Avoid the Extremes

Consistency is the key to progressing as a runner. It’s infinitely easier to stay motivated if you can see that you’re able to steadily chip away at your goals. Try to avoid the extremes of overdoing it or not doing it.
Most of this chapter is about how to keep running. You want to know how to prevent those spells where you don’t run for a week or two at a time and see your progress erode. Avoiding these spells is important because psychologically, periods of low motivation can feed on each other so that the less you run, the more frustrated you get, and the more you feel like giving up because your goals seem farther and farther away. Physically, it’s important to keep at it because after as little as one week away from running, you start to lose the benefits. One study found that after only two to three weeks of inactivity, a group of runners lost almost half of their aerobic fitness. Talk about use it or lose it!
But consider the other extreme on the motivation scale. Runners are ambitious people; after all, no one is making you do this sometimes difficult thing. Just by starting a running program, you’ve shown that you are motivated. Problems can arise when that motivation runs amok. You can get so fired up that you start running more than you’re ready for. In that case, you’re overtraining. When that happens, you’ll eventually either get injured or get so burned out that you won’t want to run. In either case, you’ll be as susceptible to seeing your fitness slip away as if you were undermotivated.
Overtraining is most common in highly ambitious runners who think that more miles are always better than fewer miles. They base their training more on reaching a certain number of miles per week than on structuring their training to best meet their goals. As a result, they wind up running a lot of junk miles. Also, they usually don’t meet their goals, and they get injured and feel flat pretty easily. Because the amount of running people can handle varies so much from individual to individual, overtraining can happen at what might seem like a low level of mileage. If you go from being sedentary to running 15 miles a week within a month, you’re putting far more stress on your body than if you were a long-time runner who increased his or her mileage from 40 to 55 miles per week. Unfortunately, overtraining isn’t like a broken leg, where you definitely know what’s bothering you. Its symptoms are many, and they can be caused by a lot of things besides just running too much.
Still, there are some ways to determine whether you’re overtrained or to prevent overtraining in the first place.
One of the best ways is to regularly measure your resting heart rate, or pulse. Over the course of several mornings, see how many times your heart beats in one minute when you first wake. If possible, try to take your pulse on mornings when you don’t wake to an alarm clock. Your resting heart rate is usually going to be within a few beats of the same measure from day to day. If your resting heart rate is more than five beats per minute higher than usual, something’s up. You might be on the verge of getting sick, or you might be dehydrated, or you might be under a lot of stress. For whatever reason, your heart has to work harder than usual just to maintain your body’s systems at rest. If that’s the case, then think how much harder than usual it’s going to have to work when you run.
If your morning pulse remains elevated for a few consecutive days, you need to take it easy. If you’re not sick, or can’t otherwise explain why your pulse might be higher than usual, then you’re on the verge of overtraining. If you keep running at your usual level, you are risking injury and staleness.
Other signs of overtraining are the following:

• No desire to run on most days
• Lower energy during the day and when you run
• “Heavy” legs that don’t feel better as you run
• An otherwise unaccountable drop in running performance
• Abnormal sleep (either too much or not enough)
• Unexplained, increased irritability
• Frequent minor colds and infections

The more of these symptoms you have had for at least a week straight, the more likely it is that you’re overtrained. If so, cut your running by half and limit yourself to a very easy pace.
Good records in your training log will help you note trends in your running. You can get a better sense of if you’re on the verge of overtraining, as well as learn how much is too much from past mistakes.
Two things are important to note here about overtraining. How much running it takes to make you overtrained depends on not only how much you’ve been running lately, but what else has been going on in your life. If there has recently been a lot of stress in your life, even if it’s a lot of good stress, your usual running routine is going to take more out of you. Be more careful about not overdoing it when you’re deep in the weeds of a major project at work, or you’ve just moved, or a loved one is ill in the hospital.
Also, variation in how you feel from day to day is unavoidable in running. So any of those signs of overtraining might hit you on a given day. Don’t immediately assume that you’re on the verge of falling apart. It’s when a majority of them occur day after day that you’re probably overtrained, not just when you’re feeling a little sluggish. With more running experience, you’ll be better able to know which warning signs are serious, and which ones are transitory and par for the course.