The inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championships, which took place over the weekend, debuted a brand-new format as well. Track and field championships are usually around eight days, but this new competition was compressed into only three. That meant less time between events, less time between rounds, and most impactfully, less time to recover.

For the athletes competing in Budapest, the shortened schedule wasn’t just about who could perform the best, but about who could recover and do it again.

One athlete thrived in the shortened format. Melissa Jefferson-Wooden won the 100-meter final on Saturday with a world-leading time of 10.62 and then came back less than 25 hours later to clinch another world-leading win with a time of 21.47 in the 200-meter final.

As impressive as the back-to-back wins are, the compressed schedule made it even more of a feat. Jefferson-Wooden had less than 24 hours to celebrate her 100-meter win and recover for the 200-meter final the next day. When discussing her race strategy for the 200-meter final, Jefferson-Wooden told World Athletics that she was just hoping for a personal best in the final. But after saving her energy in the semifinals and coming in second to Gabrielle Thomas, she was able to give everything in the final race of the weekend.

“I told myself that I need to be smart in the semifinal and save some energy,” Jefferson-Wooden said.

“I told myself that I need to be smart in the semifinal and save some energy. ”

Melissa Jefferson-Wooden

Recovery isn’t just about conserving energy to push when you need to. It is also about listening to your body and can be different for everyone. For some of the women’s track and field athletes, that meant making the difficult decision not to compete in Budapest.

Kenyan middle-distance runner and 1,500-meter world record holder Faith Kipyegon and American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone both announced earlier this season that due to injuries, they would not compete in this year’s world championships. While their weekends looked different from Jefferson-Wooden’s as they focused on recovering from their injuries, they all had to ask the same question: What is the best decision for my body?

For Jefferson-Wooden, that meant conserving her energy in the semifinals, and for Kipyegon and McLaughlin-Levrone, it meant stepping away from the weekend to continue recovering. Their decisions show us that recovery isn’t always preparing ourselves for our next competition. It can also mean taking time away from competition to allow our bodies to rest.

Rest can be hard for athletes. We work hard, practice for long hours, working to perform our best. Sometimes we want to push through an injury to compete, but knowing when to push and when to step away are both crucial to recovery.

As the World Athletics Ultimate Championships showed, sometimes we need to conserve energy, and other times we need to rest. By listening to our bodies, we can know when to push through and when it’s time to focus on recovering so we can always perform at our best.