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Re Reasons for lulls
Thanks for the comments, including the RL story.
The reasons you give for RL lulls all make sense. A few work fine as GURPS rules: recover from a blow (back away out of combat to shake off shock or stun), get time to think (if the GM enforces player slowness as character slowness), recover balance (not common in the RAW, but GULLIVER adds more opportunity for getting off balance), accomplish non-combat goal (any long action), showboat/taunt/talk (if the GM has these take time), create a lull to draw in opponent (possibly Wait or Feint, though the latter creates only a second of lull), and learn something about foe (Evaluate, for up to a few seconds' lull).
No criticism here of the game for the lulls it doesn't explicitly handle via rules; the above is a fine start!
Per your other comment, I think fatigue management is probably the biggest, most realistic factor in lulls – but gaming that level of fatigue gets pretty number-crunchy. Oh well.