SERIOUS TRAINING 30

The Stress Bucket

In SERIOUS TRAINING 28 and SERIOUS TRAINING 29, I explained how a running friend had lost several weeks of training when family, career, and life demanded more of his already limited time. Once those stresses subsided, he decided the fastest way to get back into shape before his first B-priority race—only eight weeks away—was to do high-intensity training every day.

I knew that was a disaster in the making. Even though he was training only six hours a week, this approach greatly increased his risk of excessive fatigue and possibly even overtraining.

Like most athletes, he didn’t fully understand how overtraining develops and affects training. I told him about a professional athlete I began coaching after he had dug himself into an overtraining hole. It took only a few weeks of excessive high-intensity training to ruin his season—and ultimately his career.

I didn’t want my friend to make the same mistake. Instead, I designed a plan that emphasized low-intensity aerobic training, supported by small doses of high-intensity sprinting, to rebuild a solid foundation of fitness over the next eight weeks. That would be his base. After seeing how this worked, we would then talk about his training for the first A-race of the season.

In the second of those articles, I introduced the topic of recovery during a training block and mentioned two common approaches: recovery on demand and scheduled recovery. Each has advantages and disadvantages. I’ll describe both next week.

Before doing that, however, I think it’s important to understand what we’re trying to avoid: extreme training loads.

The obvious question is:

What causes an athlete to break down from excessive fatigue—or, even worse, overtraining?

The answer is simple: Overwhelming stress.

But what exactly is stress, and how does it affect training and performance?