny feet. Or so said the doctor at the ER.

He X-rayed the foot, determined that the bone was in the right place, and said a cast or boot would hurt more than it would help. Then he said that I had to stay off that foot for six weeks. I quizzed him, as I do with doctors. What does “stay off” mean? Is it really six weeks or can I start moving sooner? And so on and so forth.

As I was asking him questions, I could see Dean out of the corner of my eye. He was trying very hard not to laugh.

So when we left (with me trying to negotiate the world with my crutch), I asked him why he found this whole thing funny.

“Oh, I don’t,” he said. “I just think it’s hilarious that you have to stay off that foot.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You can’t sit still. You won’t be able to stay off the foot.” Then he shook his head, smiling, knowing what was coming.

What was coming was an angry me, being told that she’s not capable of doing something. Of course, I can stay off my foot. Of course, I can. I write for a living. I research and read. At the time, I lived on the Oregon Coast where there was barely anything to do on a good day.

Of course, I could stay down.

Well…no. I learned pretty damn fast that I get up every fifteen to twenty minutes, often without thinking about it. I could not sit still for an hour at all. I had to move. I guess I’m like a shark. I need to be in motion.

Even now, as I write this, I am fighting the urge to get out of the chair and get myself another cup of tea. I am not done with the first one, but apparently, my internal timer went off.

All of this is good for my back and my wrists and my body most of the time. I don’t freeze into a position. I don’t have carpal tunnel or other problems despite writing like a fiend since I learned to type at eight years old.

But when it comes to doctor’s orders of stay down, well…how the heck do you do that?

It happened again when I hurt my left knee ten years ago. And I struggled with that doctor too. But I had learned from the first experience. I knew if he gave me a detailed recovery plan, I would follow it. He didn’t have anything written up, although he did tell me if I pushed the knee I would need surgery which I seriously did not want.

I had to “stay off” the knee for sixteen weeks. Since I had injured myself in October, I would be down for the rest of the year. (I injured myself crossing the damn street! Not running, not doing anything strenuous. I complained. He said, Sometimes the warranty wears out. And I said, What?!? Do I have to worry about the other knee? I got it at the same time. Is it under the same kind of warranty?)

He verbally gave me a recovery plan and I dutifully wrote it down, then copied it and handed it to Dean. (Poor Dean; he suffers when I get injured.) Dean was assigned with reminding me to follow the plan, which the poor man had to do weekly if not daily.

I do not rest well. Even when I got the stomach flu while doing 10,000 steps per day, I knew I was really sick when I couldn’t haul my sorry ass out of bed. But as soon as I could, I got up and got my steps. No ramping up.

So, this past March, after a really great February of running, the warranty of the other knee gave out. I recognized the feeling and knew what to do (besides angrily limp my way back to our building). I still had the old recovery plan, and after determining that yes, this was the same song, different verse, I did that.

Dean The Saint went with me as I started back up running, going only a few blocks at a time. He went with me to prevent me from going farther just because I felt good. Because I do that.

The time off was really good for the rest of my body. Ironically, at the same time, my super amazing Pilates instructor, the Great Michelle, had health issues of her own, so there was no Pilates to tempt me either. The downside of that was that by the time she returned, my back was out.

The upside was that all the niggly little aches and pains I’d been nurturing were gone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you now. Rest is important. I get that. For other people, anyway.

Or that’s how I was ten years ago. Nowadays? Not so much. I had so many things on my plate that it was a relief to let the 10,000 steps per day go. And dammit! I felt better. I recovered enough to run five days per week (cutting back while school started) and go back to Pilates but I just couldn’t push myself to reinstitute the steps every single day.

And I ran faster and my knee healed and I got a lot stronger.

Dammit.

Then in the fall, a mini-crisis, followed by some big changes in the way we do things. Good changes. Changes that let us rest. Not to mention the worst of the crises of the past three years had eased. They weren’t gone entirely, but they’re manageable.

And…I face-planted. So did Dean. I didn’t even want to run, but I did, half-assed, and I gave myself permission to take days off when I was tired.

What I learned was something quite weird.

I’m in great physical shape. I have no trouble running three miles in the morning and going to an intense Pilates class that night. But in November and early December, I had no reserves at all. If I was tired, I stopped.

I had never hit this place before. In the past, if I was tired, I was physically tired, not whatever this other thing was. It wasn’t burnout, because I had no trouble writing. It was and is a mental and emotional fatigue of a kind that I hadn’t experienced.

