Huge Drop in Performance During Later Stage of Marathon Training; Severe Overtraining, Underfueling or Something Else...?

That's pretty standard and the whole reason you have a taper period. You've got to trust the freshness will return when your milage reduces dramatically.

Sounds like some overtraining and/or usual marathon training. It's great that you weren't running slower than 6:35 pace on easy runs but maybe you should have been. Maybe you weren't listening to your body and your HR was a little high to recover in between sessions & now you're being told to calm down. Idk.

On the iron stuff, yes, you can get a bad reading if you take supplements on the day you draw blood. I would go back & draw iron, vitamin d, full metabolic panel, thyroid, etc. Throw in as much as your PCP will allow. Tell them you're a runner and you want to check all the boxes.

The sleep looks not great and the calories look low. Everything probably just caught up to you with the volume/intensity you were doing. I would float an easy week with no quality. Normal volume and normal long run. Eat. Sleep. Hydrate. Do the blood work. If everything is good, get back to it. Missing one mid-week interval session is fine. Get on top of the little things & you'll be ready to run a good marathon. Just looks like you pushed a little too hard.

I just think you’re tired from the extra mileage and possible dehydrated. Jog your easy runs for a couple-few weeks and make sure you’re drinking enough. I bet you’ll acclimate and bounce back. Grind on!

Vacilated wrote:

I just think you’re tired from the extra mileage and possible dehydrated. Jog your easy runs for a couple-few weeks and make sure you’re drinking enough. I bet you’ll acclimate and bounce back. Grind on!

Dehydrated might be a very good call! Although my pee is often clear, I am thirsty all. the. time.

Plus, I've been training all summer in the absolutely brutal Maryland humidity.

TheAviator1997 wrote:

Vacilated wrote:

I just think you’re tired from the extra mileage and possible dehydrated. Jog your easy runs for a couple-few weeks and make sure you’re drinking enough. I bet you’ll acclimate and bounce back. Grind on!

Dehydrated might be a very good call! Although my pee is often clear, I am thirsty all. the. time.

Plus, I've been training all summer in the absolutely brutal Maryland humidity.

Something similar happened to me - I raised my mileage by about 20%, at the same time the weather was cooling off and instead of increasing fluid intake with the extra workload, I actually reduced it. Started feeling super sluggish, workouts that were easy to recover from a couple months prior now seemed to tear me down in new ways. Making an effort to hydrate better during/after runs and jogging those recovery runs brought me out of the woods without sacrificing the workouts or dropping much mileage.

Overtraining. Without seeing your full training, it sounds like you were doing workouts ahead of your fitness, running easy runs too hard, and not sleeping enough. Might be able to pop back if you back off the intensity and just run for a couple weeks.

Overtrained. And your volume bump was too high, not just the intensity issue at play.

This training overarching training error messed with your sleep quality, which has increased your inflammation and dropped your testosterone. This as daily sunlight has declined/ seasonal and time change taking a toll. Likely some insulin resistance here as well. Your body is trying to stop you from even deeper troubles.

You can't eat your way out of this, and your calories aren't especially low. Iron, not the issue either, will only worsen your circumstances. Three weeks light 30-40/week (deliberate under-training), followed by a couple decent 10 - 12 mile runs at ~5:45. If you can't get through those tougher sessions with confidence, cancel the marathon or just use it as a 25k at <2:29 pace.

It's pretty standard for your easy pace to slow down towards the end of a marathon build-up; you'll see that recover towards the end of your taper. You should still be able to hit most of the workouts, though. I think the most obvious reason for that is lack of sleep. You'll just need to find a way to cut something else out of your life so you can get at least 8 hours a night, or at the very least find time for naps during the week and get more sleep on the weekends. Be more efficient with your running time if you aren't already; on workout days, run to wherever you're doing the workout as your warmup, go strait into the workout, jog the rest, and cool down back to home. If you get a week of good sleep I bet you'll get back on track.

Is this your first marathon? I might have missed that… for me, that is usually how I feel at the end of a marathon training block. I get to the point where I’m running about a minute slower than normal on my easy days and wondering how in the world I could ever run 2-3 minutes faster per mile for 26.2 miles. Tempo runs seem impossible. I think this means that you’re doing things right. I will say that there is a thin line and you should definitely be careful and maybe take a few days easy with some shorter strides and then see how you feel (just to be safe).

I was averaging about 4-5 hours of sleep before my marathon PR and feeling absolutely awful. I did a two week taper where I literally jogged as slow as possible. My heart rate was too high for what it should have been, and it was making me nervous. I did a few strides after each run in that last week and never felt so good on race day. I was running about 100mpw and my last two weeks went from 80 to 60 (including the marathon). I still think you might need to eat a bit more, though. I’m always well over 3,000 in the middle of marathon training.

Long story short, I find that a lot of people on here are quick to say that you overtrained. I think that’s the nature of marathon training to feel awful during training and even well into the taper. As I said, I didn’t feel good until race day, and it couldn’t have gone better.

Best of luck to you! Have confidence in how hard you have trained so far. I really believe that with a smart taper you’ll achieve that sub 2:30 marathon. Besides for maybe needing to sleep and eat a bit more, I think you've done marathon training right! Let us know in November!

noworries wrote:I think that’s the nature of marathon training to feel awful during training and even well into the taper. As I said, I didn’t feel good until race day, and it couldn’t have gone better.

