Rendered at 01:12:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
kzrdude 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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."
This article was written in 2015. Nowadays most elite ultra-runners do have coaches, and follow data-driven training regimes. This is a trend in all professional (and, to a lesser degree, amateur) sports, but it is definitely quite noticeable in a sport where athletes used to basically be dudes and girls who liked running fast in the mountains and did that a lot. A lot of that data-driven training is aimed at maximizing training load without going into overtraining.
As a result of this and other optimizations (most notably higher carbs consumption during races, but also better heat training, better recovery protocols, better shoes, etc.), races keep getting faster. The article mentions the course record for the WS100 dropping by 50' between 2004 and 2012. Since then, it has dropped by another full hour (13h46 this year).
m463 3 hours ago [-]
> most notably higher carbs consumption during races
I found how they got calories in during recent the sub-2-hour marathons fascinating:
> The hydrogel technology they have developed over the past 10 years now allows athletes to absorb 90–120 grams of carbs per hour without GI distress.
Note that in the only reasonably-close-to-contemporary story of the run, the marathon run itself came at the end of a multi-day run from Marathon to Sparta and back, about a 300 mile round trip. The marathon run was just the last 26.2.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 11 hours ago [-]
I thought the (1).2 was added so that the first modern marathon at the London Olympics (1908) could finish in front of the King? Before that the 'marathon' was 25 miles. And the 300 mile round trip is at least partially replicated in the modern Spartathlon [1]
I definitely experienced this in training for my marathon and half Ironman (which I had stupidly signed up for in consecutive months). I didn't follow my training plan properly and tried to cram all the volume in the last month or two and it didn't end well. I was able to make it through the half Ironman through pure adrenaline, but I laid in bed for the following two weeks and barely moved. I had no motivation to do anything whatsoever.
It turns out that I was deficient in plenty of vitamins: D, B12, iron. I'm sure these were all symptoms of OTS. I didn't feel the same in any of my workouts until maybe 4 months later. Even then, it took very gradual build-up after those 4 months to get back to where I was. Taking vitamin supplements helped, sure, but the true cure was just ramping down the exercise a lot and getting proper sleep over months.
I empathize with these athletes because exercise is addicting; it feels almost morally wrong to take days off. There's also always someone better than you. But as I got older, I realized that recovery is just as important (if not, more important) than the actual work. In fact, that's where all the gains are made.
I found a few helpful pointers with structuring my workouts now is to:
* Increase training volume <10% W/W. It gives your body time to adapt and also helps with preventing injury.
* Mixing in recovery weeks is also really helpful with helping your body adapt.
* There's no way around doing a lot of volume when training for endurance events, but keeping your HR lower the whole time is a good way to make sure you don't overtrain and can show up the next day.
xcskier56 14 hours ago [-]
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.
drakonka 13 hours ago [-]
The article addresses this:
> 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.
wollowollo 12 hours ago [-]
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.
anibal-sanchez 11 hours ago [-]
Most pro athletes have coaches. The real problem is that nobody understands chronic fatigue. In the best case, after the high season, the athlete takes "holidays" with a couple of months of lower-load training, hoping that it will be enough to cope with years of high-load training.
For instance, nobody knows how each body adapts to a high-carb/high-tech diet over a decade of training. They just hope for the best.
For sure, amateurs shouldn't be doing the same.
Noaidi 10 hours ago [-]
> For instance, nobody knows how each body adapts to a high-carb/high-tech diet over a decade of training. They just hope for the best.
I think this is where Nutritional Genetics could help tremendously. I went under anesthesia for a colonoscopy and my blood sugar dropped so low they had to give me a glucose infusion. That is how they discovered I have a partial CPT1A Deficiency. Apparently anesthesia inhibits fatty acid oxidation which led them to get me tested for the disorder. Knowing I had this changed my diet completely and has helped me in my recovery.
sltr 6 hours ago [-]
Experienced distance runner here. This is not new or mysterious.