I likened it to resting after running a marathon. When I told Dean that, he corrected me. He said we had run an ultramarathon. I’m thinking that might even be an underestimate. It might be one of those run-a-marathon-a-day months that some athletes manage (and then some of them do it in the desert. In the summer. Yeah, we didn’t do this voluntarily. They do). But he did like the analogy, and we remind ourselves of it regularly.

So, in mid-November, I gave myself permission to rest. That meant not putting pressure on myself for anything. I started it after I was done with all the big stuff for school (including a super-fun project that we did, performing a modern version of an ancient play). But the class schedule worked out so that I didn’t have to do anything after Thanksgiving.

I moved other deadlines around so that I didn’t have to do them. And for the first time in maybe a decade, I did not set up a monthly exercise calendar. I didn’t want to underestimate my goals. I wanted to avoid goals altogether.

However, I need to exercise, not for my weight but for my mental health and my back which was badly injured in three separate car accidents (all in which I was rear-ended while stopped). If I don’t exercise, I get seriously depressed. If I don’t keep up with Pilates, my back freezes up.

So, necessities, but I had to figure out how to do them without further exhausting myself. It was the goals (and the races, sadly) that caused the stress, not the exercise itself—but that took a while to figure out.

I’ll be doing races in the front half of 2026, but for the first 2 months, only races in the afternoon. I don’t want the pressure of getting up early. It took a while to figure that out too.

I kept writing, but without deadlines. Writing is restful for me when I can get deep into the story—which was hard these past few years, but isn’t now. I’m back to the space where not writing feels bad. Which is…yay!

The deadlines I had were for business items at WMG, and I made sure they weren’t massive. I am gearing up for the new year, and I’m still not 100% recovered. I don’t want to weirdly relapse.

Hence this piece, because it’s as much for me as it is for you all.

I know that I don’t rest well, but I do take health advice just fine. So I spent the morning doing a web search (not an AI search, damn the revised search engines) looking up what I thought I already knew.

Turns out, I never really read (or recalled) anything about rest and recovery when it came to exercise. (Be patient with me: we’ll get to the rest of life by the end of this.)

I have looked up how to rest after a marathon because Dean has done them since we’ve been together. So I would look that up for him. Of course the experts disagree on how to do it, but they do agree that rest and recovery are important.

The main thing they agree on is that for two weeks afterwards, no exercise. Then either a rebuild (written by advisers who are intense, like I am) or more rest (one day per mile, which means a month of rest, not two weeks). The rebuild should be gradual no matter what.

And it’s the gradual that I have ignored in my life, especially when it comes to business and writing.

But, let’s back up a bit, and talk about incorporating rest into everyday life, which is where I truly fall down. And that’s something I never looked up until today.

The experts divide rest into three categories:

1. 1. 1. Full Rest— taking time away from exercise. A day, maybe a week or more, depending on what’s going on. This is where the experts tell you to prioritize sleep, which sounds stupid because we should all prioritize sleep, but it’s hard to sleep well when things are going on.

Sleeping well means (for adults) getting more than seven hours per night. It also means achieving deep restful sleep. If you can’t achieve that, then you need to learn proper sleep habits—which is hard in this world of screens. (The Mayo Clinic has a good list of proper sleep habits on their website.)

Not sleeping well or enough causes all kinds of problems, from losing mental sharpness during the day to an increased risk of injury due to an inability to handle physical tasks well. And then there’s this, from Ohio State University’s medical website in an article titled “Sleep Versus Exercise: Which Takes Priority?”:

Other symptoms include delayed reaction time, decreased memory and concentration, and decreased response of the body’s sympathetic nervous system, which is important for peak performance. All have been associated with poor sleep patterns and affect how athletes train. Chronic sleep deprivation has even been linked to increased rates of heart disease, infections, inflammation and obesity.

We know that full rest is necessary when we’re sick, but most of the experts recommend a full rest day every seven to ten days if you exercise a lot or train. That doesn’t mean you sit on your butt the entire time. Take the dog for a slow walk or meander to a friend’s house. Just don’t do anything strenuous and don’t increase your heart rate too much.

1. 1. 2. Active Recovery—which I first wrote down as active rest. That’s a contradiction in terms and I’m glad I looked it up. Because we’re moving into the recovery phase here. Rest is either to prevent fatigue or to combat extreme exhaustion.

Active recovery is something else entirely. Active recovery takes place in the hours after exercise, which is why after a race sometimes you see the athletes walking or stretching.

