I've made an interesting observation about fitness. At least, it's interesting to me.

I trained for a year for a adventure type race. Part of the training program I used was a once-a-week crossfit type workout specifically designed to make you quit. I've posted it here before and called it "man up Monday". It's a real bitch, especially for an old guy.

The training program was 6 days a week of misery with Monday as the "high" point. At the end of the training, I was in superb condition, again for an old guy. That ended back in July.

Since I'm no longer training for an event, I've backed way off on the exercise. I now do the Monday workout, then just an hour of weights two days a week and a 3 mile run every day. No high intensity stuff except Monday.

Here's the interesting part. My times on the Monday workout continue to go down. Even though I'm only training at high intensity once a week, I'm still improving. A lot. My best time at the peak of my training for the race was 88 minutes. I did it yesterday in 76.

I don't know what it means, but I find is counter-intuitive that I can train so little and still see such good improvement.

Anybody else experienced something similar? I'm starting to wonder if I'm on to something. It may just be that 47 year old men need that much time to recover. Maybe the younger guys can train 3X as often and make progress that much faster.