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Do you have any of the following symptoms?

• Your performance in training is below par.
• Your legs feel “heavy.”
• You’re sleeping more than usual, less than usual or your sleep is disturbed.
• You always seem to be ill, especially with coughs, colds and other upper-respiratory infections
• You get injured easily and “everything hurts.”
• You’re irritable and anxious - your partner says you’re impossible to live with!
• You can’t concentrate and struggle to make decisions.
• You feel sad, depressed and just can’t see the bright side of anything in life.
• You feel stale and burnt-out.
• You’re not eating well, because you’re not hungry.
• You can’t face training and if you were asked to race right now, you wouldn’t bother.

What’s going on? Isn’t exercise meant to “cure” most of these symptoms?

The chances are that you’re over-trained, or as I like to put it, you’ve been over-living.

“I can’t possibly be over-trained, I’ve only done 5 hours this week! And not much more last week!” I hear this kind of thing from a lot of athletes that I feel have been over-living and who present with the symptoms at the top of this post. And they’d be right, the training is likely not the crux of the problem. It’s all the other stressors in their lives that, added to their training, have pushed them over the edge.

You see, when you are training, you stress your system (mind, body, spirit). The idea is that your system will respond to the stress and become stronger as a result. But for this to work, the stress has to be just a bit above what your system can handle.

The problem arises when you have not only the stress of training, but work stress, family stress, friend stress and all the other stuff that makes up life. And it doesn’t seem to matter that very little of this stress is exercise-related, stress of all types has a negative physiological effect. All kinds of chemicals are released into your bloodstream, which in amounts that are too large, can play havoc with your nervous system.

As an aside, it always helps to imagine that you’re not a 21st century human, but still living in a cave with only your basic biological imperatives to deal with (essentially to eat, sleep and reproduce). These are the things that your system is set up to deal with, it’s not intended to deal with falling stock markets, angry employers, nagging spouses, tearful children, driving in rush hour when you’re late, deadlines…. And the stress response to all of those is in some measure, the same as facing a wild animal or another human competing for your food. But unlike our ancestors, who’d face this sort of thing once a week, some of us are facing it in some measure, once every five minutes!

So, we’ve established that you’re over-living, what do we do about it? Here are a few things that I suggest:

• Reduce your training volume and intensity for a few weeks - don’t stop altogether, but leave out the sessions that are hard to fit in.
• Use your training as a stress release and don’t allow it to be a stressor - leave your heart rate monitor, power meter, gps device and even your watch at home and just do the training in a way that makes you feel good.
• Change where you’re training - you know the old adage, “a change is as good as a rest”? Well, a change of scenery can work wonders for your training too.
• Go running with the dog… at his pace - I take my dog out around the local dune system and just enjoy watching him futilely chase rabbits while I jog slowly along the paths. Just Eddie & me, no-one else in sight, it works wonders for my mood.
• Look at the other stuff in your life and see where you can reduce the extra stress. Sometimes this just isn’t possible, but you’d be surprised - simply excluding the cat from my office in the two hours before mealtimes has lowered my stress levels immensely!

In the end, there really is only one way to recover from over-living (over-training) and that’s relative rest. You’ve just got to slow down and let your system catch up. When it does, you’ll be fitter, but until you give it the opportunity, it hasn’t got a chance.

Tomorrow, the cautionary tale of my friend, Mac.