For those interested in the topic, this book is an amazing and extremely scientific read. Scott was a world cup nordic skier and mountaineer. I am a nobody but got to train with him before my first ultra and it was eye opening. I would upload every workout and if my HR zone was too high he would text me and say "Slow down! I don't care if you're walking at a snails pace."
Nils van der Poel was* a long distance speed skater who set impressive records and wrote about his training regime. His book is https://www.howtoskate.se/. He trained ambitiously for 3 years, won Olympic gold medals and retired! He followed a very analytically minded path and avoided overtraining.
I wonder if this is due to a lower rate of coaching. I don’t have a ton of first hand knowledge but most other endurance sports the athletes usually come up through well organized teams. Maybe the lack of organization (which is great for other reasons) leads to less coaching and therefore missing someone to tell you to rest and recover before you go over the edge.
> That’s not to say that athletes in other sports aren’t working hard. They are. But they typically do so within a team environment or under the direction of a professional coach, providing them with well-established frameworks for success. Even though ultrarunning has grown, there’s still little infrastructure to support its competitors. Sponsorships mean full-time careers, but that rarely includes coaching.
If you want to try your hand at powerlifting as an amateur, there's plenty of programs and templates with different styles of periodization that will have you doing micro- and meso-cycles of effort running up to a competition (or just testing your maxes in the gym).
I'd figure similar programs exist for traditional athletics. I guess much of the issue is the boundary between amateur and pro; most casual lifters in the gym have no hopes or business trying to compete in bodybuilding, powerlifting or strongman.
The description of it as well as one of the theories on the cause make me think of burnout:
> Kreher and others believe that the mind plays an equally important role. Because your central nervous system influences your brain as well as your physiology, he theorizes that true overtraining syndrome is triggered by a combination of psychological and physical stress.
> “That’s the multi-system nature of the condition,” Kreher says. “The interaction of the mind and body is incredibly influential.” To finish a 100-mile race requires a psychological thrashing, and some runners have described a kind of post-race depression. As they try to rally to train for the next goal, perhaps beating themselves up for their prior performance, that mental stress, in addition to the physical depletion, could bring on OTS.
I wonder if gut changes could arise as a result of endurance training and then that affects the mind? This seems to be an understudied area. They are just apparently looking into gut changes with regards to endurance training:
Tim Noakes is cited in the article for his 1987 book "The Lore of Running", I wonder if people following its 2021 "Real Meal Revolution" about keto would be subject to the very same OTS or not in the long run.
It's impossible to do really high intensity endurance training on a ketogenic diet. You won't have the energy to execute the fast interval workouts necessary to increase your race pace. So in that sense it will prevent OTS, but it will also be impossible to compete at an elite level (except maybe for longer ultramarathon events where speed isn't as important).
It’s well known ultra training destroys your heart.
In any sport.
They tested the blood of marathon runners and found heart attack markers in many of them because the heart muscle is being damaged and healing and scarring and hardening the muscle leaving young ultra trainers with the heart of an 80 year old.
Additionally recent studies have shown high duration/volumes of cardio increases plaque buildup in the arteries.
"Indeed, many studies have shown a relationship between endurance sports and higher volumes of coronary calcified plaque as determined by computed tomography."
I'm not in this space, on either the athlete or the biomedical side - but it sounds like a "more is better" running mindset and mythos is colliding with the biological realities of human bodies which either (1) Were not carefully designed for this kind of duty cycle, or (2) Have accumulated quite a few deleterious mutations in the generations since that design, resulting in frequent operational failures at well below the hoped-for spec.
Might anyone know if indigenous groups such as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rar%C3%A1muri - where extreme distance running seems part of their traditional culture - have been studied in this regard?
Do we know the biological mechanism to cause OTS, though? That would open up avenues for treatment and more precise prevention besides "rest more" (not that that's a bad preventative).
Interestingly the same that can happen to the mind. I can't recall the source of the article but it mentioned a mathematician working so hard on a problem for a long time that at some point he could no longer use his brain power to continue doing moderately difficult level math.
I don't particularly find surprising that someone pushing so hard can end up this way, we aren't limitless in our abilities after all.
https://uphillathlete.com/product/training-for-the-uphill-at...
See also brief overview article about him:
https://runningmagazine.ca/sections/training/olympic-speed-s...
(*) He changed his name since, to a more common name, so using past tense seemed humorously appropriate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides
> That’s not to say that athletes in other sports aren’t working hard. They are. But they typically do so within a team environment or under the direction of a professional coach, providing them with well-established frameworks for success. Even though ultrarunning has grown, there’s still little infrastructure to support its competitors. Sponsorships mean full-time careers, but that rarely includes coaching.
I'd figure similar programs exist for traditional athletics. I guess much of the issue is the boundary between amateur and pro; most casual lifters in the gym have no hopes or business trying to compete in bodybuilding, powerlifting or strongman.
> Kreher and others believe that the mind plays an equally important role. Because your central nervous system influences your brain as well as your physiology, he theorizes that true overtraining syndrome is triggered by a combination of psychological and physical stress.
> “That’s the multi-system nature of the condition,” Kreher says. “The interaction of the mind and body is incredibly influential.” To finish a 100-mile race requires a psychological thrashing, and some runners have described a kind of post-race depression. As they try to rally to train for the next goal, perhaps beating themselves up for their prior performance, that mental stress, in addition to the physical depletion, could bring on OTS.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12116556/
In any sport.
They tested the blood of marathon runners and found heart attack markers in many of them because the heart muscle is being damaged and healing and scarring and hardening the muscle leaving young ultra trainers with the heart of an 80 year old.
The best modern advice is don’t overtrain.
https://youtu.be/Y6U728AZnV0
"Indeed, many studies have shown a relationship between endurance sports and higher volumes of coronary calcified plaque as determined by computed tomography."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11395881/
Might anyone know if indigenous groups such as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rar%C3%A1muri - where extreme distance running seems part of their traditional culture - have been studied in this regard?
Mark me as atheist!
Well that can't help for sure.
"Overtraining syndrome"
I don't see why it's so mysterious, fatigue accumulates until something tips you over the limit
- bone microfractures
- nervous system depletion
- tendon "microlesions" (not so sure about this term though)
- immune system blunting due to stress
- raised cortisol levels
- (possible) nutritional deficiencies given the increased exertion (or just metabolic bottlenecks)
I don't particularly find surprising that someone pushing so hard can end up this way, we aren't limitless in our abilities after all.