To Train or to Overtrain, That, is the Question

(3/14-3/22)

After two days of being nauseas, exhausted, and irritable, I was finally able to accept / admit that something was wrong with me. Following my training session last Wednesday something just didn’t feel right. I was queasy all day and just the thought of food made me sick. A disinterest in food is always cause for alarm for me – that just doesn’t happen; not to me, at least! I tried to blame it on the cupcake I ate before my ride but after the feeling persisted I had to give up that theory. Even though I should have been famished after my brutally hard work out, I couldn’t eat. Over the course of the next three days I hardly ate at all, slept nearly round the clock and lost two and a half pounds.

My husband and my coach both were able to identify the signs and knew this wasn’t a stomach bug or virus. These were clear indications of Overtraining. The Overtraining was brought on by a sequence of events. In Joe Freill’s Cyclist Training Bible, he describes overtraining as an “imbalance between training and rest”. This imbalance was a combination of too frequent workouts, for too long, at too high an intensity, over a short period of time. During the workshop on Saturday, 3/14 we had done a 90 minute class with 60 minutes or so of interval training (anaerobic). On Sunday, 3/15 I went for a long training ride – 45 miles in 3 hours. We neglected to bring fuel so my glycogen stores were completely deleted about 2 hours in. I could feel that something was seriously wrong after the ride because my heart rate didn’t recover to its normal ambient heart rate, even hours after the ride. Then I had a hard power workout on Wednesday, 3/18 for 2 hours, with over an hour being spent in Zone 4. I had increased my training load by too much in too short a period of time, without giving adequate rest or any chance to adapt. This was its way of fighting back.

Fortunately we caught it early on enough that it only required 3 or 4 days of rest. Now that I am feeling good, I’m ready to get back into my training! I do plan on continuing to work hard and increase my training loads, but will try to have a better training plan, making sure to increase the loads by no more than 10-15% at a time. Now that I know some of the warning signs, I hope I can be disciplined enough to back off when I need to.