I'm going to say that it differs, based on the athlete. We all vary in how well we can rebound out of a hole. You sound like you can dig yourself in pretty deeply, and then rebound nicely for race day. Others (like myself) don't have that ability and have to be careful not to overshoot.

Only one way for the OP to find out where on the scale they fall.

I’ve had something very similar happen recently. Went from training well (also targeting a fall marathon) to completely crashing and burning over the period of several weeks. Can’t hit workouts, easy runs feel hard, readying heart rate has gone up 10-15 bpm, and the constant niggles - one of which has turned into a full blown injury.

I got a blood test and my ferritin was low (iron levels normal). I think taking a supplement prior to a blood draw can impact it. I would get another test if I were you. I had several other things tested as well. My doctor was concerned that my kidney function showed some damage due to dehydration. I was training hard in hot and humid conditions and don’t think I was properly hydrating. I would get another test if I were you. And ask for more than just an iron panel. I’m no expert, but to me your symptoms sound like something other than taper and/or just marathon training.

Agreed on the ferritin; I bet OP got a false positive from the exercise and day-of supplementation.

TheAviator1997 wrote:

At the end of the day, what the heck do you think is wrong with me? In that same vein, is there any chance of me salvaging my marathon with almost exactly a month to go? Thanks a lot, and run safe!

You have a month to turn this around. That's plenty of time if you are fatigued rather than ill.

Hi, all! OP here. Thank you for all of your great comments.

I wanted to note that, in the week since I made this post, my lymph nodes got super swollen, my throat turned sore, and I’ve been having terrible sinus and ear pain. My resting and walking heart rate have been ridiculously high to boot. I tested negative for COVID, but my doctor and I suspect some sort of viral infection. I wonder if my performance decline — in addition to classic overtraining — was due to that.

I just got the results back from my blood test, it was as follows, for whomever is curious:

-Ferritin: 67 ng/dL

-Iron: 77 mg/dL

-Iron Saturation: 22% [LOW]

-TIBC: 344 mcg/dL (calc)

-Hemoglobin: 16.2 g/dL

-Hemocrit: 45.7%

-Platelets: 198 thousand/uL

-WBC: 9.2 Thousand/uL

-RBC: 4.71 million/uL

I'm no expert, but to me, it sounds like you've fried your body and the various systems that are important for running a good marathon. Hoping for a good result in a marathon when you go into it feeling terrible, to the point that you're seeing a doctor and getting tested for various bleak possibilities, seems misguided to me. Obviously, I could be proven wrong: when you're young (as I presume you are), it's probably possible to make a relatively quick turnaround.

But to the respondents saying how that is a normal way to feel during tapering for a marathon, I'm like, WTF? Of course, I can't prove that didn't happen to you personally, but I'd say that in no way is it normal to feel bad to the point of having to see a doctor to see if you have Covid or anemia when you're tapering. I'm pretty sure that is not a common experience for top runners. I ran some semi-decent marathons myself, and never experienced anything like the OP describes prior to running a good race. During training for my best marathons, training generally went well all-around.

My advice would be to get healthy first, and worry about setting marathon PB's later.

Low iron like this can add minutes to your 5k time! That’s right- LOW IRON CAN ADD MINUTES TO YOUR 5k!

Marathon is 42km... 8.5 x 5k= extra 17 minutes to your ‘thon!

Boost those iron levels! Start now!

Sounds like overreaching which led to immune system getting weakened which led to illness. Not sure if you can turn it around for this marathon but you will be fine in 4-8 weeks. Take care of yourself.

You haven’t said how much you trained before starting this marathon block. Based on your age alone, I’d say you ramped up mileage too fast, too soon while also running high intensity, so it’s possible that you don’t have the aerobic base to handle the training your were aiming for.

Also, to me it looks like you’re getting far too little sleep, so I think you’re suffering from overtraining. I’d cut volume now and taper (exponentially) for the last four week. That and try to get more sleep.

My PB’s 2:28:17. I ran about 70-80/week for 16 week for the main marathon training block following a decade of consistently running 60+ miles/week.

Whatever happen, good luck out there!

Nothing to see here wrote:

You haven’t said how much you trained before starting this marathon block. Based on your age alone, I’d say you ramped up mileage too fast, too soon while also running high intensity, so it’s possible that you don’t have the aerobic base to handle the training your were aiming for.

Also, to me it looks like you’re getting far too little sleep, so I think you’re suffering from overtraining. I’d cut volume now and taper (exponentially) for the last four week. That and try to get more sleep.

My PB’s 2:28:17. I ran about 70-80/week for 16 week for the main marathon training block following a decade of consistently running 60+ miles/week.

Whatever happen, good luck out there!

Thank you very much, man! What did your training look like for that 2:28, as far as paces and workouts go?

Regarding my past history, I ran my first marathon in November 2017 (2:52:00) on about 60mpw. After that, I ramped up and have had probably four to six cycles where I’ve been over 85mpw for weeks on end. Current PB is 2:36, set in spring 2020 in a spontaneous, totally solo time trial at the end of a 105 mile week.

So, you can see why I’m hungry for sub-2:30, but I guess I have to be patient!