> Overtraining Syndrome is where a lack of recovery from training stress results in underperformance, often combined with Mood Disturbances such as reduced Motivation, depression and anxiety
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.
guerby 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nradov 12 hours ago [-]
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).
guerby 9 hours ago [-]
The article talks about above 10 hours run time, is that "high intensity endurance" or something different in the context?
(Curious)
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone has good data on sports where events last >10 hours. The population of athletes is quite small which makes it difficult to study effectively.
There is a bit more data on iron-distance triathlons, where the elites finish in the 7-8 hour range. They all do some high-intensity interval workouts and none are on ketogenic diets. Whether this type of training and racing is optimal for overall health and longevity is an open question; I suspect probably not.
drakonka 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bhouston 12 hours ago [-]
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:
It’s become common over recent decades for endurance athletes to consume gels etc during events.
Maybe those gels are themselves bad for you somehow (they are basically pure sugar), but also if you don’t eat while running and just eat a normal diet of 3 square meals a day then that naturally limits how much you can train.
Modern endurance athletes override the normal human digestion process by eating in a way that our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to do, therefore allowing them to train and race harder.
But to what end?
bell-cot 14 hours ago [-]
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?
pif 14 hours ago [-]
> They are renowned for their form of prayer that involves running for extended periods of time.
Mark me as atheist!
jijijijij 7 hours ago [-]
> 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
Is this speculation on your side, or do you have a source for this "biological reality"?
(1) The "endurance running hypothesis" suggests we may be exactly made for this. However, what's certainly unaccounted for is pushing limits by sidestepping physical and mental safeguards. Just fueling a run with highly available carbs is a situation "nature" couldn't possibly account for, since even most plants we eat today didn't even exist, much less highly caloric gels. Mindset is another dysregulated thing. Grave difference between hunting prey and records. You have to disregard feelings like exhaustion or lack of motivation to chase records. Not to mention, for most of history humans had way more leisure time to rest. Hunting was their job, not the hobby on top of demanding job. It was also a collective endeavor not a competitive one. So, the way it's done is certainly a perversion, but the ballpark of physical load may be within specification.
(2) I think the relevant time frame is too short to expect any pronounced evolutionary effect from civilizational slack. Endurance running may be a defining feature of our species and sedentism is a very, very recent development in evolutionary timescales. I believe, lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame. And that's really a consequential but minuscule genetic change, compared to systemic degeneration of our evolutionary legacy.
On a side-note, I want to add, your understanding of "biological realities" regarding (2) has some history and is somewhat in line with prior thinking that ended in social darwinism and eugenics AFAIK.
> 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?
I have a hard time believing you made this connection, without knowing about the book Born to Run and the endurance running hypothesis, but anyway, I believe that's where the anthropological discourse is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
bell-cot 5 hours ago [-]
> Is this speculation ... ?
More of a generic engineering quip - if a gadget can't meet a spec, then either it wasn't designed to that spec, or it degraded after it passed QC.
I'm vaguely aware of the endurance running hypothesis. But a quick Google suggests that most humans had decent stone-age atlatls, bows & arrows, snares, and spears by ~50k years ago. That's >2k generations of selection where endurance running is not the highest-value skill for catching dinner.
> ... lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame ...
Humans have been concocting excuses to proclaim their own ancestry and blood "superior" for well over 7 millennia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh#Divinity. Ditto ways to rationalize ruling class control over reproduction (and everything else) in the "lower" social classes. My own interest is more on esoterics, such as this unfortunate mutation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Synthesis - and things humanity may desperately need soon, like another 10 °C of heat tolerance.
once the body/brain/CNS starts treating cytokines produced by exercise (and illness) as a pathogen instead of doing stress adaptations, you will become perpetually ill and unable to exceed aerobic threshold (or lactate threshold) without PEM
and there's no escape, no amount of rest will cure it, there's no supplement or drug that will reprogram your mitochondria at that point
and right now all research is effectively dead for long-covid, forget OTS which will never happen
From the article: "The past seven years have seen the rise and decline of at least a dozen elite competitors, ..."
