Trapped on the wheel?

Coping with the drain of overtraining takes a toll

— Sweetie, you did everything you should.

When your ya-ya sisters hit happy hour, you hit the gym or the trail and steeled your quads, tightened your abdominal obliques.

When it hurt to get out of bed in the morning, you did, then ran a 6-miler. When brain and bones said “no” to a positive attitude and “uncle” to pain and “more of that” to empty calories, coffee and self-loathing, you stayed the course.

Then you ran the course.

Congratulations! The race is finished, and you did it! Now, it’s time to come back down.

No? You won’t? But you need a break.

“The harder part of the two [choices] is to tell someone that they’re over training or they need the rest,” says Bill Torrey, a bona fide sherpa along the steep and treacherous slope of competitive distance running.

Overtraining? Isn’t that what you’ve been doing all along? You go “over” every session, finishing your splits a few seconds faster, huffing the dumbbells over your head until your face stiffens to an expression of deep grief.

For sports scientists, over training - or “the over training syndrome” (OTS) - is a measurable physiological event, darn hard to predict, and potentially career-ending for an athlete. Several studies suggest that elite ones stand a better than average chance of suffering symptoms of the syndrome over the course of a career.

This syndrome has symptoms. Here are a few of the 28 mentioned by Dr. Tim Noakes in Lore of Running, Fourth Edition:

Generalized apathy; an “I don’t care” attitude; loss of the joy of life.

Lethargy; listlessness; tiredness.

Peevishness.

Loss of ... appetite, libido, thirst for competition, menstrual cycles.

Impaired physical performance.

Sunken eyes. Gradual weight loss. Sleep that fails to refresh.

Increase in early morning heart rate of more than five beats per minute.

Abnormal rise in heart rate upon standing and during and after a standard workout.

Swelling of lymph glands, muscle and joint pain, increased susceptibility to infection, allergies, headache, injury ....

Recognize any of that?

UNDER RESTING

Any “training” is simply the willful treatment of the body to a profound weight or a strenuous performance or both. To clean and-jerk 400 pounds or run a three-hour marathon requires our bodies to morph, and that happens only through many repetitions, a lot of straining - and a lot of patience, for these adaptations don’t occur during the workouts but after, in recovery.

When intense training coincides with insufficient recovery, either because you’ve not slept or rested enough, or because you’ve not replenished through digestion, you may exhibit the signs of overtraining.

Markedly, declining performance.

The early symptoms seem harmless enough. Tired going to bed and getting up in the morning. Maybe a tad irritable. With a little more strain, though, you notice a change in your appetite. You’re waking up an hour earlier for no reason. You’re catching illnesses you’ve never known, like mononucleosis.

If overtraining continues, “maladaptations” occur. The most famous case is probably the American distance runner Alberto Salazar, whose performance fell off precipitously leading up to the 1984 Olympics, and who, despite rallying for an impressive win at the 56-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa in 1994, suffered a decade of mysterious ennui - he couldn’t stand to jog - and was never the same athlete. He attributed his 1994 comeback to Prozac.

But you’re not Salazar! You were just trying to finish, and, yeah, tighten up that tummy.

AN OPTIMIZATION PARADOX

In sports science circles, the threshold just below overtraining is called over-reaching, marked by optimal performance gains concurrent with noticeable physiological adaptations.

In other words, if overtraining is the confluence of performance decrements and physiological maladaptations, the doorstep to these, over-reaching, is where the opposite occurs and the most gains are made.

Making things trickier, scientists, trainers and athletes agree that over-reaching may become overtraining without a change in regimen. Something as seemingly unrelated as workplace stress can precipitate deleterious training.

This is one of the leading arguments outlined a decade ago by Lawrence E. Armstrong and Jaci L. VanHeest in a review of the material on overtraining syndrome in the Journal of Sports Medicine. They suggest that our bodies respond to exercise stress along the same neuroendocrine pathways as anxiety.

That is, there are hormonal and chemical similarities between a long run on sore legs and managing a big corporate merger.

So the corollary applies thusly - if progressive psychological strain occurs during a progressive fitness-training routine, that new heap of stress can tip training into overtraining.

The sports scientist Carl Foster, one of the first to call out overtraining predictors and symptoms, said the risk of overtraining increases when:

We fail to give ourselves even one complete rest day per week.

We isolate one performance or muscle group, or go all-out every outing, eschewing interval or diverse training.

We continue our high training load in the face of external stress factors.

“With training there is no surefire anything,” says Leah Thorvilson, the winner of multiple Little Rock Marathons who even ran fast enough to compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials in Houston. “Everyone is different with what they can tolerate, and ideal training is a learning experience.”

LITTLE BABY WANTS HER MAMA?

There’s several intuitive conclusions you’ve arrived at by now, including I don’t know what to make of all this.

And, I ain’t Leah Thorvilson. I ain’t Alberto Salazar. Train myself into “maladaptation”? Preposterous!

Torrey says that if you don’t feel like training, that’s just it: You don’t feel like training.

“When you’re training hard, you’re hurtin’. You’re going to go out to the track and do speed work? It hurts. You just ran a 20-miler? It’s gonna hurt. So, if you get out of that mode of doing it, the next thing you know you’re 5 pounds heavier, then 10 pounds, and it’s that much harder.”

He and Gary Taylor, a certified triathlon coach who is Thorvilson’s personal trainer, say overuse injuries such as a sprung hamstring or a calf tear stop many more avid recreational runners - “age groupers,” Taylor calls them - than subtler symptoms of over training, although they don’t agree on the “feel”test.

“If you just don’t feel like working out that day, you probably shouldn’t,” Taylor says. “When you say, ‘Well, I’ve got to,’ that typically relates more to the Leah Thorvilsons, the elite athletes. Most of the age-groupers ... they’re generally not bound to something, [and] once you’re in that scenario you feel like you don’t have to go train, you’re less susceptible to overtraining.”

Researcher VanHeest says this shouldn’t be taken to mean that recreational or even unathletic people can’t overtrain. The frequency of overtraining isn’t in 1-to-1 proportion to the dedication in an athlete. It’s an energy imbalance. “An inappropriate negative energy balance that anyone could have,” she says.

“If you decided, ‘Hey, I’m going to run a half-marathon, and I’m going to give myself 12 weeks to do it,’ the chances you will hurt yourself [are] pretty high. It’s pretty high. ... The global stress on your system energetically and your ability to match that appropriately from a nutritional perspective are pretty poor. We’re just not [good at it].”

So, along with the adaptations of muscles to demands, there’s the ancillary adaptation of metabolism and hormones to muscles: Any spinning enthusiast who has dropped 25 pounds since Christmas can tell you that it has been harder and harder to get back on the bike, even stay alert at work.

Unfit folks who yoke an intense new exercise regimen with a reduction in calories, carbohydrates and hydration, are opening themselves up to overtraining.

“Here’s the other piece,” VanHeest says. “Most people who would decide to engage in that, [to] really embark on a huge effort to exercise regularly, are probably not, even though they say they are, are probably not doing it for health. They’re doing it for looks.

“If you put them in a vacuum and never told them that they looked good, you’d probably find that they lose the motivation.”

In other words, she says, “vanity is 95 percent” of what’s going on here.

ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 03/05/2012

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