Recovery is not something you buy. I don't cold plunge, I don't sauna, I don't do recovery boots. I do nothing but eat five to seven thousand calories and sleep eight to ten hours.

Recovery has become a product category. Plunges, saunas, boots, guns, straps that grade your sleep. I do none of it, and I have been injury free for five years while holding 100 to 120 mile weeks. That is not genetics. That is two unpaid habits done relentlessly.

Eat enough. Sleep enough. For me that is 4,500 to 7,000 calories a day depending on the block, and 8 to 10 hours of sleep. Those two cover the physiology every gadget is gesturing at. Sleep is when the repair happens, and calories are the raw material it happens with. Everything you can buy is a rounding error next to them.

The one thing I do pay for is information. A blood panel a few times a year, watching ferritin, B12, and D3, because those numbers fall quietly in distance runners and take months of fatigue with them when they go. A tube of blood tells you more than a month of readiness scores.

And the day after an ultra I run an easy ten miles. Not because suffering is a virtue, but because the body finishes the job better moving than parked. If your recovery plan requires a credit card, it is not a recovery plan. It is shopping.