As an athlete, time is one of your most important resources. You can do two things with your time. You can work or you can rest. Your biology will only experience a beneficial response to a properly dosed amount of work, followed by adequate rest. So going one more or working harder is not always the answer.
There is a maximum dose that then requires a certain amount of rest. And you have 24 hours in a day, you have 365 days a year, and you've got to apply work and rest appropriately to those units of time that you have. Anyone who has overdone it on work, whether it be in an academic context or a military context or a training context, knows that you can overdo it on work to the point where your performance starts to degrade rather than progress.
So you have to rest to get the most work done in the units of time that really matter. Yes, you can get more work done in a day if you get up before the sun, work for 18 hours and only sleep six. You can get more work done for maybe a day or maybe a week or maybe a few months, maybe even a few years.
But over a multiple year career, you have to rest to get the most amount of work done.
