Transcript
0:00 How do you dig yourself out of the rut that is often caused by overtraining or you're just fatigued and nothing is clicking and nothing is working? Too often we default to just, "Hey, take a long time off." And that can help, but it often isn't the best solution. So, today we're going to talk about how to dig yourself out of that hole. It starts with step one, which is investigating what the problem is. This seems obvious, but too often we just say, "Oh, I'm overtrained and I'm done for." We can classify this in a number of different ways, but the number one thing I like to do is look for the obvious medical or health issues that cause fatigue. Things like reds, where you're having not enough calories in, right?
0:50 You're not consuming enough calories and some other things. We have iron issues, we have sleep disturbances, or we have what I call under-recovering, which I think is often seen more so than overtraining, is there's not enough space between the hard efforts. So, the recovery isn't there. Step one is figuring out what in the world is the problem. Why did we get over this edge because that helps tell you a little bit of the solution. One of the ways you can do this besides looking at medical stuff is identifying where the performance is suffering. So, are you starting to feel really bad on long runs and not able to keep going on the minutes, two hours, or what have you?
1:38 Does the hard stuff feel bad? Does the 400-m repeats, the 200-m repeats? Does just getting out every single day and getting in the runs feel bad? All of that identifies or helps you identify, okay, where's the kind of like kink in the pipe? Now, there are so many different ones that I can't cover it all here, but what I hope to do is just give you kind of a a road map for All right, I got a kink in the pipe, I got fatigue, I'm under-recovered, I might have a medical issue. How do I get back to the training?
2:14 And I want to start with a story way back way back in the day on my early coaching years where I was coaching high school kids and we had a young runner who was one of the best runners in the state, one of the best runners in the nation, was senior in track season. Comes, I think, February, so we're almost starting track in Texas cuz we start track early cuz we have no indoor. He came down with mono.
2:40 And if you know anything about mono and high school running, generally it's like the death sentence for the season. It's like shut it down, you're done with, like we can't do anything. Good luck, recover. And for good reasons, it really puts you in a hole. And if you try and train while you're doing that, yeah, it's not good. So, first off, we listened to the doctor, recovered a bit, all that stuff, but once we got the go, which was relatively quickly, to start training again, what did we do?
3:10 Well, if he went too long on something, he would feel fatigued. If we did our normal kind of repeats even slower, mile repeats, what have you, he felt fatigued. So, instead I took a page out of Mihály Igloi's book and said, "Great. We're going to do hundreds." 100-m repeats. Put in sets, so they're not too hard. I think the first one was like sets of five. So, 500 m worth of hundreds. And they were really slow, like 18 seconds at first for a guy who would run sub-9 minutes for 2 miles. So, that's not fast. That's relatively slow, controlled for 100 m, 18-19 seconds. And what we do is we just do those sets because they didn't create fatigue, but it allowed him to run a little bit faster again, 18-19, even 20 seconds isn't jogging, it's striding out out a little bit for him.
4:08 So, it allowed us to start that work. And what we did is at first in very short sets, five sets of 5 by 100, right? Run a multiple times, sometimes long breaks in between those sets. Then we'd expand that, we'd lengthen it out, maybe to eight times 100 in sets. Maybe eventually some 150s. Or eventually what we do is we get some longer repeats once we did it, like a mile at threshold or 10K pace. Eventually down to 5K pace, and then do some 100s to give him something he could handle and come back with a mile at the end. The point was over the next couple months, we didn't do any traditional 5 by mile. We didn't even do any traditional really long runs like we had been doing before as 70-mile weeks.
4:57 Instead, for most of the workouts, it was easy day where it was like controlled easy, and then our workouts were 100-m repeats or 150s or 200s that weren't that fast. And that is the point when you're digging yourself out of the hole, what you want to do is make sure that the dose doesn't contribute to the fatigue that much, but it gives you some of that speed, that endurance, that, "Hey, we're going to throw a little bit of the system in here to the system."
5:30 So, we have to adapt in a way that was manageable. During that whole time, that whole period, his perception of effort was the entire governing thing. If he felt undue fatigue, we avoided it. We cut it down. We said, "No, that's good enough for today." And whether it's from overtraining, under-recovering, when you're coming back from or even an injury, when you're coming back from something, here's what I like to think about, okay? First is take what your body gives you.
5:59 Okay? With this athlete, we didn't say, "Oh, you need to do this to be ready for the state championship in May or the qualifiers in April." We said, "Our body is giving us a hundreds at 18, 19, 20 seconds right now. Take it." Great. Then the next week, we'd adjust. We'd say, "What will our body give us?" We set the standard of of what fatigue should feel like. In this case, a lot easier than we would normally when you're pushing the balance during workouts. We set that standard that we'd dig that hole and said, "We're going to take what our body gives us and then over time, gradually, hopefully our body adapts." And it does.
6:41 When you're coming back from things, it is not the time to get greedy. Greedy will backfire. The second principle, shrink it down, okay, to manageable pieces. This is why we did hundreds. When you're looking at easy runs, which often the solution is go go on easy for a bit, and easy runs are important. Whenever you're coming back from something, whenever you did I getting out of a hole, lots of easy is important. Though, as we'll find out, not the only thing.
