In some situations, cross-training is the best type of exercise on recovery days. For marathoners who come out of Sunday long runs feeling beat up, cross-training is the safest option for training on Monday. Your recovery is enhanced by the increased blood flow, but there’s no additional pounding on your legs and back. Cross-training is discussed in chapter 4.
Avoiding Overtraining
Overtraining is a danger for any motivated marathoner. In striving to improve your performance, you progressively increase the volume and intensity of your training. At some point, you hit your individual training threshold. When you exceed that threshold, positive adaptation stops, negative adaptation occurs, and your performances in training and racing suffer.
Individual training thresholds vary greatly among runners. Beijing Olympic marathoner Brian Sell handles repeated 150-mile (241 km) weeks, whereas some runners struggle to maintain 40-mile (64 km) weeks. Similarly, some runners can handle 2 hard days of training in succession, whereas others need 3 easy days after each hard workout. Your individual training threshold also changes with time. Sell couldn’t always handle such big mileage, but he increased his mileage as his capacity to withstand the stress increased. A detailed training log that you update at least a few times a week will help you discern your limits and how they evolve throughout your running career.
It’s important to clarify what overtraining is and isn’t. Fatigue for a day or 2 after a hard training session isn’t overtraining. In fact, it’s a necessary step in the process of recovery and development. When training stress is applied in the appropriate dosage, then you improve at the optimal rate. If your training stress is above the optimal level, you may still improve, but you’ll do so at a slower rate. Only above a higher threshold (your individual training threshold) does true overtraining occur.
What’s much more common than overtraining is overreaching. Unfortunately, this zone is where many marathoners spend much of their time. Overreaching occurs when you string together too many days of hard training. Your muscle fatigue is most likely primarily from glycogen depletion, and you may simply need time for metabolic recovery. A few days of moderate training combined with a high-carbohydrate diet should quickly remedy the situation. Overreaching can also be caused by dehydration, lack of sleep, or other life stressors on top of your normal training. In all of these cases, your body should rebound in less than a week when the extra stress is removed.
Repeated overreaching eventually leads to overtraining syndrome. The simple explanation for overtraining syndrome is that the combination of training load and other life stressors is greater than the body’s ability to recover and adapt positively for a prolonged period of time. The combination of contributing factors and threshold for overtraining syndrome varies greatly among athletes.
The body’s response to overtraining may be regulated by the hypothalamus. Located at the base of the brain, the hypothalamus controls body temperature, sugar and fat metabolism, and the release of a variety of hormones; it’s essentially your master control center for dealing with stress. When your hypothalamus can’t handle the combination of training and other stressors in your life, typical symptoms include fatigue, reduced immune system function, disturbed sleep, decreased motivation, irritability, and poor athletic performance. Chronic inflammatory responses from repeated muscle damage without sufficient recovery have also been hypothesized to contribute to overtraining syndrome.
Overtraining is caused by poor planning and not heeding your body’s feedback. In 1998, exercise physiologist Carl Foster, PhD, presented an interesting concept to help avoid overtraining. The concept is based in part on evidence that horses progress after a hard/easy training program but become overtrained when the workload on the easy days is increased. (Stick with us here; this has applications for running.)
The hypothesis is that overtraining is related to both the difficulty of training (the training load) and the “monotony” of training. Monotony of training is a lack of variation in the difficulty of training from day to day. Monotonous training typically consists of 1 moderately hard day after another, whereas varied training consists of a mix of hard days, easy days, and the occasional rest day.
The concept is that training strain is the combined effect of the training load and the training monotony. Foster found that training strain can predict overtraining-related illness and injury, with both load and monotony as contributing factors. This is further evidence that mixing recovery days into your training program is necessary for optimal improvement without breaking down. Again, a good training log can help you here. If you can gain an awareness of the combination of training load and monotony that puts you over the edge, then you can try to adjust these elements for optimal training and optimal marathon performance.
If you’re truly overtrained, you need to take immediate action. The first step is to see a sports physician to check that you don’t have an illness that mimics the symptoms of overtraining. The possibility always exists that excessive fatigue is caused by something worse than running. Also ask the physician to check your hemoglobin and ferritin levels to see whether your iron levels are normal (see chapter 2).
Unless you have a particularly severe case of overtraining, 3 to 5 weeks of greatly reduced training should bring your energy level back to normal. It appears that reducing training intensity is more important than reducing training volume in breaking out of overtraining syndrome. Reducing your training intensity so that you’re doing only easy aerobic running is the most important step in breaking out of overtraining.
You should, however, also reduce your training volume. The correct amount to reduce your training volume depends on your individual circumstances and how deeply entrenched in overtraining you’ve become. As a rule of thumb, reducing your mileage by 50 percent should be enough to allow your body to recover. In addition, if you’ve been training twice a day, it will be necessary to reduce to one training session a day. Your body needs time to recover, and a second workout will slow your progress. For the first several weeks, it’s also helpful to have at least 1 day a week off from training.
Monitoring your body provides valuable information on your adaptation to training, your risk of injury or illness, and your readiness for the next hard training session. There are several good ways to determine when you are overreaching so you can avoid overtraining and remain healthy. You can use this information to improve your recovery by modifying your training schedule.
There are many ways to monitor your recovery, but the simplest measures are often the most useful and the easiest to adhere to. In combination, these measures provide insight into your adaptation to training. Typically, when results on these measures decrease, running performance and recovery deteriorate a few days later. In addition to the details of your training, try recording the following details in your training log, and review your log periodically to find the patterns that predict overtraining, illness, and injury.
• Weight: Check your weight at the same time of day each day or several times per week. Decreases in weight over a few days usually indicate dehydration. Decreases in weight over a few weeks can indicate that you are not eating enough calories, have an illness, or are overtraining.