Ovetrained

20 July

This is the time of year when I’m usually out of the country for two weeks. This year our travel money went to much-needed work on the house. So instead of spending a couple of weeks off the bike and away from the gym I’ve continued on my usual workout routine: biking long distances on the weekends and Spinning and weight lifting at the gym during the week.

Over the winter I never stopped cycling outdoors. When temperatures permitted, I’d go with a group of hearty friends for a 45-miler in the hills or on a 50-miler to New Egypt. On colder days I’d join an even heartier group for a few hours on our mountain bikes in the Pinelands. And then there was the gym, always the gym, during the week, with occasional guidance from a trainer who found pleasure in pushing my muscles to their limit.

When the weather got warmer, my rides got longer and hillier. This year I found bigger hills sooner and tackled them more often. By June I had lost count of the number of metric centuries I’d completed.

And I wasn’t the toughest one out there, either. Some people were training for the Longest Day by riding centuries every weekend. Even more were training for the 500-mile, week-long Anchor House ride from Vermont to Trenton. They’d find every hill within fifty miles of the Delaware River and climb each one over and over again, seventy miles at a time, every weekend. Compared to these people I was a downright wimp.

I was doing pretty well. I even survived a relentlessly hilly metric in early June on a day where the heat index topped one hundred degrees. Sure, I was tired at the end, but I walked away from it convinced I was ready for the American Cancer Society century in July.

Then something started to happen at the gym, as it seems to do every summer: I couldn’t get my heart rate up in Spinning class. No matter how fast I spun, no matter how much resistance I put on the bike, my heart rate refused to go over 75% maximum. I was shooting for 80%, even 85%, but it just wouldn’t happen. I expected this because I figured I was training for endurance outdoors. The only time I could get anaerobic anymore was on a big hill. When this starts to happen it’s usually around the time I take a vacation anyway. But not this year.

Things got worse. I got a sinus infection. I stopped being able to sleep through the night. I got an ear infection. I started falling asleep on the train home from work. I got another sinus infection. I felt draggy at work during the day and wired at night. I felt nauseated a lot.

In spite of all of this, I completed the American Cancer Society century at more or less the same pace I handle any other century. I went to the gym two days later and was surprised to find that my starting heart rate was higher than usual. But it still wouldn’t budge over 75%.

Then yesterday I tackled a hilly ride on another hot day. There was nothing on this ride I hadn’t been able to handle a month before. Yet my heart rate went so high in the middle of a hill that I felt nauseous and dizzy and had to stop, something I haven’t had to do on a hill since my early cycling days. I felt dizzy and shaky for many miles after that, and had to sit by the side of the road at the top of a much gentler hill twenty miles later. It wasn’t the heat. “Something’s definitely wrong,” I said.

Last night I didn’t sleep through. In the early hours of the morning I strapped on my heart rate monitor and went back to sleep. When I woke again I checked my resting heart rate. It was 9 beats per minute higher than the last time I’d checked it.

Something is definitely wrong, and I know what it is: I’m overtrained.

A quick search on the web reveals a host of overtraining symptoms, not all of which I have:

persistent fatigue (yep);
elevated resting heart rate (uh-huh);
muscle soreness (now that you mention it…);
increased infection susceptibility (got it);
increased incidence of injuries (dodged that bullet);
irritability (nope – the hills are too pretty for that);
depression (see above);
loss of motivation (see above);
insomnia (in spades);
decreased appetite (I wish);
decreased sexual performance (none of your business!);
weight loss (they say that like it’s a bad thing);
increased cortisol (stress hormone) levels (beats me);
headaches (no more than usual);
sudden inability to complete workouts (do big hills count?)
inability to concentrate (do boring meetings at work count?)

All the articles I read say the same thing: to overcome overtraining, you need to REST. I know this is difficult for us to accept and even tougher to do. But for someone who has been experiencing overtraining symptoms for even four weeks, as little as five days off can be enough to give the body time to repair damaged muscles and reduce stress.

So, as of this writing I hereby swear off my bike and the gym for a week. I will test my waking heart rate at the end of the week and decide what to do from there. Meanwhile, I hope to start sleeping through the night and to get a lot of stuff done that I just haven’t had time to do for the past few months.

I know there are a lot of you out there who could use some time away from the bike. Do yourself a favor and get a little rest. We have the Princeton Event century coming up in a few weeks. Let’s be ready for it.




For more in-depth reading on overtraining, see:


http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/overtraining.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtraining
http://exercise.about.com/cs/exercisehealth/a/toomuchexercise.htm

http://sportsinjuries.suite101.com/article.cfm/overtraining_syndrome