My legs have felt dead lately when I race. I had an ear infection and sickness so my running dropped off a bit for a week but I'm getting back to normal and I feel dead during races and training. State is in less than 2 weeks and I've started taking ice baths to see if it helps. I have a really good chance of winning state, and it's my senior year, I just need my legs back under me. Any suggestions?
*I race the 1600 and 3200
DIAGNOSIS: HEAVY-LEGGED SYNDROME
PRESCRIPTION: LONG, EASY DISTANCE
Twenty years ago, I received a panicked call from Kevin, a high school athlete whom I'd coached to an 800m league championship the previous year. Now a senior, Kevin had been coached by Coach L-----since I'd moved out of state six months earlier.
"My legs are totally dead," said Kevin. "My 800 time has gone from 1:59 to 2:11. And Coach L-----has given up on me. He says I'm on my own. League finals are six weeks away, and I don't know what to do!"
After calming Kevin down, I advised him to stop running entirely for 10 days. Complete rest was the only cure I knew for dead legs. "Then," I said, "we start over."
Though Kevin rebounded to run 2:01, good for second place in league, the down time robbed him of months of precious base work. I kicked myself at the time, certain there was a better cure for dead legs. I just didn't know what it was.
Turns out I was right. More than two decades earlier, Arthur Lydiard, the legendary New Zealand coach, had devised the perfect remedy for heavy-legged syndrome: Go long.
"While I was training, always in the Lydiard way," says Lorraine Moller, four-time Olympic marathoner and bronze medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Games, "if there was a training issue the remedy was always easy aerobic running until you 'came right.' Problems nearly always stemmed from overtraining, [and] the remedy was to oxygenate the body with long-ish runs."
Lydiard's answer to dead legs was more running, not less--certainly not time off. It was just that the running had to be slow and aerobic.
"The long aerobic run is your home," says Dixon, one of a long line of New Zealand distance stars to embrace Lydiard's training methods. "Home is where you find comfort. It's where you go to sleep, to rest. Your long aerobic run is your home base. It's where you go to feel comfortable."
When Dixon awakened to discover himself as fatigued as when he'd gone to sleep, he didn't panic. Instead, he went for a run.
"A long, slow aerobic run would always correct me," says Dixon. "And this was in the middle of my European track season! I'd go out for a 2-hour, maybe 2-hour, 20-minute run. Later, when I would go through the same symptoms, I'd do the same thing."
If one long run doesn't fix your dead legs, then try two. If not two, then three. Eventually, your legs will feel refreshed, and you won't have sacrificed months of training.
lol that makes no sense. how is a 2 hour long run going to help with overtraining? isnt the stress from it going to make the overtraining worse?
Would a long run be good if I have Regionals in 4 days(Saturday)? And I have a pretty tough regional. State is the next Friday(10 days)
I'm just giving Lydiard's advice. And my personal advice too - when my legs feel dead, I do two things: go for 2 hour slow runs and do my next interval workout a second or two slower per 400 meters. And it works for me. That said, if the runner isn't used to going for long runs, then in this case, an hour might be the longest I would recommend. 4 days away from a big race is a tough call. But yeah, I would do a longish SLOW run 4 days from a big race. I think tapering is way overrated anyway.
DEXTERSLABB wrote:
lol that makes no sense. how is a 2 hour long run going to help with overtraining? isnt the stress from it going to make the overtraining worse?
Go get a good deep tissue massage, but preferably not within 2 days of the race.
DEXTERSLABB wrote:
lol that makes no sense. how is a 2 hour long run going to help with overtraining? isnt the stress from it going to make the overtraining worse?
You're committing the error of taking an elite runner's fitness out of context. For Rod Dixon, an easy 2 hour run wouldn't have been a stessor at all.It would relax him, stretch out his muscles, and get his blood pumping, but it wouldn't be challenging for him. Like he said, that easy long run is his home, something that he can go out and do comfortably without much effort. For someone like a well-trained high school boy you might scale it down to an easy 45 minute run. Overtraining is a result of hammering too often. When you take out the hard sessions and replace them with easy runs, the body can recover while still retaining some fitness.