If you overtrain long enough, will you eventually adapt?

another canuck wrote:... my suggestion to serious runners is at least in one year or one season, err on the side of overtraining and see what happens.

wtf?!? I'm ashamed to see this written by a fellow Canadian. ;-)

There's a huge difference between training very, very hard when you are very fit and benefiting from it (a la Webb etc per your examples) and pushing it that little bit harder and digging yourself a hole that you don't get out of.

It doesn't matter who you are. Radcliffe or Ritz can overtrain too. Generally speaking, the fitter you are, the harder you can train (and survive), and you need to train well to get to that point. But working yourself to the point of overtraining sets you back, delaying your progress, because it forces you to either take time off to recover, or you choose to continue in the downward spiral of deteriorating performances. In either case, your overall development is interrupted needlessly.

Train hard - even very very hard - but learn the limit, and don't push beyond it, unless you're trying to peak for the biggest race of your life and don't mind taking a couple months of rest afterward.

My opinion, anyway.

I should retract my "ashamed" comment, because I misread what "canuck" wrote. I thought he was suggesting to try overtraining every year, rather than once. I suppose you need to have pushed beyond the limit at least once to learn where that limit lies, so his advice is probably not as bad as I made it out to be.

No. You won't recover from true overtraining by doing anything other than easing up significantly. But not everyone who says they're overtrained really is. If you're doing really big mileage you'll generally feel quite tired but if you back away from it for a short time you'll freshen up and run pretty well.

If you're overtraining it will take way longer to freshen up and get back in form. As someone suggested, look to your race results. If you're improving then you aren't overtrained despite feeling tired all the time. If you're stagnating or regressing you probably need to ease up.

Usually it does not take a whole season to find out where the limit is. Anyone with a moderate amount of intelligence can tell where it is after 2 weeks or less. If you're training hard enough that you're never or only rarely feeling good, you're working too hard. Being recovered helps you get more out of your workouts.

Thanks Pete, that's exactly what I meant. This is advice for the serious only-at least once in your life go to the max and see what happens. Maybe you'll be the person who adapts well to that. I believe that Derek Clayton's story is along that line- he observed that the harder he ran the better he got.He may have overtrained at the end, but that is how he got to 2:08 in the first place.

My broader point is that we take as gospel "when in doubt, undertrain." I don't agree, unless you have a proven track record of breaking down and being injured year after year, season after season.

Read any account of what young Kenyans are doing, let alone the known world class ones.

I still don't see your point. In general, world class runners don't overtrain. Kenyan runners don't overtrain. Training hard and overdoing it is not the same thing. Pushing it hard for a week or two without rest is not the same thing as pushing hard for months on end without rest.

joyful wrote:

I still don't see your point. In general, world class runners don't overtrain. Kenyan runners don't overtrain. Training hard and overdoing it is not the same thing. Pushing it hard for a week or two without rest is not the same thing as pushing hard for months on end without rest.

Not exactly true, its only that world class runners and kenyan runners don't come to letsrun to bitch about overtraining or to tell people that if they run too much or too hard they will become "stale." As a previous poster said, look at the logs of Clayton, Hodge, Malley, et al. Dudes ran hard.

I think the problem is in the semantics of the original question. I think he really meant, if you train much harder than ever before and are consistently overtired, can you adapt? I think the answer is yes, but not always and not for everyone. Young Kenyans 16-19 are running the double sessions, with the second one most days being a hard tempo run.Most of us in the west would say this is "overtraining". But the result, at least for some, is 5k in 13:20 and 3k in 7:40.

I agree that by definition "overtraining" must mean too much, and therefore is not correct.My point is really no more than test your limits to the absolute max.

I think that most of the informed posters to this board draw upon their own experience or vicarious experience to comment.I ran at a fairly high level, and trained fairly intelligently, but I don't think I ever challenged the outer limits of my abilities, and look back with some regret.

perhaps you aren't necessarily overtraining, but just doing other things wrong, i feel like i've had a horrible second semester of running, and I think part of it is, not eating right, not taking my vitamins, not sleeping enough, and drinking too much. part of it is also not being prepared enough for the second semester of running that sent me into a downward spiral, having taken 3 weeks off before coming back for second semester, i then jumped right back into work outs that i couldn't be prepared for with out a base. this has made it hard to benefit from the work outs and by this point i'm just too worn out to benefit from anything i'm doing I think. anyway, this is just an example from someone who f***ed up 2 seasons of running, maybe you can learn something from this.