Relentless Forward Progress_ A Guide to Running Ultramarathons - Bryon Powell [21]
In the end, the best diagnosis is having a coach or experienced runner look at your training and lifestyle.
Rest and Recovery
If you find yourself overreaching or overtraining, William Henderson, a physician and exercise physiologist, suggests, “There are two broad areas to think about. If overreaching and overtraining are a mismatch of stress and recovery, then you must fix the balance by both decreasing stress and increasing recovery.”
To recover, initially assume that you are overreaching. However, don’t completely stop training. Instead, reduce your training volume by 30 to 40 percent. Dr. Henderson notes, “You can keep the intensity in your training. It’s all about reducing volume.”
If two weeks’ recovery doesn’t have you feeling better, then more rest is likely warranted. You are overtrained. Continue to modify your training as you did during the first two weeks of rest. Full recovery from overtraining can take months or even years in extreme cases.
Also, examine other aspects of your life. Diet and sleep are crucial for recovery; many of us, however, skimp here. Aim for at least eight hours of sleep. To meet your caloric and nutritional needs, eat enough fat and protein, emphasize whole foods over processed foods, and hydrate well during and after workouts.
Don’t stop there, though. Work life, troubled relationships, and other life-related stressors can hold back your training. No matter how difficult, address big issues, too.
The Finish Line
Most endurance athletes who have seriously trained for a few years have experienced one of the fatigue states described here. But the conditions are “as common or more common in amateur athletes as in professional athletes,” says Dr. Henderson. “They don’t have the ability to focus on stress or especially on recovery that professional athletes do.”
The good news is that 90 percent of runners who think they are overtraining are only overreaching. Therefore, most of the time a runner who feels burnout can be back training at full volume in half a month if he or she reducing stressors and increases recovery during that time.
This essay is adapted from the article “The Dreaded FOMO: Manage Stress and Recovery to Maximize Performance” that I wrote for the January 2011 issue of Trail Runner magazine.
Do You Need a Coach?
Perhaps it’s odd for a training guidebook to consider whether or not you need a coach. No matter, for it’s possible for you to use this book as well as a coach to prepare for an ultramarathon. So why in the world would you want to work with a coach anyway? While individual coaching is not for everyone, there are many good reasons why a coach might be right for you.
First, even with available instruction through a guide such as this, many aspiring ultrarunners or ones looking for improvement seek reassurance that they are making the right decisions along the way. Think of it as a mentoring relationship. Such relationships are particularly valuable for a runner who hasn’t engaged the local ultra-running community, as the coach and runner can discuss strategy and logistics in addition to developing a training program.
Such aid might be particularly valuable if your first attempt (or attempts) at ultramarathoning turned out very poorly. Here, a coach reassures you that you can run an ultra well and are on a path to do so.
A coach might also be right if you desire accountability in your training. While a coach in this sort of relationship develops a training program and mentors the runner, simply being there as “Big Brother” is key. Many runners use a coach as a motivating tool to get out there for runs when they otherwise wouldn’t. However, some astute runners bring on a coach to make certain they aren’t training too much. As is alluded to above, it is quite common for endurance runners and especially those new to ultrarunning to overindulge. Coaches can keep runners accountable regarding