And it seems the time-line of OTS and long-covid are also similar. IIRC there was an article on how long-covid had significant effects on respiratory performance of athletes (and that other people were affected just as often, but usually didn't notice because they didn't often/ever use their full output).
Does anyone remember reading something similar?
ck2 9 hours ago [-]
not sure if you are asking if overtraining-syndrome emerged around long-covid but that's not true as it has been documented for many decades in endurance athletes
but what I meant is the cause/effect and symptoms are virtually identical especially once afflicted
long-covid has taken out a lot of athletes, especially triathletes, and many professionals who never recovered despite access to almost unlimited resources
I actually collect articles about them and have hundreds in a folder but it gets depressing to check years later and they've never come back
personally I lost about 10 vo2max points that never came back
and it's not just respiratory performance, it's the entire energy envelope, the actual activity ability and recovery time is just completely destroyed
also similar to auto-immune diseases but no existing test detects long-covid or overtraining-syndrome which is why I am so sure now it's "bad/corrupt code" in the mitochondria themselves
keybored 11 hours ago [-]
I haven’t read OP, but there are enough people in our culture with a monomanaic tendency who only need an obsession to go overboard all unsupervised. So they might start running a little, of course slow to start because they physically can’t take it, but after a point they might not notice that adding more and more activity volume can’t just be done forever just based on your gut, dayfeel, and no pain no gain. Or someone reads about meditation and starts doing hour-long meditations, then soon retreats. Then their mind gets hit with an uncomfortable and disturbing realization while their minds are figuratively in a bad and structurally weak yoga pose. But why didn’t the meditation book warn about this? The meditation book aimed at people who successfully will do it for twenty minutes a day and will have 90% no long-term follow through.
14 hours ago [-]
raverbashing 14 hours ago [-]
"Mysterious"
"Overtraining syndrome"
I don't see why it's so mysterious, fatigue accumulates until something tips you over the limit
goda90 13 hours ago [-]
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).
bbayles 11 hours ago [-]
A lot of it is anorexia by another name. There is a subspecies that involves compulsive exercise. Doing lots of athletics without proper nourishment is a good recipe for low performance and injury.
vova_hn2 10 hours ago [-]
> A lot of it is anorexia by another name.
Literally my first thought after reading this training log excerpt:
> 10/4/2012: I’m really trying to be conscious right now about losing some worthless snack weight… Need to be more diligent, take action, get fucking after it, and restore the body and the mind!
"worthless snack weight" sounds very similar to epithets that anorexic people often use.
But over-training can happen even with sufficient nutrition (even if it is less likely, as nutrition is a major part of post-exercise recovery).
bbayles 28 minutes ago [-]
Also anorexia by another name in many cases, alas.
raverbashing 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, a lot of them. Non exaustive list:
- 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)
inigyou 13 hours ago [-]
What's fatigue? Is there a fatigue molecule?
rzzzt 13 hours ago [-]
Lactic acid?
perrygeo 11 hours ago [-]
Nope. Lactate and lactic acids are by-products of fatigue, not causal agents. Far from being toxic, elite athletes are even intentionally ingesting lactate as fuel these days.
nradov 11 hours ago [-]
Correct. Related to that, accumulation of free hydrogen ions is associated with acute fatigue (although not necessarily related to chronic conditions like OTS). This is why some endurance athletes are now taking sodium bicarbonate supplements.
raverbashing 13 hours ago [-]
I'd say ask ChatGPT because the list is loooong
ButlerianJihad 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tokai 10 hours ago [-]
Humans seem to be like horses. A little bit of bad luck and we're half crippled for life.
globular-toast 11 hours ago [-]
Wasn't this kinda inevitable? When I was little a marathon was considered a monumental athletic performance achieved by few. Nowadays it's like everyone who has ever put a pair of trainers on has "run" a marathon (completed would be more accurate, because many people walk a significant part of it). Yeah, I know, I know, gatekeeping is not cool etc. etc.
