Overtraining

How does it happen? Shouldn't it be easy to avoid, since all you have to do is back off and rest whenever workouts become really tough to start or to get through, right? It's not so simple, as once you get used to a very high volume and workload in training, it becomes hard to back off. You just don't want to even take even one day easy. And what happens in the short term is that you can actually feel yourself getting faster! But you're smart, right? So eventually you do make yourself rest. A little bit. But it's not enough. You rest just enough to get rid of some short term fatigue so that you start feeling relatively good again. When you get back into it, you end up jumping right back in and going just as long, just as hard as you were before. You just can't stop. Taper is approaching. You have to get more training in. You skip a rest week, and decide to just keep building until taper. After all, you planned an extra long taper so that you could do just a little bit of functional overreaching, you should be OK, right?

Wrong. What you don't realize is that you hit functional overreaching weeks ago, and now you're really overdoing it. Skipping rest weeks and rest days, in my experience, has always, eventually led to disaster. When training gets to be at training camp levels, it is so very important to incorporate adequate rest immediately after, and to build back up again and not jump right back into the same long, hard training. Your body can very easily get used to fatigue and work through it for quite awhile, even getting faster while your fitness skyrockets. But that fatigue builds and continues to build and without frequent rest to keep it in check, it will continue to accrue. Once it reaches a certain point, you will start to slow down and the normal rest periods you incorporate will only reach short term fatigue, whereas long term fatigue will still be there. When this happens, you are overtrained, and it is going to take quite awhile to recover.

Overtraining can be very deceptive though, because it can occur in the major muscles used for one sport and with no short term fatigue from all the rest you've done recently, you might feel really good in the other two sports. This then teases you with the thought that maybe you just need more training in that sport that you are overtrained. And that is a really bad idea. What you need is rest. Particularly in that sport. But more rest in general. Weeks of it. Possibly even months.

I can't quite describe how hard it was to go from biking 250-400+ miles per week to trying not to ride more than 100 miles with no hard efforts, but it has worked. However, even now, after a couple months of having "my legs back" on the bike, I have been keeping my bike mileage under 200 miles per week as I work to slowly, and carefully build my bike fitness back up.

Lesson learned. Never skip rest periods, no matter how good you feel. Always be aware of the long-term fatigue on your body. Undertraining is an easy fix. Overtraining is not.