Hello humans. Here is a New York Times article with a gruesome story about overtraining. The story has a real Dateline exposé feeling to it (“Can you DIE of EXERCISE? Find out NEXT here on NBC AFTER THE BREAK”), but it raises a good question: When do you stop?
The answer according to the article is that like most things that are worth giving a damn about, no one knows. Personally, I keep a little notebook in which I jot down my workout specs and how the workout felt. One such entry is about last Sunday, when I went on my weekly long run. I’m now on week 7 of the marathon training guide I found on the internet, so last Sunday’s run was 7 miles. I had some kind of virus and scratchy throat and felt my ass dragging like a sack of lead shot. I got passed, a lot. It was also 11 am and the temperature was already in the upper 80s. These are all the stuff of quitting, but I slogged on. I don’t know if it was worth it. Probably, since I didn’t really have a specific running-related problem–I just felt like crap. I had to take a nap and felt terrible the rest of the day from dehydration. Most days I am fine, and I keep the notebook to make sure I notice if I feel bad more than a few days in a row.
I am generally getting better at managing the kind of exhaustion I mentioned above. I am tired from training, every day. When I first started out training, I needed at least a two-hour nap after every run. Now I don’t know if I’m less tired or if I’m just better at ignoring it. Coffee helps, as does generally not running at the crack of dawn. We’ll see what happens after I switch to running at 6 am again. Unemployment and many cool days have allowed me to roll out in the late morning, sometimes even the early evening, but that will have to change if/when I get a job.
I haven’t experienced anything worse than being tired so far, though, which makes me cautiously hopeful that an old mystery hip problem I used to have may be less of an issue these days. Often when I had been running for a couple of weeks, I would develop this irritated, grating popping sensation in my left hip, with an accompanying vicious stabbing pain. I started to favor my left leg, which led to my right knee getting thrown out of whack, a situation known as a compensation injury, or dumbass syndrome. According to Keith Hanson, some guy quoted in the NYT article, “If you are gimping — altering your gait— after 10 minutes of running, then it is an injury and not just an ache or pain”. That advice, plus my notebook, is so far working out well enough for me.