Meanwhile, the world record marathon time must be reaching its irreducible minimum.
It seems to me like more and more people are now pushing distance to set themselves apart from everyone else. If you say "I ran a 2:30 marathon", most people won't know if it's impressive or not. If you say "I ran 10 marathons, backwards, while juggling 10 pineapples" suddenly people are interested.
Noaidi 11 hours ago [-]
From the article:
“He’d waffle between jittery agitation, as though he’d just had seven cups of coffee, and a fatigue so profound that he could hardly get off the living room couch.”
“I was convinced I’d come down with some severe condition that was going to kill me,” he says. For the next two years, Roes’s life became a series of waiting rooms and tests: blood work, brain scans, heart screenings. “I was having severe fevers and extreme phases where I would go into such a brain fog, I thought I might black out,” he says. The tests yielded no definitive diagnosis.
—
I have lived this myself. I’m not an ultra runner but many of these symptoms These runners have I have without ever being into exercise. And it runs in my family. They keep finding little weird things in my test results, but it’s never anything that leads to a diagnosis or affect. They label me with a psychological disorder only.
I’m inclined to think that both my issue and these runners issues has to do with how they handle oxidative stress and the damage that can do to the neurological system. We know these runners are fueled by a sort of addiction to the running. And that’s going to involve dopamine. But since you have to metabolize dopamine using monoamine oxidize enzymes, you’re going to create hydrogen peroxide, and oxidative stressor, as a product. In my opinion to understand, neurological disorders, you need to understand how oxidative stress damages the neurons and the immune system.
And it seems by even just thinking about this I was right I just googled over training and oxidative stress and came up with this paper
So I’m assuming the people this affects probably have some mild genetic issue that makes them a little bit worse at handling oxidative stress of some sort. This could be with glutathione peroxide or catalyze or any of the nutrients needed for us to absorb the cofactors that enable us to get rid of oxidative stress.
tsimionescu 11 hours ago [-]
There are so many things going on at the same time in the body of someone pushing themselves so far beyond human limits that it seems extremely unlikely you'd find a single neat cause for this. The bottom line is that they're destroying their bodies for athletic achievement, and most likely one too many things are pushed beyond a limit. The cure, or at least prevention, for them is simple - they should just stop doing this to themselves.
The fact that the vague array of symptoms matches your own possibly genetic symptoms doesn't mean much, most likely. Perhaps there are some similar biological mechanisms behind at least some of it, but perhaps not.
Noaidi 10 hours ago [-]
Of course, yes. I feel like the only solution to these odd disorders lay in personalized medicine. I feel like only looking at their genome will reveal the true cause and wills how the genetics that put them at risk. But theer could be some other environmental variables as well.
But they share enough of the same symptoms that they have already seemed to have narrowed it down to four possible causes. I never gave up on myself and I have come a long way, so I have hope for them.
nradov 11 hours ago [-]
Oxidative stress could be a factor in some cases but connecting that to dopamine metabolism seems like a real stretch.
Noaidi 11 hours ago [-]
A real stretch you say? Meaning that it’s something that they definitely would not study at all?
When training is effective or the athletes are not exhausted, the decrease of the excretion rate--with the exception of dopamine--is more likely to be lower (noradrenaline, adrenaline). Generalization of these results requires further expansion of the experimental basis.
Oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage, and inflammation create an environment in which DNA damage can occur. The results of animal studies have shown that overtraining can cause DNA damage in blood, skeletal muscle, and liver.
andrewstuart 13 hours ago [-]
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."
Paywalled articles are allowed on HN, but if you pass the URL to archive.is and then post the link here, you can get a few karma points for free.
bell-cot 14 hours ago [-]
Not if you're security conscious enough to default-block js.
robin_reala 13 hours ago [-]
…or hit the reader button.
avalys 11 hours ago [-]
> A thin-faced, introspective Montanan, Wolfe had recently quit his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in Helena to concentrate on running for the North Face’s global athletic team.
