Runners tend to worry about whether they’re doing enough.
Am I running enough mileage? Should I add another workout? Should my long run be longer? Should I be pushing harder on my easy days?
But there’s another question we probably don’t ask often enough:
Am I doing more training than my body can handle right now?
Training works because we apply stress to the body, recover from that stress, and adapt.
Remove the training stimulus and there’s little reason for the body to adapt, but keep adding stress without providing enough recovery and eventually the equation stops working in your favour.
That’s why sustainable training isn’t necessarily about training less. It’s about finding the amount of training you can absorb consistently.
Here are five signs you may have crossed that line.
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1. You’re Tired All the Time
Some fatigue is a normal part of training.
If you’re building mileage or you’ve just completed a demanding workout, you should expect to feel somewhat tired.
The problem is when tired becomes your normal state.
You wake up tired. Your legs feel heavy walking up the stairs. Your easy run feels like work. By afternoon, you’re already thinking about going to bed.
One tired day doesn’t mean anything.
But if you’re feeling unusually fatigued for several days, particularly without an obvious explanation, pay attention.
Your body may be telling you that the training stress you’re accumulating is greater than your current ability to recover from it.
And remember that your body doesn’t distinguish particularly well between training stress and everything else going on in your life.
A 70-kilometre week during a quiet period at work isn’t necessarily the same stress as a 70-kilometre week when you’re working overtime, sleeping six hours a night and dealing with family responsibilities.
Training has to fit your life, not exist separately from it.
2. Your Performance Has Plateaued Or Is Declining.
This one can be particularly frustrating.
You’re training harder than ever, yet you’re not getting faster.
Your tempo pace stalls. Workouts that were comfortable a few weeks ago suddenly feel difficult. Your race performances stop improving.
The natural response for most runners is:
I need to train harder.
But usually, the opposite is true.
Fitness doesn’t improve during the workout itself. The workout just provides the stimulus. Improvement occurs afterward as your body recovers and adapts.
If you’re constantly applying another stimulus before you’ve adequately recovered from the previous one, you can end up doing more work while getting less from it.
Before adding another workout or increasing your mileage, ask yourself whether the missing ingredient might actually be recovery.
Sometimes the way forward isn’t another workout, it’s absorbing the training you’ve already done.
3. Your Resting Heart Rate Is Consistently Elevated
Your resting heart rate can provide another useful clue.
I’m less interested in any single reading than I am in the trend.
Maybe your normal morning resting heart rate is around 50 beats per minute. Suddenly you’re consistently seeing 60, 65 or 70.
That doesn’t automatically mean you’re overtraining.
A lot of things can affect your resting heart rate. Poor sleep, dehydration, illness, alcohol, heat and life stress can all manifest in a higher resting heart rate. .
But that’s exactly why it can be useful.
An elevated resting heart rate several days in a row can be one piece of information suggesting that your body is under more stress than usual.
Don’t panic because your watch gives you one strange number on Tuesday morning.
Look for patterns, and combine the number with how you actually feel.
For example, if your resting heart rate has been elevated for several days, your legs feel terrible and your workouts are deteriorating, that’s considerably more meaningful than any one metric by itself.
4. You’re Losing Motivation and Focus
This one is easy to dismiss because we tend to think of training problems as purely physical.
But the mental side of things is an important cluse as well.
When training load becomes excessive, sometimes the first thing to disappear is enthusiasm. You stop looking forward to runs, and start to see them a chore or a second job.
You find yourself unusually irritable or unable to concentrate. You may even begin wondering whether you still enjoy running.
Everyone has days when they don’t feel like training. But if you start to dread training on the regular, it’s a sign you’re overdoing it.
Running should require commitment, but it shouldn’t feel like a daily battle against yourself.
Sometimes losing your enthusiasm for training is your mind’s way of telling you what your legs haven’t managed to say yet.
5. Your Sleep Is Getting Worse
This sounds counterintuitive. Surely more training should make you sleep better?
Sometimes it does.
But excessive training stress can sometimes have the opposite effect.
You may feel exhausted during the day but strangely wired at night. You have trouble falling asleep, wake frequently or notice that your sleep simply doesn’t feel restorative.
You train hard, but don’t recover properly. Your sleep deteriorates, which then further reduces your ability to recover.
And then you train hard again. It becomes a viscious cycle.
Sleep is one of the most powerful recovery tools available to runners, and unlike a new pair of carbon-plated shoes, it’s free.
If your training is consistently interfering with your ability to sleep well, that’s a problem you need to address.
One Sign Doesn’t Mean You’re Overtraining
One bad run doesn’t mean you’re overtrained.
Neither does one poor night’s sleep, a slightly elevated heart rate or a day when you don’t feel like running. Some days will always feel better than others.
What I’m looking for is a cluster of changes that persists over time.
Maybe your resting heart rate has been elevated for four days, your sleep has been poor. You’re starting to feel a scratchy throat.
Wednesday’s normally controlled tempo run felt much harder than expected.
And now Saturday morning arrives and you’re dreading your long run.
That’s when I’d start asking questions.
What Should You Do?
The answer isn’t necessarily to stop training completely. Many times a relatively small adjustment is enough.
Take an extra rest day.
Replace a workout with an easy run. Cut your mileage for a week.
One of the biggest mistakes runners make is worrying that backing off for a few days will destroy their fitness. You don’t lose fitness overnight. You could take a week or two off and essentially pick up where yo left off.
But stubbornly pushing through accumulating fatigue can turn a few easy recovery days into several weeks of poor training or even an injury.
The goal of training isn’t to see how much punishment you can tolerate, it’s to create adaptation.
That requires enough stress to stimulate improvement, but enough recovery to allow that improvement to happen.
Pay attention to persistent fatigue, declining performance, changes in resting heart rate, loss of motivation and disrupted sleep.
Your body is constantly giving you feedback about how well you’re handling your training.
Learn to listen to it.
