How to Overtrain, in 3 Easy Steps
It helps to start with the right attitude. For a master athlete with a family, job, and the other accoutrements of suburban life, time is hard to come by. Too often recently I've found myself wanting to make every day count, even when I needed a break. This is different from wanting every workout to be effective/specific. In the past I'd been pretty good at backing off when I needed to recover. Cooking yourself doesn't happen in a week; it creeps up on you over a period of time.
It all started in July. I tore something in the back of one leg during a run. I wasn't incapacitated, but I knew I'd done something wrong. In the beginning, I was the model pragmatic athlete: I applied an ice pack twice a day and didn't do anything for 2 weeks. After 2 weeks, I saw my doctor, and he prescribed some physical therapy. He gave his blessing to do any sort of exercise that didn't aggravate the injury, i.e. I could do anything but run.
Let me pause here to say my doctor is great, and so is the physical therapy place I've gone to. Unfortunately I've had to see them a couple times in the past 3 years. And they've always done right by me and brought me back strong. I blew myself out and I take full responsibility.
I started therapy, 3 times a week for 4 weeks. The first mistake was not counting this in my training log. Lying on that table getting ultrasound, or with an ice pack, that's 20 minutes of hard training, yeah right. It may not be, but the other 45 minutes where you're running on a treadmill or doing God knows whatever exercises, that adds up.
Lesson 1: if you keep a training log and you're getting P.T., record P.T. time in the training log.
The Saturday before we went on vacation, I was back in full-on running mode, and lactic threshold work was required. Instead of intervals, I ran 85 minutes at LT without break. Warmup and warmdown were additional. Yeah sure, it was a successful workout, but it was basically a race type of effort, requiring more than 1 rest day. In the middle of the following week, I realized my error, but taking 2 non-consecutive days off is never as good as back-to-back rest days. Wednesday following the Big Run, we drove to Fern Lake, about 20 miles northeast of Lake Placid, for a week's vacation.
Lesson 2: The really hard days require more recovery, especially if you're in my age group, that is getting recruitment letters from AARP.
Of course, once up in the Adirondacks, there was no hanging around on the deck pumping aluminum and relaxing. I want to take every opportunity to get out when there's a change of scenery, right. I roller skied; we canoed all over Lake Placid; we hiked. On our last day of vacation, I roller skied the route the U.S. Ski Team used for its fall time trials in previous years, and my heart rate just wouldn't go up to where I expected it to for that sort of hard effort. Always a bad sign with me. I didn't get an effective workout because I was already toast. That afternoon I could barely roll a bocce ball with my in-laws.
So I took 4 rest days. I resumed with an easy double pole session at Lake Denmark on Saturday. Then I ran 4 hours on Sunday. The first hour I felt... how do you say.. just blah. Maybe it was the banality of running in my usual haunt after spending so much time in God's country. The next 2 hours, I felt good; then I began to hurt. The last hour was a sufferfest with my IT band problems coming back to haunt me.
Final lesson: Once in awhile, it can be good to do nothing on your vacation! Don't let this happen to you!