Well yeah, that seems more important. /s
Article is faintly ludicrous.
Extreme endurance exercise is bad for your body. Medicine has understood this for years. Marathon runners, cyclists and swimmers have one of the highest incidences of atrial fibrillation once they pass age 60. If you took a blood test right after running a marathon, doctors would think you’re having a heart attack.
> Back in Montana he started running 25, sometimes 30 hours a week, fasting to drop any extra weight off his already thin frame and beating himself up in the margins of his training logs.
> Skaggs told me after Hardrock, he took a single day off, then started training for a marathon. “Stupid-hard running,” he says, “and the symptoms just kept getting worse and worse.”
This article is about people who are damaging their bodies through extreme, unnatural exercise - and then they are surprised that they’ve damaged their bodies. This publication is blithely unaware of how ridiculous this sounds. Like reading a Reddit thread of coke addicts earnestly cheering each other on to consume more and more coke, then being disappointed when their nose disintegrates.
I suppose it’s scientifically interesting that we don’t know the cause down to the biomolecular level. But that’s not surprising either. Other than genetic disorders that can be traced to a single faulty protein, or those caused by some external causative agent like a toxin or a virus, we don’t really know the root cause of that many diseases.
pipes 13 hours ago [-]
Click bait title.
eulgro 13 hours ago [-]
> he inhaled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the kitchen table
Well that can't help for sure.
smcg 11 hours ago [-]
This seems like it should be obvious that it should happen. The human body was not designed for ultra-marathons. At a certain point the body shuts down out of self-preservation, because the mind is exhausting it too much.
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://uphillathlete.com/product/training-for-the-uphill-at...
As a result of this and other optimizations (most notably higher carbs consumption during races, but also better heat training, better recovery protocols, better shoes, etc.), races keep getting faster. The article mentions the course record for the WS100 dropping by 50' between 2004 and 2012. Since then, it has dropped by another full hour (13h46 this year).
I found how they got calories in during recent the sub-2-hour marathons fascinating:
> The hydrogel technology they have developed over the past 10 years now allows athletes to absorb 90–120 grams of carbs per hour without GI distress.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47914829
(and the shoes)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides
1. https://www.spartathlon.gr/en/home/
It turns out that I was deficient in plenty of vitamins: D, B12, iron. I'm sure these were all symptoms of OTS. I didn't feel the same in any of my workouts until maybe 4 months later. Even then, it took very gradual build-up after those 4 months to get back to where I was. Taking vitamin supplements helped, sure, but the true cure was just ramping down the exercise a lot and getting proper sleep over months.
I empathize with these athletes because exercise is addicting; it feels almost morally wrong to take days off. There's also always someone better than you. But as I got older, I realized that recovery is just as important (if not, more important) than the actual work. In fact, that's where all the gains are made.
I found a few helpful pointers with structuring my workouts now is to:
* Increase training volume <10% W/W. It gives your body time to adapt and also helps with preventing injury.
* Mixing in recovery weeks is also really helpful with helping your body adapt.
* There's no way around doing a lot of volume when training for endurance events, but keeping your HR lower the whole time is a good way to make sure you don't overtrain and can show up the next day.
> 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.
For instance, nobody knows how each body adapts to a high-carb/high-tech diet over a decade of training. They just hope for the best.
For sure, amateurs shouldn't be doing the same.
I think this is where Nutritional Genetics could help tremendously. I went under anesthesia for a colonoscopy and my blood sugar dropped so low they had to give me a glucose infusion. That is how they discovered I have a partial CPT1A Deficiency. Apparently anesthesia inhibits fatty acid oxidation which led them to get me tested for the disorder. Knowing I had this changed my diet completely and has helped me in my recovery.