UCHealth, which is a network of clinics and hospitals in Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska, defines active recovery in an article on their website titled “Rest and recovery are critical for athletes of all ages from students to pros to older adults.” The article says:

During active recovery, athletes should engage in light physical activity that raises the heart rate above a resting rate. But they should avoid the same repetitive movements they performed during training or an event.

In other words, do something different. Don’t overdo. Just have fun.

Active recovery was something I had heard about and incorporated, but I was still stressing by trying to get 10,000 steps (and more during the pandemic). Now, I’m going to have to rethink that. Because the time I took this fall has made me feel a lot better. (Dammit! I hate it when the experts are right.)

1. 1. 3. Long-term Recovery— here’s the one I had never heard of. And this is how UCHealth defines it in the same article:

Long-term recovery involves rest and recovery periods that are built into a seasonal training schedule. It also may include days or weeks of rest and recovery incorporated into an annual athletic program.

Well, that sounds incredibly sensible and somewhat impossible. But I’m a scheduler (as you can tell from above), and the article added something which helped me.

Athletes who follow a seasonal training program may need to adopt a process called periodization, which incorporates pre-scheduled recovery days and even recovery weeks throughout the year. Periodization requires changes in training programs that include modifying workout types, adding cross-training, and changing exercise intensity, time, and distance.

Well, that’s a big honkin’ well duh to me. I just barreled on ahead for years on the exercise and writing and business things, without thinking about planning rest.

And what’s been stopping me from planning my 2026 was the idea of getting back on that treadmill. (Not literally; I’m the person in the YouTube videos who falls off.)

I think this December is the first time I ever planned to just rest if I needed it. I was not commanding myself to do nothing; I was going by feel rather than mentally powering my way through things.

This is pretty straightforward on exercise. I’m going to plan my year now in walking and in running and with Pilates. (My Pilates partner and I are discussing ramping up over the summer, which makes sense when the temps are 110 degrees and we have to stay inside. That might mean reducing the running…hmmmm.)

But I also want to plan the year with writing and with business. Dean and I always do that at the end of December, and I think this year will be no different.

Because of the nightmare few years, we had to go balls to the wall. Now, we can set our own schedule and take our time.

I’m thinking that I do my writing with maybe one day off for other things. The publishing needs a schedule. You can’t run a publishing business without one. But that doesn’t mean we have to do something every single week.

It means there can be breaks between projects.

It depends on what’s happening in-house versus what’s happening on the outside. For example, I’ve decided to use the Free Fiction Mondays on my website to repair all the damage that the bad administration at WMG inflicted on my work.

That means I’ll have to touch each of the stories I put up, all 52 of them. But I don’t have to do so weekly. Right now, I’m preparing all of January. I posted December’s stories around the first.

It’s a matter of being organized.

From the front of the website, it looks like I’m posting every Monday and back when I did this on my own ten years ago, that’s what I did. But not now.

My goal is to work ahead on as much of the publishing stuff as possible, but without panic and without working my tail off to get something done on a last-minute deadline.

The UCHealth article had this observation as well, one that really struck home to me after the past three years.

Training stresses the body in various ways, but it’s far from the only stress athletes face. Work, school, relationships and the busy pace of modern life can all exacerbate stress, which has a cascade of effects on the body. Stay in a stress state long enough, and there are negative impacts on health.

“If you’re exercising and operating in this stressful, high-cortisol state all of the time, you aren’t getting back to the rest and digest state, and your body isn’t able to heal,” said Jessica Yeaton, a physical therapist at UCHealth SportsMed Clinic in Steamboat Springs. “That has implications on injury, illness, strength production – everything.”

So it’s no wonder that in the middle of one of the most stressful periods of my life, as I was getting no more than six hours of sleep, the warranty ran out on my right knee. (Sigh.) It was inevitable that something would hit me. It just found the weakest physical spot at that time.

What have I learned while researching and writing this post? That I need to change habits. I knew that, but I didn’t know how. Now, as a scheduler, I can figure this out. This gives me the same kind of map that the doctor gave me when the warranty ran out on my left knee. I can design the year with an eye to rest and recovery, hitting my exercise, writing, and publishing goals, and not putting myself back into this weird fatigue state that shows me I still (after a month of going slow) have no real reserves.

I’m getting there though.

And rest will definitely be in my plans for 2026. Now if I can just figure out how to write that into my paper calendars…

 

“Rest” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

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