7:10 But the point is, even lots of easy, especially if it's something nutritionally related, can still dig a hole. If you're running an hour, you're still depleting some of that glycogen, and maybe you're not restoring enough. You have reds or something like that, okay? We're still digging a hole. So, even with lots of easy, we want to think of how can I do this where it's not that debilitating, where we're emphasizing the recovery, the calories in, the protein, the carbs afterwards. We're doubling up, maybe even having protein at night to increase muscle protein synthesis. We're having big hits of protein throughout the day to keep that muscle synthesis, protein synthesis, up.
7:52 Okay? We're doing those things. One way to do this is to shorten the easy runs or split them up. So, you could do this in terms of doubles. You could go, "Hey, instead of an hour run, I'm going to do 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the afternoon." That's actually easier to recover from. It doesn't give you much as much bang for your buck, but you still get the good aerobic stimulus. Another idea is to split it up within it. Right?
8:18 Instead of going an hour, maybe you're going to go 20 minutes and then take a 5-minute water break and just bring everything back down. I know that's sacrilegious in the running community, but what it does is gives us a little safeguard where we're not digging that hole both physically and psychologically. Okay? So, split things up. Shrink it down, even on easy stuff, but especially on workouts. What's the minimal viable product to get some sort of stimulus here?
8:49 The third principle, don't forget about everything else. Often, again, we go to easy runs, which are important, but I like to think of it as easy with spices of work. Why? Because often when you're in these kind of big holes or ruts that you can't get out of, your body just shuts down. You start feeling flat all the time. It feels like there's no coordination when you're running faster. You just feel heavy legged. If we forget all of the stuff and just go easy, often our muscle tension contributes to that. You heard me when I talked to Mary's back in talk about muscle tension and tone. I've talked about it before. I'll probably do more on it in the future, but think of it as how much pop you have in your legs.
9:34 When we're overtrained and fatigued, our pop often goes to like nothing. We're just We're blah. There's no responsiveness off of it. This is where we need to include things like strides, some hundreds, maybe eventually even some hill sprints as we'll talk about in a bit, to kind of get that pop back in. The key here is we want to do faster but not fatigued. We don't want fatigue is the enemy here. We just want to get some of that, hey, we got to wake our legs up. This could even be a simple easy fartlek in the middle of a easy run.
10:08 Instead of doing that 30-minute easy run just straight, maybe you add in four to five by 30-second surges in there with minutes of recovery, plenty of recovery in there. You're just trying to throw a little bit into the system to kind of get it revved up. Even when we come, the next principle is when we come to workouts where we're starting to do more of them, when we're getting off of the spices and baby work, there's two ideas here that I think are real important. Do workouts that you enjoy, and then do workouts that you can win.
10:43 When getting out of that fatigue rut, often what happens is we have expectations from before, from prior seasons, of what's normal, and that ruins our workouts. Everything feels hard because we set that expectation. So, instead what we want to do is make sure, just like I did with the kid with mono, let's set ourselves up to win the workouts where we can handle them, we can make a little bit of progress, and sometimes have a little bit of fun and test the system in the last repeat or two, but you want to walk away, as my high school coach would say, making sure that you won more workouts than you lose.
11:20 Okay? Because those wins are going to build momentum. What does it mean to win a workout? You walk away feeling like, yeah, that was good. I handled that. I gained from that. I can progress from that. I can try a little bit more. I'm not in a hole where I have to walk or jog really slowly tomorrow and I'm worried about recovering. You want to win the workouts. Part of that is doing things you enjoy because that brings the psychological component to it. So, if you hate long tempo runs, don't do them. Do a fartlek instead that hits the same system. If you hate mile repeats, don't do them. Break it into sets of 5 by 400 with really short rest instead.
11:59 Do something where it's like, "Okay, I can handle this. I can enjoy this." On the training side, when we're looking at building our training out, frequency comes first. So, get back to a point where it's that habit. You want that 5 days or 6 days of running that you used to do. You want to do frequency. The duration isn't the thing. It's what comes next, okay? So, if that frequency means, "Hey, I get out and I run for 15 minutes 5 days a week," then go run for 15 minutes, okay?
12:32 Duration is then what we work at. Again, these are principles. It doesn't always follow this, but generally, then once we get the frequency going or we're in the same ballpark, then we worry about increasing the volume or duration of the thing. And then finally, we want the intensity at the end. Again, spices of intensity in there, but not intensity with the fatigue thing until we're in. So, the training kind of looks like lots of easy, spices of what I'd call non-fatiguing speed, and then you transition into short controlled aerobic work. The fartleks that are sub-threshold, the 400s that are again like Igloi style sub-threshold where you're doing 400s at 10K or 15K pace or to convert out of race distances, maybe a pace you could sustain for 45 minutes to an an That's not very fast for 400s. You keep the rest short, like 45 seconds, something like that. But what you're doing is you're getting controlled aerobic work. Once we get through that controlled aerobic work with some non-fatiguing speed, then we can start with the kind of real workouts. That's all the 100s and 18 seconds were, or the 150s, or the 200s is they were aerobic.
13:51 They weren't that fast. They were so short that we were using really short rest, but it became a controlled aerobic workout that we could then lengthen and bridge back. That's what we're trying to do. Manage things to bridge that gap gradually. Sometimes slower than you want, but letting the body dictate, and you as the coach or the athlete taking what it gives you and not getting greedy. The number one mistake peop- people make when coming out of that fatigue hole is they get greedy. They think, "I was here. I need to get back here as quickly as possible." You do that, just going to dig a bigger hole.