Overtraining: The Imperfect Storm

Today I did a brick session that totally took it out of me: I watched a 50-minute episode of Boardwalk Empire and went straight into a 30 minute nap. Phew, it was tough. So tough, in fact, I needed to follow it with a cuppa tea and another nap. Welcome to the very special place that I'm in – where overtraining and illness collide.

Triathlon, they say, isn't a hobby so much as a lifestyle and, if you're anything like me, that statement doesn't just refer to the early morning training sessions and weekends riding out on the roads, so much as the monstrous appetite for news, views, interviews and reviews on all things swim/bike/run. If you share my voracious appetite for triathlon information, chances are you'll have read articles about overtraining before; if you share my odd mix of stupidity and sense of invincibility, chances are you read them thinking 'well that'll never happen to me'. But it did.

Now it has, there are two main thoughts:

a) Well, I didn't see that coming.

b) How the hell did I not see that coming.

Before explaining how I arrived at this point, I'll first explain how I knew I'd got there. Last Friday, I was racing in the Aerofit Sprint Triathlon in Ghantoot. The swim didn't feel good but sometimes they don't, and my time was decent enough. Then came the bike – my initial thought was that I had a flat tyre but I looked down and saw I didn't. I must be riding into a huge headwind then, I thought. Hitting the turnaround point, I realised this wasn't the case. Why did I think these things? Because I usually average around 40kph on this bike section; on Friday, as hard as I was trying, I was barely getting over 35! I stuck with it to the end of the 20k bike – by which point I'd been overtaken by athletes who are fine racers but I know shouldn't be anywhere near me. I headed out a few steps on the run and my whole body moaned, while a shooting pain of sciatica felt like I'd just taken a bullet in the arse cheek! For the first time since I started doing triathlon, I pulled out. I walked over to where our coach, Jason, and one of the most experienced guys on our team, Ed, were stood watching and they both knew what as going on before did. “You're fried, mate. You're flat as a tack.”

I got home and looked up overtraining syndrome. Most sites said you'll probably display some of the following signs – I had them all:

• Drop-off in ability to perform at the same levels – especially in the likes of a TT situation YES, see that morning's race
• Inability to raise the heart rate
  YES, in spite of all my efforts that morning, my heart rate had rarely climbed above 130bpm!
• Soreness and aching in the joints
  YES, from the minute I started the swim, which is unusual
• A general passiveness, apathy or lack of enthusiasm
  YES, had generally been a bit down on triathlon and training all week, found it hard to get up for this race (again, out of the ordinary) and even while out there on the bike doing almost 5kph slower than usual, I just sort of excepted it... which isn't like me

So, after establishing that I definitely was overtrained, I then looked at how I'd gotten there.

Again, I turned to our ever-faithful, always-accurate friend, Senor Internetto. He said that overtraining usually occurs for one or more of the following reasons:

• A general increase in training volume and/or intensity
• Lack of rest and recovery time (general as well as between workouts)
• Experiencing high levels of emotional and physical stress in other areas of your life
• Other illnesses, infections or conditions affecting your physical health

I don't want to seem like teacher's pet, but I've got a full house, and this is where it all started to make sense. You see, the reason I didn't see this coming was that I didn't feel 'overtrained' in terms of purely doing too much training. Yes, I was putting a lot of kilometres in, but my body was holding up to that fine – I felt less fatigued and achey than I had at times in the past. However, there's no doubting that I was training pretty hard, so that's the first box ticked.

Working in publishing is fun and exciting, but a stress-free 9 to 5 it certainly isn't and, from around 5 Jan, for the next month, I was in the office every single day, averaging 60 hours per week. Make that 60 pretty stressful hours and me still trying to fit in all my training around that (averaging 4 or 5 hours sleep a night) and you can tick boxes two and three. In fact, the cold sores that I hadn't suffered from for 10 years made an unwelcome return at this point – known as a stress-related condition, this is another sign I totally missed.

And the final box? I'd been struggling with stomach aches and cold-like symptoms all week and had gone light in training for just that reason. But after Friday morning, when I stopped and excepted I was run down, it hit me with the force of a fat kid diving into a swimming pool. Cut a long story short, I've been in bed for most the past five days and have been off work for three days. I have a full-on dose of the flu (not man flu or what people call the flu when they have some sniffles) but a proper flu virus, with a respiratory tract infection as a kicker. So, overtraining aside, I was properly ill going into the tri on Friday and just didn't know it.

So, there are the signs and the symptoms; if you're reading this and any of those sound familiar, I'd urge you to take a step back and give yourself a few days off to consider where you're at and if you might be pushing a bit too hard. It's difficult – it's not in triathletes' natures to do this as we tend to operate on a 'work harder get better results' MO. But maybe that should be 'work smarter'.

Tomorrow: the road to recovery.