> Overtraining Syndrome is where a lack of recovery from training stress results in underperformance, often combined with Mood Disturbances such as reduced Motivation, depression and anxiety
https://fellrnr.com/wiki/Overtraining_Syndrome
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.
(Curious)
There is a bit more data on iron-distance triathlons, where the elites finish in the 7-8 hour range. They all do some high-intensity interval workouts and none are on ketogenic diets. Whether this type of training and racing is optimal for overall health and longevity is an open question; I suspect probably not.
> 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/
Maybe those gels are themselves bad for you somehow (they are basically pure sugar), but also if you don’t eat while running and just eat a normal diet of 3 square meals a day then that naturally limits how much you can train.
Modern endurance athletes override the normal human digestion process by eating in a way that our ancestors wouldn’t have been able to do, therefore allowing them to train and race harder.
But to what end?
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!
Is this speculation on your side, or do you have a source for this "biological reality"?
(1) The "endurance running hypothesis" suggests we may be exactly made for this. However, what's certainly unaccounted for is pushing limits by sidestepping physical and mental safeguards. Just fueling a run with highly available carbs is a situation "nature" couldn't possibly account for, since even most plants we eat today didn't even exist, much less highly caloric gels. Mindset is another dysregulated thing. Grave difference between hunting prey and records. You have to disregard feelings like exhaustion or lack of motivation to chase records. Not to mention, for most of history humans had way more leisure time to rest. Hunting was their job, not the hobby on top of demanding job. It was also a collective endeavor not a competitive one. So, the way it's done is certainly a perversion, but the ballpark of physical load may be within specification.
(2) I think the relevant time frame is too short to expect any pronounced evolutionary effect from civilizational slack. Endurance running may be a defining feature of our species and sedentism is a very, very recent development in evolutionary timescales. I believe, lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame. And that's really a consequential but minuscule genetic change, compared to systemic degeneration of our evolutionary legacy.
On a side-note, I want to add, your understanding of "biological realities" regarding (2) has some history and is somewhat in line with prior thinking that ended in social darwinism and eugenics AFAIK.
> 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?
I have a hard time believing you made this connection, without knowing about the book Born to Run and the endurance running hypothesis, but anyway, I believe that's where the anthropological discourse is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
More of a generic engineering quip - if a gadget can't meet a spec, then either it wasn't designed to that spec, or it degraded after it passed QC.
I'm vaguely aware of the endurance running hypothesis. But a quick Google suggests that most humans had decent stone-age atlatls, bows & arrows, snares, and spears by ~50k years ago. That's >2k generations of selection where endurance running is not the highest-value skill for catching dinner.
> ... lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame ...
Look at parts of the immune system which are needed to fight high-mortality diseases. The classic is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease#Genetics
> On a side-note ...
Humans have been concocting excuses to proclaim their own ancestry and blood "superior" for well over 7 millennia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh#Divinity. Ditto ways to rationalize ruling class control over reproduction (and everything else) in the "lower" social classes. My own interest is more on esoterics, such as this unfortunate mutation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Synthesis - and things humanity may desperately need soon, like another 10 °C of heat tolerance.
(FWIW, my immediate association with Born to Run is musical - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Run )
once the body/brain/CNS starts treating cytokines produced by exercise (and illness) as a pathogen instead of doing stress adaptations, you will become perpetually ill and unable to exceed aerobic threshold (or lactate threshold) without PEM
and there's no escape, no amount of rest will cure it, there's no supplement or drug that will reprogram your mitochondria at that point
and right now all research is effectively dead for long-covid, forget OTS which will never happen
* https://imgur.com/a/OzP83pd
* https://i.imgur.com/v6BnoJG.png
* https://i.imgur.com/VpEwjp0.png
From the article: "The past seven years have seen the rise and decline of at least a dozen elite competitors, ..."
And it seems the time-line of OTS and long-covid are also similar. IIRC there was an article on how long-covid had significant effects on respiratory performance of athletes (and that other people were affected just as often, but usually didn't notice because they didn't often/ever use their full output).
