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How to avoid overtraining for marathons

This is an excerpt from Advanced Marathoning-4th Edition by Pete D Pfitzinger,Scott M Douglas.

Overtraining is a danger for any motivated marathoner. In striving to improve your performance, you progressively increase the volume and intensity of your training. At some point, you hit your individual training threshold. When you exceed that threshold, positive adaptation stops, negative adaptation occurs, and your performances in training and racing suffer.

Individual training thresholds vary greatly among runners. Many elite marathoners handle repeated 120-mile (193 km) weeks, whereas some runners struggle to maintain 40-mile (64 km) weeks. Similarly, some runners can handle more hard days of training in a week than others. Your individual training threshold also changes with time. The elites now running 120-mile weeks couldn’t always handle such big mileage, but they increased their mileage as their capacity to withstand the stress increased. A detailed training log will help you discern your limits and how they evolve throughout your running career. Software that monitors your training and recovery and enables tracking your development over time is discussed later in this chapter.

Understanding Overtraining

It’s important to clarify what overtraining is and isn’t. Fatigue for a few days after a hard training session isn’t overtraining. In fact, it’s a necessary step in the process of recovery and development. When training stress is applied in the appropriate dosage, you improve at the optimal rate. If your training stress is above the optimal level, you may still improve, but you’ll do so at a slower rate. True overtraining occurs only above a higher threshold (your individual training threshold) for a prolonged period and can lead to overtraining syndrome.

What’s much more common than overtraining syndrome is overreaching. Overreaching occurs when you repeatedly string together too many days of hard training. There are two categories of overreaching: first, short-term overreaching, in which a period of higher-intensity or higher-volume training leads to fatigue and a short-term decrease in performance, after which you bounce back after a week or so of recovery; and second, “nonfunctional” or extreme overreaching, in which more prolonged higher-intensity or higher-volume training leads to longer-lasting fatigue and decreased performance for several weeks or even months (Meeusen et al. 2013). Other factors, including a lack of sleep, psychological and emotional stress, restricted caloric intake or carbohydrate intake, low iron levels, dehydration, work stress, and environmental stress, can contribute to both types of overreaching as well as overtraining syndrome.

Repeated extreme overreaching eventually leads to overtraining syndrome. The simple explanation for overtraining syndrome is that the combination of training load and other life stressors is greater than the body’s ability to recover and adapt positively for a prolonged period of time. As would be expected, the combination of contributing factors and threshold for overtraining syndrome varies greatly among runners.

Nonfunctional overreaching and overtraining syndrome are caused by poor planning and not heeding your body’s feedback. Depending on the severity and duration of the imbalance, changes in the neuroendocrine system due to prolonged overtraining often require many months to return to normal levels.

Rather than just training too hard, overreaching and overtraining appear to be related to both the difficulty of training (the training load) and the monotony of training. Monotony of training is a lack of variation in the difficulty of training from day to day. Monotonous training typically consists of one moderately hard day after another, whereas varied training consists of a mix of hard days, easy days, and the occasional rest day.

The most effective training schedules find the right balance of several types of hard training and easier recovery days or rest days for optimal improvement without breaking down. Again, a good training log can help you here. Software-based training and recovery trackers provide a variety of metrics and analyses that can provide insight into how you are adapting to your training and allow you to easily compare your current marathon preparation to your training and recovery from previous marathons. If you improve your awareness of the training load and monotony that puts you over the edge, you can try to adjust these elements for optimal training and marathon performance.

Breaking Out of Overreaching and Overtraining Syndrome

If you have more than two weeks during which your energy levels are down and you feel like you are not progressing, it pays to consider whether you need to back off for a couple of weeks to get your training back on track. Given the typical runner’s mentality to train through adversity, this can be difficult to assess (even with some objective data). You are training hard and have various other stresses in your life, and you will invariably have times when you are more tired than usual.

In most cases, two to three easier weeks will allow your body to recover so you are once again adapting positively to training. Reducing training intensity—so that you’re doing only easy aerobic running—has the largest effect on recovering from extreme overreaching and overtraining syndrome. During marathon preparation, this would include temporarily skipping V̇O₂max training, lactate threshold training, and marathon-pace runs.

To enhance recovery, you should also reduce your training volume. The correct amount to reduce your training volume depends on your individual circumstances and how deeply entrenched in overtraining or overreaching you’ve become. As a rule of thumb, reducing your mileage by 40 percent should be enough to allow your body to recover. In addition, if you’ve been training twice a day, it will be necessary to reduce to 1 training session a day. Your body needs time to recover, and a second workout will slow your progress. It’s also helpful to have at least 1 day a week completely off from training.

Two to three weeks of training with reduced intensity and decreased mileage are not a disaster for your marathon preparation. After all, it’s rare to tick all of the boxes in the many weeks leading up to the marathon.

If you have regained your usual energy level by the third week, you can reintroduce V̇O₂max training and lactate threshold training. Do the workouts listed in the training program you’re following, but run those workouts a few seconds slower per mile than you otherwise would have. Similarly, you can increase your mileage back to close to the level prescribed in the training schedules, but hold back about 10 to 15 percent for the first transition week. During the second transition week just hold back a few percent from the full workload called for in the training schedules. Depending on how long you felt overtired, how long you backed off, and how many weeks are left before your marathon, you may need to adjust your marathon race goal, but you can make that decision closer to race day.

Other strategies to recover from overreaching and overtraining syndrome include ensuring adequate quality and quantity of sleep and consuming a high-quality diet. Key dietary factors include consuming enough calories to meet the energy demands of training (see discussion of RED-S below) and consuming enough carbohydrates to support training and immune function. If you have low energy levels and have responded poorly to training for several weeks for no obvious reason, then your training stress and other life stressors may have led to extreme overreaching or overtraining syndrome. If you haven’t already, the first step is to back off your training as discussed above. If you don’t see improvement after a few weeks, see a sports physician to check whether your symptoms are caused by an illness. The possibility always exists that excessive fatigue is caused by something other than running. Ask to have your red blood cell count, hemoglobin, and ferritin levels checked to see whether your iron levels are normal (as discussed in chapter 2). If you reach this point, it’s probably best to either significantly change your goal for the marathon you’ve been training for or give up that marathon entirely. What matters most is regaining your normal vigor and ability to adapt to training.

In some cases, a reduction in running performance is due to a prolonged imbalance between calories consumed and calories used. Termed relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S), energy intake is less than energy expenditure and eventually leads to impaired health and performance. When you have a caloric deficit for a prolonged period in combination with hard training, your body responds to protect you. In this situation, body weight may stay the same or only slightly decrease because your metabolic rate drops as your body attempts to adjust to fewer calories. In female athletes, an imbalance in energy availability can lead to the female athlete triad, which includes low energy availability, an absence of or infrequent menstrual periods, and low bone mineral density. These conditions are interrelated, and highly committed athletes in sports such as distance running, in which leanness may be associated with performance, are at risk. The triad usually starts with restricting dietary intake, sometimes including disordered eating, while running high mileage, leading to less estrogen production and irregular menstrual periods. This leads to reduced bone mineral density, an increased risk of stress fractures, and other injuries. Running performance declines as the triad progresses, but the risks to long-term health are more important. Breaking out of RED-S and the female athlete triad requires increased caloric and nutrient intake, reduced training, and other lifestyle changes, and it often involves the support of a sports physician, a sports nutritionist, and a psychologist (Mountjoy et al. 2023).

More Excerpts From Advanced Marathoning-4th Edition

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