Preserving the Candle
Signs of and strategies for late-season fatigue
Aw, buddy…
At this point in the year, athletes sometimes have performances in races or in training that leave them scratching their heads. Fatigue is an important factor in those odd performances, as athletes have usually been building fitness for almost a year, and by this point fatigue is high as well. Managing that fatigue is the key to good performances in the final few months of the northern hemisphere schedule, which is also when championship races are held. Coaches need to know how and when to either rest an athlete, keep moving forward as they have been, or (in a few rare cases) lift or shift the training load.
Fatigue is an Important Metric
It’s really important to track your fatigue, but it’s difficult because so many factors go into how tired you feel: training, work, relationships, family, diet, sleep. Every athlete committed to improving performance (an important distinction! Not every athlete hungers to improve all the time!) needs to carry some fatigue, since it’s a sign of progressive overload, the holy grail of endurance training. The key is figuring out just how much fatigue, since too much is bad (injury, burnout, poor performance), as is too little (stagnation, plateau, poor performance). Many athletes will have polarized reactions to fatigue, so keep asking yourself or the athletes you coach what their impulses are when they are tired. Two very normal “types” are:
The “Security blanket” athlete or the athlete who says “I need to feel very tired all the time, otherwise I don’t think things are going well!” This athlete keeps pushing, no matter how bad they feel. This athlete will need to build faith in the fact that fitness is durable despite resting.
The “Recovery junkie” athlete or the athlete who says “I need to be perfectly rested for every workout (not possible, leads to stagnating fitness, performance plateaus). This athlete pulls the emergency brake at any sign of fatigue and shys away from pushing themselves. This athlete needs to see that they can do hard workouts on top of other hard workouts, and that some fatigue is important to development.
Signs of Fatigue
Fatigue can manifest in different ways, sometimes even within the same athlete! As a coach or an athlete, look for these flashing lights that it might be time for a rest:
The athlete suddenly cannot perform as they did just a few weeks (or days!) ago
While analyzing your workout files, you notice that heart rate is elevated or depressed for a given power or pace
You experience sensations in training you’re not used to: shakiness, chills, fever-like symptoms, burning legs on easy/shallow climbs, clunkiness while running or swimming, deep sighs or odd breathing patterns
Motivation is low, or you find yourself saying or thinking I don’t really care about this workout
Sleep, mood, diet, or stress suddenly change: over/undersleeping, mood swings or mood intensity, hungry all the time or never hungry, everything seems like a stressor
These are only a few of them, but as your athletes move into August/September/October it might be a good idea to check in with them about how they’re feeling (well, you should be doing that all the time, coaches, but maybe put a little more emphasis on it at this point in the year). After programming workouts, your main job as a coach is to manage fatigue, so make sure you have these questions built into your athlete meetings. If you are self-coached, journaling can be a helpful way to check in on fatigue, or giving yourself a snap score every day on a scale of 1-10, where 1 means you’d really rather stay in bed and 10 means you could probably throw that football over those mountains. Notice that we aren’t suggesting one of the many recovery devices presently flooding the market. If those are useful to you, continue using them, but we’ve never seen anything more powerful than the question “How are you feeling?”
Yup. We get it.
How to Deal, and What to Say to Yourself (or Your Athlete)
We’ll cover the athlete who avoids fatigue completely in the next section, but if you’ve discovered you or your athlete is suffering from fatigue, here is what to do and what to say. First of all, scrub the workouts from the next two or three days. We can actually hear you type A types clicking away from this post, but don’t! In the words of someone pithier than us, “Fatigue is the ultimate watt-block.” That statement is aimed at cyclists, but the principle is the same for all endurance athletes. If you are tired enough that your workouts are suffering, you will not get anything out of them. And even worse, if you feel the compulsion to train even though you know you are tired, you might have a problem with exercise addiction. That’s kinda heavy, but it really happens in these sports. If that is the case for you, we really urge you to talk to a mental health professional, since it’s probably beyond your coach’s scope of care.
But if you can take two or three days off, please do so. And do so in the spirit of exploration. You won’t lose all of your fitness, we promise you. Physiological changes take a long time to occur, both as you add fitness and detrain, and a few days of complete rest won’t return you to couch and donut days. If you find yourself saying to your coach “Can’t I just swim?” or “Can’t I just go for an easy ride?” you may want to check in with yourself to figure out what is doing the wagging: the tail or the dog. If you’re a coach, just ask your athlete to give it an honest try and you’ll evaluate how they feel when they return to training. If you’re an athlete, ask yourself if you have gone through this exact thought process in the past, and if you are willing to try something new this time. For both coaches and athletes, here are some tools to help quiet the demons, since skipping planned workouts can be anathema for goal-oriented endurance athletes:
Out of the 500-700 workouts you will do this year, how important could 5-7 of them actually be?
You (self-coached athletes) or your coach do not write perfect plans. You both wish you do, but it’s just not possible. Think of these sessions you are missing as moments of overenthusiasm from you or your coach during the planning session, and they shouldn’t have been here in the first place, if either of you had had a crystal ball.
Training while tired or sick will eventually lead to worse problems: injury, chronic fatigue, or burnout. You picked up this sport because you liked it, not because of the shiny things it can offer you.
Making Friends with Fatige
On the other side of the coin from the athlete digging themselves into a crater at this point of the year we see the athlete who hasn’t yet accepted the fact that ANY fatigue is a good thing. We won’t spend too much time here, but these athletes probably still have at least one or two races remaining on the calendar, and probably want something different than what they’ve gotten this year. For these athletes, walking them through the following process of developing endurance performance can be helpful:
Training induces fatigue, as your body struggles to keep up with the new load
Progressively adding more fatigue (but not too much!) signals to your body that it needs to adapt to handle this new normal
You should be getting more and more tired over the course of a training block or mesocycle, and a few workouts that don’t go well are totally OK
Once you’ve hit a moderately-high level of fatigue (usually after a period weeks, not days or months) it’s time to rest
Resting after you’ve built up significant fatigue is when your body has time to recover and adapt
If you’re repeating a pattern of one workout - rest - one workout - rest your development will take much longer than it needs to take
Probably the best way to sum this up is to rip off Michael Pollan’s maxim for healthy eating: “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.” In our case the message would be “Train consistently, mostly easy to moderate, not too much.” Note that in both sayings, there is a real lack of absolutist language, no “only,” “ever,” or “always.”
Conclusion
To wrap up, we’re going to give you something else, other than just the summary of this article. We owe Tim Cusick, lead developer at WKO5, the main idea here, which we are going to extend slightly to our own purposes. Cusick uses a term he calls “Self-selected Training” for those moments when an athlete is feeling good. The idea here is that we should be making room for athletes to bring their own experience and intuition into their training, but we should also give them guardrails to keep them safe. Cusick’s maxims are the first two, and ours is the third.
In the early part of the training year (first trimester), if you’re feeling good you should extend the interval. I.e. make it longer, not harder
In the middle part of the training year (second trimester), if you’re feeling good you can make the interval harder (i.e. more intense)
In the third part of the training year (third trimester), if you’re feeling good, consider leaving the interval just as it is. Save that bullet for your big race instead, and carry around the confidence that you could have done more, but you were a mature athlete and kept an eye on your fatigue
We hope that this has been a helpful post, and will keep a few of you from maybe driving yourself into a too-deep hole. Managing fitness is always difficult, but this point of the year, when form and fatigue balance on a narrow fulcrum, you should be asking yourself every day “what is the appropriate response to this feeling I’m having right now?”