Fatigue and Motivation
A few weeks ago I posted on a rationale for taking a break. I thought that I likely burned myself out a bit and overtrained going into Leadman this past summer. While I clearly needed and am taking a break, I struggled with the overtraining hypothesis for quite a while. You see, my training wasn’t that different than it was in 2019. I ran faster at the Leadville 100 run in 2019 and I finished the mountain bike (…albeit 15 minutes after the cut-off).
2021 was not a lot different. Training was similar if not slightly better, but I just couldn’t get anywhere. I slowed down - a lot. I postulated that it could be aging (you can’t decrease that much in a year or two for age alone). I thought the weather and heat were affecting me.
I searched for so many different rationales as to my struggles training for Leadman - my wife began to laugh every time I brought it up… While overtraining definitely played a role I think something bigger was at work.
What happened? What occurred that could have had such great impact?
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. So it goes.
The past twenty months were met with the worst pandemic the world has seen since the 1918 Spanish Flu. We experienced mass protests driven by racial division. An insurrection against our government and continued rampant conspiracies. While the intensity of these issues may or may not have effected us directly (depending on your perspective) the reality is that they likely caused some amount of continued stress both conscious and unconscious. It’s the unconscious stuff that’s insidious. The conscious stuff is often the tip of the ice-berg. It’s what’s underneath that builds up and sneaks up on you. Add that to personal stressors like family, work, money, etc. and the heavy load of training for multiple ultraendurance events crossing different modalities - you start to get a recipe for over-training.
No matter how ‘resilient’ or ‘tough’ we think we are stress is stress and it takes it’s toll in how we perceive physical activity! (by the way EVEN David Goggins took some time this year to take care of an injury).
A 2009 study by Marcora, Staiano and Manning suggests mentally fatigued subjects ratings of perceived exertion increased noticeably after a prolonged bout of cognitive activity.
Guess what - processing all that’s going on - even if it didn’t affect you greatly, will take energy away from you. Things will in general seem harder. You’ll be more likely to get fatigued sooner, have less motivation, easier to cross the line into overtraining…and yes, get injured. That’s normal!
Having a higher level of perceived exertion during long term stressors is your bodies way of protecting itself. It’s telling you to take care of yourself and slow down. It’s not saying stop. It’s saying you have a limited reserve. Let’s preserve it for when we need it most.
Many could just carry on with out feeling too much going on. That doesn’t make them ‘tougher’ (I loath that concept). It doesn’t make them any more resilient. Each and everyone us has had a different experience to this…
If you’ve been experiencing more fatigue this past year, lower motivation, maybe even experienced a DNF or DNS - you are not alone.
Ironically, for me a I experienced a notable decrease in speed at the beginning of March 2020, right as we were beginning to go into a ‘lock down'.’ - several months later doing a 10K time trial I was slower than I had been in years! For a long time I experienced this - and then by trying to layer more on, I actually started going backwards and became significantly under-recovered.
So what would I do differently now that I am a bit more aware of this?
Appreciate and respect where I am at in the present moment.
When the stressors are high - feed my recovery more. Recognize I need to take more time off than I normally would during a training week.
Set limits at work, with friends, family. Say no. Rest.
Lower my expectations just a tad recognizing this is where my body is at - that’s OK, let’s take it easier, allowing my body to recover more. These races ain’t going anywhere. A few less races wouldn’t hurt.
Rely on Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) more. Your brain knows. So many times over the past year I’d go for a ‘easy’ run and it felt like death. That was a good sign I needed maybe two or three days of recovery.
This self-knowledge is part of resilience. Knowing what my body does, how it reacts AND how to take care of myself allows me to come back stronger next year. Trying to force it to happen - not so much - that’s when we lose that fitness and risk over-training.
SELF-CARE, SELF-COMPASSION are critical tools to SUCCESS. This is what makes someone resilient and gritty. Listen to your body.
2022 is right around the corner? How are you handling this stress? Have you struggled with fatigue and motivation? Do you have big events on the horizon? What can I do to help you? Feel free to reach out, I’m here to serve.
- Neal
Marcora, S., Staiano, W. & Manning, V. (2009). Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans. Journal of Applied Physiology, 106, 857-864.