For high school athlete Mark Ericson, his running season went great up until spring this year. His training for the past year was relentless and it seemed like it was paying off. Each day that he ran, he was shaving a hundredth of a second off his time. But not long after, at the beginning of spring track, everything seemed to go off-track. Each time he ran the thousand-meter course, he seemed to add about 5 seconds to his time. He seemed to be getting slower with each training round. His coach began to look deeper into the problem; the boy didn't need any running tips - he was an expert himself. And yet, here he was getting slower by the day, irritable, his muscles numb all the time. His coach had read about something like this - it was called overtraining. It is the thing that every athlete dreads. Is there are a limit to how much you can train your body - is there a limit to how much you can push yourself?
Overtraining is something you'll rarely read about in any list of running tips you come by. If it is rare, it is only because the kind of commitment it takes to reach a state of overtraining is something most people find to be too much. It is actually a real physical ailment. If you overstress your body for too long, it fights back. It fights back with aches and pains, tiredness and psychological detachment. As rare as the condition is, people are beginning to take notice of this, and it's becoming somewhat a fashionable ailment to suffer from. These days, people read about overtraining in a section on running tips in the magazine, and the moment they have a problem with their performance, they begin to complain of overtraining.
This isn't the way it's supposed to go. To begin with, overtraining is terribly rare - even for athletes. If you are running maybe 25 miles a week and you feel that you have a problem, you probably need to look into other causes. The body is perfectly capable of handling 25 miles a week. When you try to double that or maybe triple that, and then feel dead inside doing 80 miles a week, that's when you might need to consider the possibility that you could be overtraining.
There is an important reason why you can't just go about jumping to the conclusion every so often that you could have a case of overtraining on your hands. When you are in this position, there is really no way out of it other than to quit training for months. What athlete would want to do that - it would probably take him out of running forever. So how really do you know that yours is a case of genuine overtraining? As a matter of fact, overtraining is a poorly understood condition. It isn't just a slowness or sense of exhaustion that signals this. The first thing you notice is that your heart rate is a lot faster than it should be when you're resting normallly, or with moderate levels of work. And athletes also find that they feel weaker, and they can't really walk with the kind of muscle-coordinated confidence they always had. The best running tips always suggest that you need to push yourself as an athlete as far as your body will go - without going too far. It's when an athlete goes over the line without realizing it, that this happens. You're supposed to train just a bit past your real abilities to qualify as having pushed yourself. When you train more than just a touch above your ability though, your body throws in the towel.
Olympic coaches are exquisitely aware of overtraining and know exactly how to hit the mark. Not long ago, the best of athletic wisdom out there felt that it was the sheer hours of training you put into your sport that helped you improve. Now coaches understand that there is a point beyond which a lot of training doesn't really help you that much, and only puts you in danger of overtraining. When it occurs, the signs are there for all to see - when an athlete seems to gain very little for crazy hours of training he puts in, that's a sign. An athlete who isn't pumping his fist and beaming with self-confidence after a training session is another sign. If an athlete is just exhausted all the time, it's time to stop. It's just that athletes completely give themselves over to the sport and never know when to stop.
Sports medicine specialists would be a great idea when you suspect a problem. Sometimes they'll give you blood tests to test for certain kinds of chemicals known as Ferritins that appear at very low levels in people who overtrain. With the right kind of supplements, it could help cure the problem. But mostly, the advice will be simple and unpleasant - it's three months off the sport. It will be for the athlete's own good, and it always works.