Originally Posted by
StanSeven
It's not that difficult to overtrain on much less mileage than 200/week. It's the hard effort repetitively without enough time to recover. For many it's as much mental as physical. I've overtrained a couple times running during marathon training and doing 50 mile weeks. The training caused me to continually improve and I kept increasing the intensity without backing off even though I knew and ignored the warning signs.
Disagree. It's pretty dang hard to do that at under 200 miles per week.
Even in marathon training, a true 50 mile per week overtrain is unusual. That's a mere 1.2 hours of running per day. You'd have to try and hammer it every single session you're out there, and honestly, unless you're being forced to do that by a school coach or something similar, you'd just slow down when you felt drained. Beginners whole haven't run at all or much don't even get to 50 mpw on the run (or 200 on the bike) because FATIGUE stops them dead in their tracks.
Overtraining is when you train through fatigue, for weeks, if not months on end, at high volume. Tiredness, even a whole 2 weeks of tiredness is not overtraining. I was totally drained for 4 entire weeks in my half ironman build 3 months ago when I ramped up to 18 hours per week of training from about 10-11, and felt like a zombie when I was trying to even get up in the morning. That was NOT overtraining.