The danger is that novice racers often try to achieve too much. Unless they exercise caution, impetuous and overzealous racers will find themselves falling prey to the most common, and least understood of all running ailments--overtraining. An important observation made by Heiss (1971), described an increased susceptibility to infection as an important component of the overtraining syndrome. In some runners, the first signs of overtraining are generalized fatigue, recurrent headaches, weight loss, sleep problems. All fail to understand why, despite such hard training, their racing performances continue to deteriorate. Probably the earliest scientific reference to overtraining was made by McKenzie (1923) who noted fatigue of the whole muscular system requires a day or two of rest, chronic fatigue (slow poisoning of the nervous system) also called 'staleness' could require a week or even months. The urgency to train even harder is only exacerbated by the time lost as a result of illness and fatigue. But because these assumptions are wholly incorrect, the athlete's bout of intensive training only compounds an already grave situation. The truth is that once athletes are even mildly over trained, they are already past peak condition. The only way to save the situation is to stop training until the body is rested and the desire to run and complete return. Excerpt from the Fourth Edition of the Lore of Running, by Tim Noakes, MD. In other words, I rode my spin bike 16 miles at 19 MPH instead of running today and counted it as 4 miles. | 