xenonscreams wrote:
Most of the collegiate women I know who "burned out" (they are hardly running anymore and not nearly as fast as they used to be) just ran so intensely in college that they really didn't desire to run that intensely after college. I think for women at least it's usually more mental/emotional than it is physical.
You're above advice about each runner needing to be seen and trained individually is wise.
I hate it when people ascribe any piece of burnout to being "mental."
Do you really want to stigmatize young runners with that concept?
Do you believe that the mind and body are separate?
Sure, maybe some females can get burned out on the team intensity of things etc.
Some kids get burned out on 4 years of college classes and don't ever want to take a class with such pressure again. Some go on to med school. Everyone has different wiring and resiliency.
But many female runners are not over trained, not over pressurized, and find life long running an everlasting joy. Those are the women with smart coaches, and a smart sense of health and balance and life long fitness as their goals.
Even when there is a mental component to burnout, burnout, to me, is always physical. The thinking brain and the emotional brain components to the brain are all in the body and influenced by nutrition and rest etc. etc. etc.
Bowerman used to say that each runner needs to be seen as an individual, that not all runners could handle the same workload, and he paid proactive attention to that. The most classic example, is in his program runners ran intervals or hard, 3 times a week. Kenny Moore was cut back to 2 times a week, because he broke down, lost weight, got injured when he ran hard 3 times a week. Kenny Moore went on to take 4th in the Olympic marathon in addition to many other fine accomplishments in running.
Bowerman also said that it was easier to recover from under training than over training, and that you should always leave the track, or a workout, feeling like you'd left a little bit more that you could have done out there on the track or the trail. You wanted you to leave the hard workouts exhilarated and with a hunger for more -- not spent and exhausted.
--I'm sure there are athletes that can leave the track crawling (like Mo tweeted some months back), however, the above was Bowerman's philosophy, and probably a wise one.
Never risk over training.