Your recovery doesn’t need a montage. It needs Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

A montage is a storytelling device that compresses months of repetitive, unglamorous work into a minute of highlights. Real recovery is the uncompressed version, which is mostly ordinary weekdays where nothing noticeable happens at all. Those days are not the boring stretch between the real progress. They are the progress, which is precisely why the compressed version has to leave them out.

Plan the next three days rather than the next three months. One session, one exercise, one early night each. Judge the week on whether those happened, not on whether you felt any different by the end of it.