Pfitzinger Pete - Advanced Marathoning

For example, say your resting heart rate is 50 beats per minute and your maximal heart rate is 185 beats per minute. If you train by maximal heart rate, then you would want to keep your heart rate below 141 (185 ×.76) on your recovery days. Heart rate reserve is your maximal heart rate minus your resting pulse. In this example, then, your heart rate reserve is 135. If you train using this more-complicated but more-precise method, you would want to keep your heart rate below 144 [resting heart rate of 50 + (135 ×.70)] on your recovery days.

The lower-tech way to determine your appropriate recovery training intensity is to run approximately 2 minutes per mile (per 1.6 km) slower than your 10-mile (16 km) to half marathon race pace. For example, if you run the half marathon in 1:18, or just under 6 minutes per mile (per 1.6 km), then your recovery runs should be done at roughly an 8-minute-per-mile (per 1.6 km) pace.

At his peak, Bill Rodgers used to say that nobody working a full-time job would beat him in the marathon. He knew that even if someone could string together training to match his around the constraints of regular employment, the extra rest and attention to detail that his schedule allowed would give him an edge on race day.

Of course, you’re probably not trying to win Boston, nor do you likely have the luxury of quitting your job for the sake of your running. Still, you can hasten your recovery from hard workouts by regularly paying attention to these matters at work.

• Hydration.Always have a water bottle at your workstation, and commit to draining it several times a day.

• Calories.Keep healthful foods at work so that you can graze throughout the day as opposed to getting so famished that you hit the vending machines in desperation.

• Posture, part I.Make sure your computer screen is at eye level and not too far away so that you don’t sit with your head tilted and thrust forward all day.

• Posture, part II.Even if your computer is set up ideally, it’s still easy to sit with a slumped upper body when you’re at a desk all day. Sit with your head, shoulders, and hips aligned, and with a slight curve in your lower back. Good posture at work translates into fewer biomechanical woes on the run.

• Move.Get up and walk around at least once an hour to lessen the strain on your lower back and hamstrings. If the smokers in your office are allowed to leave their desks throughout the day to tend to their habit, then you should be able to stand and stretch your legs to tend to yours.

In some situations, cross-training is the best type of exercise on recovery days. For marathoners who come out of Sunday long runs feeling beat up, cross-training is the safest option for training on Monday. Your recovery is enhanced by the increased blood flow, but there’s no additional pounding on your legs and back. Cross-training is discussed in chapter 4.

Overtraining is a danger for any motivated marathoner. In striving to improve your performance, you progressively increase the volume and intensity of your training. At some point, you hit your individual training threshold. When you exceed that threshold, positive adaptation stops, negative adaptation occurs, and your performances in training and racing suffer.

Individual training thresholds vary greatly among runners. Beijing Olympic marathoner Brian Sell handles repeated 150-mile (241 km) weeks, whereas some runners struggle to maintain 40-mile (64 km) weeks. Similarly, some runners can handle 2 hard days of training in succession, whereas others need 3 easy days after each hard workout. Your individual training threshold also changes with time. Sell couldn’t always handle such big mileage, but he increased his mileage as his capacity to withstand the stress increased. A detailed training log that you update at least a few times a week will help you discern your limits and how they evolve throughout your running career.

It’s important to clarify what overtraining is and isn’t. Fatigue for a day or 2 after a hard training session isn’t overtraining. In fact, it’s a necessary step in the process of recovery and development. When training stress is applied in the appropriate dosage, then you improve at the optimal rate. If your training stress is above the optimal level, you may still improve, but you’ll do so at a slower rate. Only above a higher threshold (your individual training threshold) does true overtraining occur.

What’s much more common than overtraining is overreaching. Unfortunately, this zone is where many marathoners spend much of their time. Overreaching occurs when you string together too many days of hard training. Your muscle fatigue is most likely primarily from glycogen depletion, and you may simply need time for metabolic recovery. A few days of moderate training combined with a high-carbohydrate diet should quickly remedy the situation. Overreaching can also be caused by dehydration, lack of sleep, or other life stressors on top of your normal training. In all of these cases, your body should rebound in less than a week when the extra stress is removed.

Repeated overreaching eventually leads to overtraining syndrome. The simple explanation for overtraining syndrome is that the combination of training load and other life stressors is greater than the body’s ability to recover and adapt positively for a prolonged period of time. The combination of contributing factors and threshold for overtraining syndrome varies greatly among athletes.

The body’s response to overtraining may be regulated by the hypothalamus. Located at the base of the brain, the hypothalamus controls body temperature, sugar and fat metabolism, and the release of a variety of hormones; it’s essentially your master control center for dealing with stress. When your hypothalamus can’t handle the combination of training and other stressors in your life, typical symptoms include fatigue, reduced immune system function, disturbed sleep, decreased motivation, irritability, and poor athletic performance. Chronic inflammatory responses from repeated muscle damage without sufficient recovery have also been hypothesized to contribute to overtraining syndrome.

Overtraining is caused by poor planning and not heeding your body’s feedback. In 1998, exercise physiologist Carl Foster, PhD, presented an interesting concept to help avoid overtraining. The concept is based in part on evidence that horses progress after a hard/easy training program but become overtrained when the workload on the easy days is increased. (Stick with us here; this has applications for running.)

The hypothesis is that overtraining is related to both the difficulty of training (the training load) and the “monotony” of training. Monotony of training is a lack of variation in the difficulty of training from day to day. Monotonous training typically consists of 1 moderately hard day after another, whereas varied training consists of a mix of hard days, easy days, and the occasional rest day.

The concept is that training strain is the combined effect of the training load and the training monotony. Foster found that training strain can predict overtraining-related illness and injury, with both load and monotony as contributing factors. This is further evidence that mixing recovery days into your training program is necessary for optimal improvement without breaking down. Again, a good training log can help you here. If you can gain an awareness of the combination of training load and monotony that puts you over the edge, then you can try to adjust these elements for optimal training and optimal marathon performance.