"Good to Go" by Christie Aschwanden

I love to run. It owes me nothing, and I am eternally grateful that it keeps giving me more than I can say, or will try to say in a book review. To keep enjoying and giving what I can to what might be our oldest sport, I try to make good on the best training and recovery practices I can find. 

Some strategies and gear work for me. Some don’t. I learn from both, and try to learn more. And, as in many areas of life, I learn the most from the iconoclasts, the unblinking gazes that size up the status quo, put value where it belongs, and bring the worthless down to size. The best of these guides give us the extra push to look closer as well.

Christie Aschwanden’s Good to Go piqued my interest with its reputation for debasing the recovery practices so many of us know and love. As a former professional skier, lifelong athlete, podcaster, and accomplished writer, Aschwanden has no shortage of reasons to catch and hold my attention. And, in this particular instance, I felt a personal draw as a big fan and regular practitioner of recovery myself. 

I stretch and roll out routinely, usually twice a week, and much more if I can fit it in. For me, it feels great, and acts as a gift I try to give to myself as often as possible. Plenty of people do likewise. But, naturally, I had to see what I might not know about what I try to know well. 

In terms of a reading experience, Go is a blast. Like a cheerful samurai, Aschwanden embodies a charm and enthusiasm all her own as she chops the legs out from under almost every recovery product and practice on the market.

After a thorough survey of the field and questions as hard-hitting as they are simple, Aschwanden reports that, for the most part, you can’t buy anything to improve on what millions of years of evolution have given us for free. 

To approach sport otherwise, with a penchant for shortcuts and chemical hacks, is to risk some truly harrowing outcomes. 

We get not a few true horror stories, wherein people unknowingly juice themselves and get disqualified because of it. Or, even worse, some unfortunate consumers ingest poisons, with tragic results. 

The state of a market that, presumably, holds good health as priority one, and still presents these dangers begs essential questions of who should be keeping people safe. And, without any powers of effective oversight, one wonders what the FDA is good for if it’s forbidden from making companies prove that their products can do what they claim to do. 

Or, more importantly, if they are safe. 

It is even more than troubling to learn that there is no oversight accounting for what is on the market at any one time, either.

While losing none of the gravity of what’s at stake, Aschwanden still manages to share a ride as fun to read as it is edifying. By doing so, she sidesteps what a lesser writer could have compiled as a laundry list of warnings. 

Instead, Go is a pleasure, and not a few times laugh-out-loud funny. Aschwanden’s critical eye slices through reams of bad copy and breathless promises one finds in the athletic industry, from the vague to coercive to the blatantly false.

It is useful to learn that there is only so much oxygen blood can carry, and that to say compression or other means increases this amount is to boast the physically impossible. Aschwanden puts the lack of substance behind terms like “toxins” in their place, as well as any argument that our lungs and kidneys can be bested by any so-called “cleanse.”

Many of the interactions she shares with different brands are a riot to read. This is especially true when one is familiar/exhausted by the attempts to gloss over a lack of content in these products and services, much less value. 

For example, Aschwanden does not hold back from her conversations with a rep from a brand of at-home testing kits: 

“Because, honestly, I didn’t feel like I’d learned anything meaningful. “Okay, good points,” she [brand spokesperson] said.

A fantastic understatement. What other point can there possibly be for a product that the customer bought to learn something meaningful? 

We get a similar answer when Aschwanden asks why a certain blood test is worth buying. 

“The question you’re asking is a hard one to answer.” 

I’m rolling. 

Hilarity continues to ensue when the flushing of lactic acid and, no joke, pajamas go on trial. 

When companies can’t explain why their goods are any good, what athlete can’t think of better places to put their money? Maybe products that are already working well for them? Or more races perhaps?

Still, Aschwanden allows room for nuance and the importance of an athlete’s state of mind taking precedence. The science is clear that ice baths and stretching don’t do much. 

However, if it makes us feel better, then they’re doing everything we need them to do.

We learn about the ongoing enigma of the placebo effect, which at times can be as effective as it is resistant to good explanations. Opioid receptors might be one culprit, since blocking them in one study took away benefits that the placebo offered otherwise, somehow.

Expectations likely have some influence in the equation, especially when a branded container around this or that powder or pill can wear all kinds of promises, but bear nothing larger or smaller than the power of the user’s faith. 

All of this warrants plenty of interest and further study.

After all is said and done, though, there is still one recovery practice that works. It is the undeniably, provably effective way our bodies get better at performing. We all know it, and it might be the easiest to neglect.

We need to sleep more.

The work-horse attitudes and uncompromising vision that find athletes so often can make it easy to think of sleep as indulgence. Even worse, we lump rest with laziness, and strive to be anything but. 

Sleep debt gets shoehorned into an issue we name minor, then decide, with a culture that glorifies ceaseless work over, well, everything, that it’s something we just have to deal with in stride. 

The nature of sport itself seems opposed to stillness, especially when you love something that lets you be reckless, even feral for a little while, alone or among fellow animals in practice. 

But the studies, time and again, confirm what we already feel when our base is off-base. We’re out of sorts when sleep-deprived, unfulfilled by a frenetic pace when its denied due nourishment. 

And when we let ourselves sleep well, we’re amazed at how simple it is to feel new.

Of course, the market is here to sell us more devices and services in this realm as well. 

And, of course, Aschwanden calls out the nonsense by name. She shows us how products promising insights into the quality of sleep, without devices that can quantify our inner electrical workings, aren’t doing much beyond guess work. 

In the end, I came away from Go with the comfort that my must-haves are what I already have, and to give myself the gift of whatever makes me feel that at my best. 

So, I roll out. I stretch. I try to eat well. I experience a comfortable recharge from seven hours of sleep, and feel like a new man entirely when I get even more. Underneath it all, my body is reassembling itself the way it always has, and will continue to if I give it the relaxation and nourishment it needs to do so. 

Go won’t be the last time I look to Aschwanden for guidance in this area, or any other. Her reasoning is sound, her research as thorough as it is engaging. 

I can’t disagree with looking to nature as the best healer of all, especially, as Aschwanden puts it, recovery practices “won’t actually resolve anything, but they give you something to do while you wait for nature to take its course.”