The ego has disbanded

A chain, they say, is only as strong as its weakest link. It’s a fair point. It does indeed take two to tango, and you certainly cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. But such age-old words of wisdom do not always hold true. 

A journey of 1,000 miles doesn’t always begin with a single step – not if you’re on a bike or in a car at least. I’m pretty handy with the old vocab but I draw like a blind toddler – my pictures are in no way worth a thousand of my words. And anyone who holds the belief of ‘first come first served’ has clearly never been in any sort of queue in Dubai – ‘pushiest most arrogant knob, first served’ would be more appropriate here.

And – kerpow! – I’ve only gone and exploded another myth. You can, it seems, teach an old dog new tricks. As I’ve moaned on and on and on and on about of late – mainly coz it’s been the only thing really going on in Mattmundo (like Disney Land but I’m the star) – I was fairly ill, rundown and suffering from a spot of overtraining a few weeks ago; this inspired me to re-evaluate training, work and my general lifestyle and I decided to make some changes.

Now, it’d have been all very well to say I’d change things up and not fall into the same traps again but discover that, when the nonstop whirlwind that is life in Dubai swept me back up, no lessons had really been learnt.

Happily, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

First and foremost, I’ve taken my time getting back into training and only now, 10 days after my first session back, am I properly cracking on with my full programme. Last Friday, for example, a few of my team mates, our coach and I had a power-endurance morning: three back-to-back mini triathlons of 600m swim, 13k bike, 2.5k run. Between each was a short rest of around 5-7 minutes. We were due to do three of these, back-to-back, and I was feeling better than I expected after two tris... but I still let the others go on with the third while I headed out on the bike for an easy spin. This is a bit of a revelation for me – I think I could have pushed on and done the third mini tri; but, given how few session I’d done in the weeks before and that I was still finishing a course of antibiotics, I also could definitely not tell how it would affect me. Therefore, I stopped.

It was the right decision.

Feeling good after that session, I could have dived straight back in the following week. But I didn’t. It was still early days. Sunday was my rest day on my programme, while I had a friend in town on business on Monday. In the past, I’d have got up super-early to fit a session in before work, or tried to squeeze an hour’s run in between work and meeting my friend for dinner. Instead, I accepted that I had a busy day in work, embraced a second day off from training and had a great evening of catching up, a huge bowl of moules-frites and a few tasty Belgian beers.

By the end of the week, I was feeling the benefit.

Now, I’m back into full training, conscious that Ironman Austria is only just over three months away, but rather than feeling like I’ve missed out on a few weeks and a load of sessions, I’m actually more confident than ever that I’ll perform well in Austria. And if I could sum up how and why I’ve been able to make these changes and think longer-term instead of chasing shorter, harder goals and ever-increasing volume, I’d put it down to one thing: I’ve toned down the ego.

Triathlon is an endurance sport that requires patience. And that’s every bit as true of training as it is of racing. Now I know that, it's time to put the virtues of patience and maturity into action - not entirely instead of enthusiasm and determination, but as well as.

Overtraining Part 2

So, where did we get to?

Well, once I'd established I was overtrained (not to mention pretty ill, too), there were two questions: how long had I been in this slump, and what did I need to do to recover? The two are inextricably linked as recovery depends very much on how long you've been overtrained for.

Triathletes are achievers. We may look for free time here and there – bike fits to aero helmets – but we also understand that the road to improvement goes through the towns of Dedication, Hard Work and Consistency (which, come to think of it, sound like the sort of towns that Westerns are set in).

This is, in many walks of life and training, good; but it means that when a triathlete suffers a bad result (as I did this weekend due to overtraining/illness), it's easy for them to do the maths and decide that they must need to train more. Why not? It seems logical. However, by doing so, we're just digging deeper and deeper. So, if you can't dig yourself out of a hole, what do you do? Just stop digging.

Looking back, I raced an Olympic distance race in the first week of Feb and did well, feeling good. I trained well that week, and did the Wadi Bih run the following weekend. Again, I felt OK, but to make up for the lack of normal Friday training that week, I put an uncharacteristically big day in the next day. I then started feeling run down and ill (stomach bug and flu-like symptoms) during that week but perked up enough to start the RAK Half Marathon, which I struggled with and, looking back, felt flat at. So, that's where I think the problem occurred which means I'd only been overtrained for a couple of weeks – good news.

That generally means around a week or so of total rest, a couple of days of active recovery (gentle runs/walks and spins on the bike that aren't hard enough to engender a 'training effect') then beginning to train again with shorter, harder sessions initially, adding time and distance gradually.

There are other things you can try to ease the OT syndrome too – staying well hydrated, proper nutrition and massages will all help you along the road back. For me, however, there's a slight difference – I'm not just overtrained, I'm ill too. So, armed with my newly-discovered 'sensible approach to triathlon', I made recovery my first priority and decided I wouldn't jump on to a bike, dive into a pool and don a pair of running shoes until I'd totally kicked this flu's ass.

But recovery isn't enough – I also want to put in some precautions to stop me making this mistake again. So, I've decided on some new rules. Key to these are understanding the theory of 'overcompensation' or exactly what happens when we train. I may be preaching to the choir here, but this has really helped me to get my head around the importance of rest and recovery. Put simply, training doesn't make us fitter – recovering from training does.

If I do a 5 hour bike ride and put my body under the stress of doing such a ride, that, in and of itself, doesn't make me fitter. In fact, it makes me less fit as it breaks down muscle etc... What makes me fitter is my body saying “Sweet effing Nora that hurt – I'm going to recover and, when doing so, I'm going to recover even stronger than I was before so that kind of stress never happens to me again.” Therefore, rest without recovery is just breaking down the body time after time.

So, the new rules state that, on my programme, I add recovery aids just as though they're training – whether that's 'protein shake and ice bath', 'wear compression shorts and socks today' or 'rest is essential this morning', it now features on my March programme.

My next rule is that, as someone who usually loves and embraces training sessions, if I feel down and unenthusiastic about two sessions in a row, I take a step back and take a day or two off – a bit of hard work and discomfort is always to be expected when you're training for triathlons and Ironman but my enthusiasm levels, I'm learning, are a remarkably accurate indicator of health and wellbeing.

As are my lymph glands. Annoyingly sensitive, they swell at the first sign of infection or virus. And when they do, in future I'll take note.

The final one I'm going to call my 12 hour rule. This only applies to big training days during the week but training and my working day should never exceed 12 hours. This is fine – my big midweek brick is usually a three hour session after a 9 hour working day. However, if that working day becomes 10 or 11 hours, then the session has to be missed, shortened or swapped up for another day accordingly.

So, there's my guide to overtraining – hope it's of use to some but really hope it's never of use to most. More than anything, the message I've taken from the past week or so is to be sensible rather than obsessive – we do this sport for fun, self-improvement, to socialise and for general enjoyment. Not to pay the rent of put kids through school. In the grand scheme of things, a week off just doesn't matter.

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.