Does anyone ever look at their training logs and go “aw yeah, I’m really training pretty stupidly right now, I’m gonna keep destroying my fitness until I get a stress fracture!” I really don’t think so. If we knew we were making training mistakes, I’d think most of us would immediately stop and reformulate. But the fact is that we all come down with injuries at some point or another, and most of them can be traced back to a root cause. It’s usually some combination of over-training or under-resting, with a little bit of not doing preventative exercises thrown in for flavor.

The Question

As a relatively new runner, I still struggle to know when I’m pushing too hard. Of course intervals are going to hurt a little – that’s the point, right? And the training plan called for 12 x 400, so at rep 10, I’d expect to have to be going to the well just a little bit to get these done on pace. It’s not like my legs are falling off, they’re just a little dead. Later that day at work, climbing the stairs feels worse than the last 100m of a 5K, but that’s to be expected. Stairs are obviously awful after a workout. I’m a little tired throughout the day, but there’s a reason the pros get like 10 hours of sleep a night plus a nap.

Those things all sound pretty normal when you think about it. So how is anyone supposed to know when they’re pushing too hard and no longer building fitness? This applies even more to runners, who are stereotypically type-A overachievers. How are people who have learned their whole lives that working harder produces better results supposed to sit back and…rest?

What’s the Answer?

I don’t have an answer, I just have a year of injury cycles that I’m trying to learn from. Is that intuition something you pick up on as time goes on or am I just oblivious to the signs of impending injury? We all know the signs of true Overtraining Syndrome, but none of those things applied in the example above. Resting heart rates should rise and HRVs should go down if true overtraining were present. There would be inescapable fatigue. Your fitness levels would drop and what was once easy would now be impossible. In short, you’d _know_ if you were suffering from Overtraining Syndrome. But there’s an area between that and healthy, positive training stress that’s destructive and can cause injury.

I picked up Peak Performance by Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg last week to read while I’m whittling my time away on the stationary bike. It goes into detail about productive training stress versus destructive training stress and how it can affect your fitness. But I’m not sure it’s possible to convey how to find the line between the two in words. Maybe it’s something that other people can pick up on even if you can’t. Maybe that’s a good reason to have a coach or a training group you see pretty frequently. I’m not completely sure, but it’s something I’d love to hear some experts and long-time runners talk about.

Looking for Answers Myself

There’s still a distinct possibility that this is Compartment Syndrome and that there wasn’t really much I could do to avoid this happening. If that’s true, maybe I didn’t screw up in my training. Maybe it was a problem that I was going to run into sooner or later. Even if that is the case, I think this is still an important topic to explore. Even if this particular one wasn’t a training error, the last one was, and the one before that. It’s something runners and everyone in endurance sports will struggle with as long as they continue to train and compete.

Today I noticed my lower legs were feeling taut and just…bad. As much as I want to run today, I’m going to take the day off from aerobic exercise. I’ll just stretch, roll, strengthen and work specifically on some ankle mobility. I’m going to kick it off by firing up my yoga app and then cap it off with a bunch of sleep tonight.

If I don’t change my approach to training, I’m going to continue to run into the same pitfalls that have me here in the first place. The same goes for all of us both in running and in life. If we don’t ask the questions, we’ll probably never get the answers we need to move forward and improve.