Overtraining
Maggie Mason

As I rounded the famous "fire station turn" of the Boston Marathon last April, I swore under my breath. At mile 17 I was supposed to be a well-oiled machine, not clumsy, slow and aching. My goal was a 3:20 PR. I'd worked relentlessly for it, etching miles on the road, at the track, in my psyche.

I scanned the crowd, hoping for an emotional boost from my parents, sister, and boyfriend, who had promised to be at that corner. They weren't. Cursing, I limped along to finish more than 15 minutes over my targeted time. I'd tried my hardest, but knew I'd blown this race.

What happened? Why did I bomb so patently shy of my goal, which should have been within reach? According to my doctor, numerous articles, and the coach who ultimately helped me out of my slump, I was "overtrained." I'd been running too hard, too long, and too obsessively without adequate recovery. I ran four marathons in 13 months: Los Angeles in March 2002, Boston in April, New York in November, and Boston again in April 2003. Long runs, speedwork, and tempo runs were my fare for a year and a half without a real break: a recipe for disaster, as I found out.

Let me add a disclaimer here. I think Bill Rodgers said that anyone who runs more than two marathons a year does so for psychological and not physical reasons. I was in the middle of a divorce, and as most of you well know, running is an effective panacea for emotional pain. Training is something we can do consistently, measurably and amply, providing a sort of corral for our psychic broncos: we run not only to acknowledge our inner demons, but also to keep them in check.

Overtraining isn't just the natural tiredness that comes with arduous work. We all recognize and love the deep, to-the-core exhaustion that accompanies a day or two of intense effort. Overtraining syndrome is markedly different, because the fatigue is chronic -- it doesn't go away after a few days of rest. The condition is thought to be affected by the hypothalamus, which controls body temperature, sugar and fat metabolism, and the release of a variety of hormones. Your hypothalamus goes a little awry when it can't handle the combination of training and other stressors in your life, resulting in overtraining syndrome. The symptoms, which don't disappear after a few days of backing off, include deep fatigue, decreased immune system response, disturbed sleep, lack of motivation, and poor performances (Pzitzinger and Scott, Advanced Marathoning).

In other words, you're tired all the time, you get sick a lot, you have trouble getting out the door, your muscles are always sore, and dang it, your race times suck. As much as I tried to deny these symptoms, I experienced them all. They descended on me manifold, heaped, clustered. Yet at first, I gloried in my physical strength. Last year, I ran the L.A. Marathon in March, and Boston six weeks later, and set PR's. Racing for months in local events, I set records for myself all summer and fall, always pushing to the next level, recording breakthrough experiences in my running log. I felt invincible, sneering in the face of injury and fatigue. Take a break? Rest? Not me; not once.

When the inevitable regression sneered back at my hubris, things got ugly fast. My race times started to decline, my leg muscles were sore even on easy runs, I was tired and unmotivated, and I got sick. Worst of all, the joy was gone from running, and it became drudgery. The last half of the NYC marathon was a study in hell. With a blister on my left arch the size of an Oreo cookie, guts that misbehaved most unbecomingly, and congestion that camped in my lungs around mile 12, I almost considered dropping out. After a weak finish, I resolved to redeem myself at Boston in April.

Here's where the classic "overtraining" mindset asserts itself: I thought I had 5 months to train myself back to my goal. In reality, I had 5 months to plunge further into a quagmire of fatigue, illness, and substandard racing, when I should have been learning the basic tenet of being a good runner: "It's the RECOVERY, stupid!" I usually field one cold a year or none; last winter I had four. Two of them piggybacked. I had to take almost a month off of training altogether, and was still weak when I ran Boston. Predictably, I bonked.

Clearly, I hadn't listened very well to my poor, overextended body, despite its insistent pleas for moderation. Sometimes, we're just not our own best arbiters. When I went in to see Mike Swan, who helped me a few years ago with an injury, he said I was "cooked," and proceeded to prescribe a schedule that sounded cooked, as in plain oatmeal: I would run under a certain heart rate limit, and I would run by time, not mileage. Easy flat runs only. Crosstrain on a bike. The recovery period would last weeks, if not months.

I'm the first to admit I'm anal about clocking and measuring myself—no doubt how I got in trouble to begin with—so this was initially hard to swallow. I couldn't help cheating, because I knew all the mileage for my bread and butter runs by heart. So I sought out new routes, a rejuvenating act. I stopped planning my courses, and just ran whimsically. I found new neighborhoods, pockets of Santa Barbara I'd scarcely noticed before. Slowly, reluctantly, I gave over to the freedom of running minutes instead of miles. After several weeks, the tyranny of pace began to recede. Mike was encouraging, and let me know there would be a time when I could and should pace myself very precisely. But for now, I ran easily, biked a lot, and logged lotsa miles. I was building my aerobic fitness, but not doing any hard running—the key to recovery. I chose the Santa Barbara half-marathon as my first real target race.

Gradually, Mike added hills and slow "tempo" runs at the upper end of my easy heart rate limit, but didn't prescribe any hard interval workouts for over four months. Four months! I felt slow, lumbering, gawky, as if my body had forgotten how to run fast. I raced a few times during my recovery period, and -- as much as I knew intellectually not to expect fast times -- was inevitably disappointed. But the philosophy began to sink in: Recovery is as important as hard work. As Mike pointed out, our mild climate and year-round beauty here in Santa Barbara can be seductive, continually tempting us to stay in peak form for a racing season that never ends.

Eventually, I was rested enough to resume speedwork and run some races hard. It was rough; I had a difficult time running the prescribed intervals fast enough, and my race times never measured up. I'd walk off the course with head bowed, feeling discouraged. I had to learn patience, perseverance, and consistency. A couple of times I blew it all by running too hard before a race, or not taking easy days easy. I had to be reminded again and again: save the hard efforts for the important workouts. Dummy.

Why is this concept so hard for a reasonably mature, relatively competent person to digest? Perhaps my twelve-year-old weakling self, picked last for every team -- sniff -- still wants revenge. Maybe I'm a typical American adult-onset athlete with a Puritan workout philosophy: salvation comes from pain, deprivation and overexertion. More probably, I'm just like every other schmo peeping into the abyss of advancing age. We envision frostier eyelids, like Lear. Or, like middle-aged Hamlets, we'll have an occasional tete-a-tete with the skull. But running keeps us young: when we race, we're hopeful, lively, joyful contenders.

But we're not gods, and I learned my painful lesson this time around. With Mike's guidance, I ran the best race of my life two weeks ago, and hope to chase down that marathon PR next year. The next time I start feeling a bit too arrogantly immortal, I'll try to think of Alexander Pope's humbling reminder in his "Essay on Man":

Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!