Lessons Learned - When to say When

Let me ask you this question. During one of your training seasons, have you ever had an injury where you lost a few weeks of training. Or perhaps you feel your workouts were not at the level they should. Then, you consciously decided to increase your training frequency or intensity to a level beyond what your schedule required? (Perhaps against the advice of the coach you pay good money for)? I have. And the results should be known. So read this before you decide whether you want to run those extra miles.

The Season Begins

I started this year's season will the intention of running another full marathon in May. I had signed up for a season of training with Marathon Dynamics (my second season with them), did their standard mile test, and received my schedule. I was already to go with one exception - a fun trip to Whistler for some snowboarding (and perhaps a few beers) for one week. Then I would be off to the races (so to speak). :)

It is said that the best laid plans often go astray. And they did. My fun trip to Whistler resulted in a snowboarding accident (the details of are best suited for a different forum). The injury was to my right shoulder. No bones were broken, but it seemed to be badly pulled; bad enough that I could not move my right arm very much. And while it is true that I don't run on my hands, the arm was sufficiently stiff that even the normal cadence of them caused substantial pain for a light jog. In short, 5 weeks lost in my scchedule.

Time to Catch Up

In the first week back to the grind, I found that I was struggling to keep pace to where I should have been at. After a week or two my pace did improve and I felt truly ready to push. And push I did. In order to "catch" missed training, I started running every day (albeit several of these were light runs). On day twelve I had run each day but one. My body felt week, my legs were sore, and I have less energy (and I'm usually wound-up, so that's odd!). To add insult to (post) injury, it was mile repeats with the group. The short result of that was that my repeats were not on pace for what I was supposed to do (even after factoring my injury), much slower than last season, and the repeats completely drained me. That night when I got home (and the next day), I really felt horrible.

My saving grace - I recognized what I should have known. That I was pushing my body beyond what it could take. I eased up and did not run for two days, did easy pace for my long run (I didn't want to skip that), told another day off, then went back to the 4 run a week schedule.

The Result

The next week I was back at the track with the group. On deck for us - 400m repeats (i.e. pushing even harder than the 1 mile repeats). But I had the opposite out come - better times than I was scheduled to do, and a super fast extra last lap where I gave 110%! And I felt good when it was done!

The important lesson here is that when training the human body to get better, it must be first pushed hard, but then it needs adequate recovery to get better. My error was I was pushing each day but not giving my body time to rebuilt and adapt. Had a cut out a few runs over those twelve days I would have been further ahead than I ended up at. And more important, I was lucky in that I did not injury myself.

And my bad is that I already knew over-training was not good and should have known better. But sometimes we can make the same mistakes over again. Learn from me and don't over-train!