Tox Report 59. A rest

Breaking muscle down, building muscle up, repeating it

I’ve taken a week off training because I hurt my knee (the video above is me on the last day before this break). This is annoying, but not the most annoying — I’m at the end of a six-week block and this would have been a “deload” week anyway, meaning a week of lighter weights. Plus I’ve been visiting family on the Yorkshire coast, so there’s been lots of swimming in the North Sea and little time to miss the gym.

Still, it’s a shame my enforced rest had to come during the Olympics, cutting into my opportunities to do pretend commentary in my head while trying for a PB. Also annoying: I’m not even sure how I did it. It’s a toss up between going for a slightly too-heavy squat, or my perpetual bad habit of sitting with my knees tucked up so the left one get full sideways torque.

Anyway, it’s now been one week of doing nothing (and sitting properly) and the shock news is: it works. Obviously not everything gets better if you leave it alone, but it’s always worth trying as a first-line response. And it’s a good reminder of how much rest matters, whatever kind of training you do.

Back in my serious running days, I was very reluctant to take time off and would aim to run every day. This turned out to be very draining. One of the mental adjustments of strength training was learning that rest is essential: if you work out every day, you’ll only be doing the “breaking muscle down” part, and missing out on the “building muscle up”. (“B2B” by Charli XCX is good sports science as well as a banger!)

This is a lesson with applications beyond squats. When you’re doing something challenging — something that means working near the limits of your abilities in order to expand them — rest has to be part of the project. This isn’t always something that comes easily to me.

When I originally scoped out the timescale for writing Toxic, it was on the assumption that writing a book would be roughly as demanding as writing the same wordcount-worth of columns. All I had to do, in theory, was write two columns a week, and in a year I’d have a book. Hahahahahaha. Good one.

There are economies of scale in writing, but they take a long time to kick in and are pretty marginal: as a rule of thumb, the “prep” time increases exponentially in relation to the wordcount. The more words you’re writing about something, the more deeply you have to know the subject, and the more decisions you have to make about style and structure.

Essentially, the more you have to write, the more time (proportionately) you have to spend not writing. Long, frustrating days of working on Toxic were spent not knowing what to do, and not being able to do anything else because the next set of decisions relied on the decision I didn’t know how to make.

The only solution here — or at least, the only solution that worked for me — was to stop and do something entirely apart from writing. To actually rest. Sometimes I would be rewarded for this with a genuine, middle-of-the-night moment of inspiration: I was jolted awake at 3am one morning with a clear passage about R Kelly in my head that needed to be typed up immediately.

More often, the recovery was less dramatic. A day away from my desk meant that the next day, when I returned, the writing might well still be a grind. But it would be a grind with purpose. I wouldn’t necessarily have all the answers full-formed, but at least I could look at the questions clearly. I could find something useful in getting it wrong.

This was chastening for me, because I officially don’t believe in inspiration. There is no writer’s block: you’re just not writing. But that’s an attitude probably born of having spent a long time working well inside my writing comfort zone. To get beyond that, I had to give myself time to build up. And it was tough — maybe doubly tough because I was so used to being a fluent, fast writer. I had to let go of that idea of myself in order to become a better writer.

It’s been just over 18 months since I finished work on Toxic, and I feel a bit like I’ve been resting since then. I’ve obviously been turning in journalism, but I haven’t been ready to take on a bigger project. In terms of RPE (rated perceived exertion), I’d say I’ve been at a steady 6. Now I’m starting to feel ready for something closer to an 8. (Another book proposal? Something else entirely? We will see.) I needed the rest to get there, and whatever it ends up being, I’ll need rest to get through it.

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Gimme, gimme more…

• I wrote last Sunday’s TV column — leading with Linford Christie and the shadow of the “lunchbox” gags.

• Ads departments: CHECK THE FLATPLAN BEFORE YOU SELL.

• The feature so unfortunately juxtaposed is worth reading. It is very, very hard to understand why the wife here has chosen to stay with her husband after his conviction for downloading child sexual abuse imagery; it’s even harder to understand how the husband manages to keep up such a tone of self-pity. “People immediately think you’re a danger. It’s isolating and means I’ve lost friendships.” Yes, well, you did do something both unforgiveable and unrecoverable: maybe you just have to live with that?

• I am sorry to do this, but the JD Vance sofa discourse (he didn’t have sex with a sofa, but it’s very funny that everyone is saying he did) led me to look up the OG sofa-shagger narrative: Giles Coren’s essay for Esquire: “I carved a hole in one of the big, foam-filled, hessian-upholstered back cushions of the sofa in the family TV room and fucked that. The hessian provided what I thought must be a fair simulacrum of the coarseness of a woman's pubic hair, and by lining the tubular hole I had bored with Vaseline, I reckoned I had got as close to the condition of a true vagina as I was ever (honestly, ever) going to get.” Can you believe that Esquire took this thing offline?

• Jessica Fox nailing the canoe slalom is my favourite Olympics thing so far. What a run!