FEATURES

Stuff About Late Season Burn-Out...

Saturday, 25 October 2014 00:10

By Jene' Shaw (triathlon.competitor.com)

Stay on track for your peak race of the year.

For many amateur triathletes, fall means it’s time to wind down the training, start (finally) practicing yoga or get back to focusing on work or family. But for top age groupers or anyone targeting a late-season “A” race, now is the time to peak and perform at your best without burning out after a long year of training and racing.

Qualifying for any of triathlon’s world championships means you have the talent and drive to race to the top of the age-group rankings. It also means—especially after a season of qualifying long-course races—that you have to find a delicate balance in order to peak, race well enough to qualify and then recover multiple times throughout the year, all while keeping up the motivation to train hard day in and day out. Nailing that perfect train-enough-but-not-too-much ratio can be...

tricky. If you don’t battle through some fatigue to gain fitness, you’ll never improve. But if you work too hard for too long without allowing the body to recover and adapt, you could wind up racing your worst right when you need to be racing your best.

The extreme result of neglecting proper recovery is overtraining syndrome, a medical term that is often tossed around but not always understood or properly diagnosed. Put simply, the syndrome is a result of overdoing your capacity for exercise and winding up with a decline in performance. The consequential physiological and psychological effects can go beyond just one bad race result—they could lead to career-ending consequences. READ MORE