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Mac was an awesome triathlete. In fact, so was his wife.And yes, I’ve changed their names, just in case they read this…

The problem with Mac & his missus was that they weren’t quite “the best” athletes around at the time. And of course, what do you do when your results aren’t what you’d like them to be? That’s right, you train more & you train harder. So, that’s what they set out to do. The way they tell it - we had yet to meet at the time this was going on - they were knocking out 40-hour training weeks with plenty of intensity thrown in. And they were working full time jobs.

Whenever the results didn’t quite meet their expectations, they simply threw in more intensity & trained harder. And the results never got any better. It never actually occurred to Mac that if they simply slowed down for a couple of weeks, they’d recover & would perform better.

Tragically, by the time I met Mac & his wife, they were both suffering not from acute over-training syndrome (which responds well to a period of relative rest), but from chronic long term over-training. The result of this was that neither was able to train at all any more. Mac told me one day that after 3 months of doing nothing (including having given up his job), he went for a 20-minute run… and then slept for 24-hours, after which he was exhausted for days. This pattern had been repeating itself for a few years, he said.

Unfortunately, due to us both moving away and this being pre-internet, we lost contact. I have no idea how Mac is today, although I did see his wife’s name on a result sheet a couple of years back. And she was once again, somewhere near the top of the field. It seems that years of rest had allowed her system to repair itself.

The 3 years that Mac & I spent living in the same city, regularly meeting up for coffee (although I can’t remember what he drank, probably camomile tea) served as a lifelong warning to me, also a “mega-mileage monster”, that there is a point at which your system is telling you to slow down for a bit.

The trick is to listen!