By Jayme Otto
After disappointing performances in a couple of key tune-up races last year, a depleted Ryan Hall made the hard decision to withdraw from the Chicago Marathon. Too many grinding 25-kilometre tempo runs at 3:06 per kilometre pace at a 2 100-metre altitude with too little rest afterwards had finally caught up with him.
‘I love to push my body,’ he says. ‘Recovery is the hardest part of training for me.’
Problem is, if you don’t take time for proper R&R, your body won’t adapt to the stress of your training – you won’t get stronger or faster, explains Dr Stacy Sims from the Stanford Prevention-Research Centre, School of Medicine. Neglect recovery for too long and you will start to lose strength and speed. You’ll sink into the black hole known as overtraining.
First, your sleep patterns and energy levels will feel the effects. Eventually, your immune system crashes, and you lose your appetite. It’s like burning out your engine. And you don’t have to be logging 160km weeks to suffer. Recreational runners can overtrain, too. ‘With deadlines, chores, bills, kids, and lack of sleep, it’s more challenging to recover properly from your runs,’ says Sims.
So in preparation for the 2011 Boston Marathon, Hall used an online recovery-tracking programme called Restwise, which looks at simple biological markers input
by the athlete first thing each morning, calculates a daily recovery score from1 to 100, then trends it over time.
Pay attention to the following 10 markers. If three or more of these indicators raise a red flag, you should consider a few easy sessions or off days so you can return to running strong.
Says Hall, ‘Now I’m learning to love to rest.’
1) Body Mass: You lost weight from yesterday
A 2% drop in weight from one day to the next indicates a body-fluid fluctuation. It’s very likely you didn’t hydrate enough during or after your last workout. Dehydration negatively impacts both physical and mental performance, and could compromise the quality of your next workout.
2) Resting Heart Rate: Your resting heart rate is elevated
Take your pulse each morning before you get out of bed to find what’s normal for you. An elevated resting heart rate is one sign of stress. It means your nervous system prepared for fight or flight by releasing hormones that sped up your heart to move more oxygen to the muscles and brain. Your body won’t know the difference between physical and psychological stress. A hard run and a hard day at work both require extra recovery.
3) Sleep: You didn’t sleep well or enough
A pattern of consistently good sleep will give you a boost of growth hormones, which are great for rebuilding muscle fibres. Several nights in a row of bad sleep will decrease reaction time along with immune, motor, and cognitive functions – not a good combination for a workout.
4) Hydration: Your pee is dark yellow
This can be an indicator of dehydration, barring the consumption of vitamins, supplements, or certain foods the evening before. The darker the colour, the more you’re struggling to retain fluids, because there’s not enough to go around. You need H2O to operate (and recover).
5) Energy Level: You’re run down
If your energy level is low, there’s something amiss. The key is honesty. Athletes can block out signs of fatigue to push through it, thinking it will make them stronger. It won’t always work that way.
6) Mood State: You’re cranky
When your body is overwhelmed by training (or other stressors), it produces hormones like cortisol that can cause irritability or anxiety. Stress also halts chemicals like dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that has a big bummer effect on mood when depleted. Crankiness probably means not enough recovery.
7) Wellness: You’re sick
Any illness, or even a woman’s menstrual cycle, will increase your need for energy to refuel your immune system, which is having to work overtime. This means
fewer resources available for recovering from training.
8) Pain: You’re sore or nursing an injury
Whether you’re sore from overworked muscles or an injury, your body needs more energy to put towards repair, lengthening total recovery time.
9) Performance: Your workout went poorly
This is a subjective measure of workout quality, not quantity or intensity. If you felt great on yesterday’s run, you’d evaluate that as good. If you felt sluggish on that same run, you’d count it as poor. Trending workout quality – multiple poors in a row – is one of the easiest ways to identify the need for more recovery.
10) Oxygen Saturation: Your oxygen level has dipped
The amount of oxygen in the hemoglobin of the red blood cells can be measured by placing your fingertip in a portable pulse oximeter (a gadget that’s available online). The higher the percentage, the better: Above 95% is the norm at sea level or for an athlete who is fully acclimatised to a given altitude. This is a new area in recovery science, and requires more research, but there may be a link between low oxygen saturation and the need for more recovery.
COUNT YOUR FLAGS:
The Restwise Algorithm assigns more weight to some markers (e.g. performance) than others (e.g. mood), along with other factors to generate a precise recovery score. But you can get a sense for your ballpark recovery quality by tallying the red flags (left) that you average per day in a week.
0–1, Green light: You are clear to train hard.
2–4, Caution: You can go ahead with a hard workout if your training plan calls for it, but cut it short if it feels too hard. Better yet, take an easy day – or a day off.
5–6, Warning: You’re entering the danger zone, which could be intentional according to your periodisation or peaking protocol. If not, back off.
7–10 , Danger: You require mandatory time off, ranging from a day to a week, depending on the severity of your fatigue and what you’ve seen over the previous few days and weeks. You may also need to visit your doctor.
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If only we would actually listen to our bodies. We often get caught up in what OTHERS do and say, instead of taking it easy sometimes.
When you are disciplined, and don’t back down for every little disturbance along the way, you should know when there are real warning signs, and adhere.
The most important thing is to remember why you do what you do. Is it because the competition is taking over, or is it as it should be – you love to run?
Let us not forget that we run because we can, because it is good for us, as long as it does not take over every other aspect in our lives. it should be a healthy obsession!! And an inspiring one. So often people on a roll just put other potential runners off in stead of setting a good example. So when you do put those running shoes on, say a prayer of thanks that you are in good health, that you have a strong body and that you are blessed to participate in an activity that providing you handle it sensibly, will give you a lean and strong body.
It is sometimes difficult to ‘listen to one’s body’ as very often your body will be telling you to lie in, pig out on chocolate and read a good book. Very often I don’t feel like a run and it is very easy to convince myself that I am overtraining. But after having the run, I feel energised. I think what is needed are objective signs of over-training such as this article provides.