I've been overtraining i think...please help

just take a week down.. cut your miles in half and just don't do any workouts at all... your big indoor meets can't be right now... you still have about a month and a half, and outdoor is what should matter.... hopefully your legs come back in a week or so.

If your from the UK some people do have big meets upcoming this month!

Maybe ice baths would help.......?????

They speed recovery and get the blood circulating around the muscles. Anyone know if this would help? I'd think it would, but don't know.

correction HOT BATHS will get the blood flowing.

Minimalist advocate wrote:

correction HOT BATHS will get the blood flowing.

You know what I mean. The ice baths will cause the blood to go further down... where the muscles are, and promote recovery. That's Running 101. I just don't know if the principle applies to overtrained muscles.

One thing you don't want to do is race and do workouts and have all the other days be cross training. Less workouts and races and more easy running would get you back on track and you could go from there.

The best advice would be bag the beginning of indoor in favor of aerobic training. Start racing indoor toward the end of the season and go strong into outdoor.

If you have not run much aerobically then you have drained your tank with your quality work. You have to refill it before moving on. Of course that's easier said then done especially if you are on scholorship to run and the coach does not understand.

How's your sleep?

If you find yourself going to sleep easily, then waking up in the middle of the night and having a lot of trouble getting back to sleep: that's a classic symptom of overstress. It doesn't help that overstressed people often consume a lot of chocolate and other caffeinated food/drinks--which will disrupt their sleep further.

Not much help to you now, I realize, but get in the habit of counting your pulse for a full minute when you wake in the morning. Once you know what your baseline pulse is, you can use an elevated morning pulse as a rough guide to whether you've recovered--anything 10%+ above your norm is a sign to go very easy that day or take the day off. (Exception: don't take your pulse on race days! It will often be elevated, just from nerves, and you don't want that kind of feedback.)

Be very careful with doing cross-training, unless it's a familiar activity that you've done with some regularity recently. If you're overstressed (= adaptation reserves depleted), the last thing you should do is to introduce a new thing to adapt to.

But in general: if you can get an extra hour of sleep per night (I bet you can if you really try), and sleep at regular times every night (including weekends!), you'll probably start to feel peppier. Until then, keep your training light and avoid anything new.

ya skipping indoors is not really a possibility for me. I had been running awesome workouts for a while, but they have sucked the past 3 weeks or so. If things don't improve in the next week or so I'll have a talk with my coach. A month ago it appearead to both me and my coach that I was on perfect track for a breakout season; this sucks.

You need to go talk to your coach 1 on 1, chances are he has a plan for dealing with this kind of thing.