Don’t Overtrain
7 Principles of Training:
#4) Don’t Overtrain
This might be the hardest principle of training for a runner to follow.
Why?
Fear.
And I think it’s harder now than ever to not overtrain due to our ever-increasing connectivity and access to other’s training regimes.
Humans are comparative animals because we’re relational. How we make sense of the world around us happens in the context of whom we have access to. Not too long ago the world was fairly small. In many American towns, there was only one daily paper, a handful of radio stations, and three television stations.
You trained with a handful of runners and competed against a slightly bigger handful. It was once rare to travel to New York City, or London, or Tokyo to run a marathon unless you were one of the best runners in the world.
Then, rather quickly, everything changed.
We started to have easier access to opportunities (thanks in big part to the airplane) and more advanced examples of training (books, magazines, and then, of course, the internet.)
Now we know what the best runners in the world think (thanks Twitter), do for training on a daily basis (thanks Strava), how they look doing it (thanks Instagram) and what their sponsors want us to buy (thanks Runner’s World).
We can all wear similar racing shoes as Kipchoge, do similar workouts — albeit scaled-down versions — as Dibaba, drink the same post-run recovery shake as Hasay, and enjoy the same coffee as the Bowerman Track Club runners.
In short, most runners are overwhelmed with information — and much of it is irrelevant.
However, humans have a hardwired need to Keep Up with The Joneses, so we tend to be pretty poor in our ability to filter signal from noise.
The result: many overly ambitious or enthused runners do too much too soon. They want results now. They want to post easy run mile pace average to Strava, clips of their workouts to Instagram, and tweet about how they’re “ready to go” for their next race.
But all physiological processes in the body have their own rate of development and expression which cannot be rushed. Mother nature doesn’t care about our modern-day impatient expectations, she advances at her own pace, and always has.
The fundamentals of the training process are simple: loading causes fatigue, and when the loading ends, recovery begins. If the training load was optimal, after recovery the runners will be more fit (as a result of overcompensation) than before the training load was applied.
Pretty much every runner knows how to apply a training load: run a pace and/or distance that is currently a little too hard for you. The loading part of the cycle is not where overtraining happens.
For most, it occurs in the recovery phase.
So many overly enthusiastic runners comprise their recovery by doing too much running, too fast between hard workouts when their body isn’t yet ready for it.
In many ways, overtraining is really chronic undercovery.
So what to do?
Your best bet is to follow Bill Bowerman’s timeless wisdom: keep your hard days hard and easy days easy.
How hard is hard? How easy is easy?
Russian sports scientists figured this out for distance runners about 50 years ago:
Hard = Trainable Loads (150+ bpm)
Easy = Maintenance or Restitution Loads (<150 bpm)
Roughly speaking, the line is drawn in the sand at around a heart rate of 150 bpm.
Like all maps, it’s only a guide.
This isn’t a law or a rule. But it is an accurate, tested, and easy measure which can help guide most runners who wish to keep easy days easy and hard days hard.
Here are the tables:
