Effective recovery, the process of restoring performance capability in response to training, is essential for improving sport performance. Though recovery is theoretically complex, dynamic, and athlete-determined, it has often been operationalized in a limited scope centering on perspectives that are external to the athletes. The purpose of this study was to explore what recovery means to elite endurance-sport athletes by characterizing the experiences, processes, and purposes of recovery. Thirteen Canadian elite athletes (6 women, 7 men; aged 25-31 years; from 9 sports), each a participant in multiple Olympics/World Championships, completed two semistructured interviews discussing their perspectives on recovery, between which they kept a week-long activity journal of their recovery-related actions and thoughts. Through inductive reflexive thematic analysis, we created two overarching themes supported by six themes. First, athletes described how recovery encompassed a wide range of potential approaches, which spanned multiple dimensions of feelings, levels of focus (i.e., a focus dial), and personal solutions. Second, several processes shaped how the athletes acted on or experienced recovery within those potential approaches, as described in themes of "defining short- and long-term purposes", "breaking and engaging", and "negotiating and prioritizing". These results expand on previous recovery research by adding the detail and nuance of athlete perspectives on how they engage with and experience recovery states and approaches. Athletes play a central role in defining and shaping their recovery, and these findings hold implications for how theories of self-regulation and expertise may contribute to further understanding athlete-centered recovery in high-performance endurance sport.
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