Across the Line: 6 lessons from overtraining

It was everything I could do to hit 63 watts on my bike. That made no sense. My functional threshold power was 174 watts. 63 watts should have felt easy, but I struggled to maintain the effort and stopped for a rest 14 minutes into the two-hour ride.

For the past several months, I had trained harder than I ever imagined possible, nailing brutally hard workouts designed by Darrin “Daz” Smith, the legendary triathlon coach who helped athletes from six different countries qualify for the 2012 London Olympics (with two finishing in the top four). My commitment and hard work paid dividends: I won gold in two age-group World Championships. In my 70s, I was fitter, faster, and stronger than most people ever imagined possible at my age.

I was exhausted but couldn’t stay asleep at night. During the day, it often felt like someone had hit me over the head with a two-by-four and I had to sleep NOW. I had a series of minor illnesses. Cuts didn’t heal. My resting heart rate was not normal. And maybe most bizarre was my mood. One moment I'd be happy and cheerful and then, like someone had flipped a switch, I was suddenly depressed, only to be cheerful again ten minutes later.

Eventually, Daz pulled me from training and told me I was 'overtrained'.

I had been searching for my body’s limits. No matter how hard I pushed, I believed I could dig deeper, go farther, be tougher. Instead, I discovered the limits of my body's ability to recover as I crossed an invisible line between healthy training and Overtraining Syndrome.

What followed was a long journey back and an education I wish I'd had before I needed it. Here are six lessons that would have been helpful to understand before developing Overtraining Syndrome:

1. Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) is a medical condition

As endurance athletes, we expect to be tired at the end of a tough workout or challenging training block. Then we rest, recover, and come back stronger. But if stress is too high and/or recovery too low for an extended period, a medical condition called Overtraining Syndrome can occur. Performance drops and doesn’t return with normal rest. Extreme fatigue, disrupted sleep, moodiness, an abnormal resting heart rate, and a series of minor illnesses can follow.

It’s important to note that stress is not just caused by training. It can also come from a variety of other sources, including travel, relationships, work pressure, underfueling, and dehydration. When symptoms persist despite rest and other medical causes have been ruled out, it may be Overtraining Syndrome. Depending on the depth of the overtraining hole, recovery from its symptoms can take months or even years.

2. Grit without wisdom is a recipe for disaster!

This is where I went wrong. I listened to the mantras: Suck it up, buttercup! Shut up legs! Death before DNF! I read books about athletes who pushed through incredible pain and fatigue and put them on a pedestal. I heard coaches and professional triathletes say, “Embrace the suck.”

I figured no matter how deep I dug, I could always go deeper. When pain or fatigue crept into training, I ignored it and kept going. My efforts were rewarded when people referred to me as a “badass.”

Yes, I was tough, but I also lacked common sense, because I didn’t yet understand what my body was telling me.

3. OTS is easy to deny!

Unlike a stress fracture, there’s no X-ray that confirms OTS. So, it’s easy to deny that your symptoms are being caused by a medical condition. For example, when easy watts felt like a threshold workout on the bike, instead of listening to my body, I figured my power meter was broken and kept going. When I couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two, I blamed my circadian rhythm.

By the time I realised I was in trouble, I’d already crossed the line from overreaching into overtraining.

4. The aftermath of OTS is an emotional minefield

Being suddenly pulled from training uprooted my daily routine. For eleven years, I had been turning the boxes in TrainingPeaks green as I completed each workout, but now there were no boxes!

I felt a sense of loss and went through the process of grieving. Sometimes grief came as denial: Am I really overtrained? Other times, I was angry. Why had my coach let this happen? Why did I let this happen? Most of the time I was just sad.

I also felt ashamed. I wondered if people would think I stopped training because I was soft. It took a long time to tell people that I had OTS.

Emotionally lost, I searched for OTS case studies and found none. I wrote Across the Line in the hope that I could help coaches and athletes understand OTS, especially those in the middle of it.

5. OTS seems to be connected to a systems failure

Overtraining Syndrome doesn’t happen because of one hard workout or even one overly ambitious training block. It develops when an imbalance between stress and recovery persists - and the warning signs that should interrupt that process are missed, misunderstood, or denied. I once believed OTS was simply the result of a coach or athlete making an error in judgment about training load or recovery. Then I began asking a different question: Why was that error allowed to continue?

An entire system may be involved in pushing a coach, athlete, or both to overlook or discount the initial symptoms of Overtraining Syndrome. Sports culture celebrates pushing through pain. Psychologically, coaches and athletes can be influenced by deeply ingrained messages about the relationship between performance and personal value. Relationships can play a part, too. Athletes may wonder, Will my coach be disappointed if I don’t push through this workout? Or even worse, Will my coach lose interest in coaching me if I don’t push through?

And then there are logistics. Elite coaches often see athletes face-to-face daily and notice things that don’t appear in training data—their posture, their eyes, even how their hair is combed. Remote coaches don’t have the same clues. Without frequent video meetings where the coach can see and hear the athlete, early warning signs may be easier to miss, deny, or ignore. And without an adequate margin of safety to compensate for the lack of face-to-face observation, an imbalance between stress and recovery can develop.

6. Overtraining Syndrome is an invisible injury

When someone has a broken leg, no one doubts they are injured. OTS is different. It’s an invisible injury. It was easy for those around me to forget I was injured. Heck, sometimes even I forgot and I’d wonder if I should be out there training.

People offered well-meaning advice: “Just take a week off and you'll be fine.” I thanked them politely while screaming inside, Are you kidding me? If only it were that simple! They didn't understand the difference between overreaching and Overtraining Syndrome. A week off might be effective in the case of overreaching, but there was no quick fix for OTS. If there were, I would have already done it.

If I could talk to the athlete I was before I crossed the line into Overtraining Syndrome, I would not tell her to stop training hard. I wouldn't advise her to shy away from discomfort or to stop chasing big, audacious goals.

I'd tell her that grit is only half the equation. The other half is wisdom.

The best athletes aren't simply the ones who can dig the deepest. They're the ones who prepare their bodies to train hard through proper nutrition, body care, rest, and who know when to put the shovel down.

Further reading

• Athlete Inside: From 335lbs to World Class Triathlete
• How to avoid overtraining and burnout in sport, work and life