Does anyone remember reading something similar?
but what I meant is the cause/effect and symptoms are virtually identical especially once afflicted
long-covid has taken out a lot of athletes, especially triathletes, and many professionals who never recovered despite access to almost unlimited resources
I actually collect articles about them and have hundreds in a folder but it gets depressing to check years later and they've never come back
personally I lost about 10 vo2max points that never came back
and it's not just respiratory performance, it's the entire energy envelope, the actual activity ability and recovery time is just completely destroyed
also similar to auto-immune diseases but no existing test detects long-covid or overtraining-syndrome which is why I am so sure now it's "bad/corrupt code" in the mitochondria themselves
"Overtraining syndrome"
I don't see why it's so mysterious, fatigue accumulates until something tips you over the limit
Literally my first thought after reading this training log excerpt:
> 10/4/2012: I’m really trying to be conscious right now about losing some worthless snack weight… Need to be more diligent, take action, get fucking after it, and restore the body and the mind!
"worthless snack weight" sounds very similar to epithets that anorexic people often use.
But over-training can happen even with sufficient nutrition (even if it is less likely, as nutrition is a major part of post-exercise recovery).
- 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)
Meanwhile, the world record marathon time must be reaching its irreducible minimum.
It seems to me like more and more people are now pushing distance to set themselves apart from everyone else. If you say "I ran a 2:30 marathon", most people won't know if it's impressive or not. If you say "I ran 10 marathons, backwards, while juggling 10 pineapples" suddenly people are interested.
“He’d waffle between jittery agitation, as though he’d just had seven cups of coffee, and a fatigue so profound that he could hardly get off the living room couch.”
“I was convinced I’d come down with some severe condition that was going to kill me,” he says. For the next two years, Roes’s life became a series of waiting rooms and tests: blood work, brain scans, heart screenings. “I was having severe fevers and extreme phases where I would go into such a brain fog, I thought I might black out,” he says. The tests yielded no definitive diagnosis.
—
I have lived this myself. I’m not an ultra runner but many of these symptoms These runners have I have without ever being into exercise. And it runs in my family. They keep finding little weird things in my test results, but it’s never anything that leads to a diagnosis or affect. They label me with a psychological disorder only.
I’m inclined to think that both my issue and these runners issues has to do with how they handle oxidative stress and the damage that can do to the neurological system. We know these runners are fueled by a sort of addiction to the running. And that’s going to involve dopamine. But since you have to metabolize dopamine using monoamine oxidize enzymes, you’re going to create hydrogen peroxide, and oxidative stressor, as a product. In my opinion to understand, neurological disorders, you need to understand how oxidative stress damages the neurons and the immune system.
And it seems by even just thinking about this I was right I just googled over training and oxidative stress and came up with this paper
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3435910/
The four theories of the disorder from the same magazine, which includes oxidated distress as one of them
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/ov...
So I’m assuming the people this affects probably have some mild genetic issue that makes them a little bit worse at handling oxidative stress of some sort. This could be with glutathione peroxide or catalyze or any of the nutrients needed for us to absorb the cofactors that enable us to get rid of oxidative stress.
The fact that the vague array of symptoms matches your own possibly genetic symptoms doesn't mean much, most likely. Perhaps there are some similar biological mechanisms behind at least some of it, but perhaps not.
But they share enough of the same symptoms that they have already seemed to have narrowed it down to four possible causes. I never gave up on myself and I have come a long way, so I have hope for them.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1601559/
When training is effective or the athletes are not exhausted, the decrease of the excretion rate--with the exception of dopamine--is more likely to be lower (noradrenaline, adrenaline). Generalization of these results requires further expansion of the experimental basis.
Editing to add a more recent study(2025):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266633762...
"Oestradiol, total catecholamines and dopamine levels were higher in OTS athletes."
The more catecholamines you release the more H2O2 you will produce.
And this one(2025):
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12010411/pdf/main.p...
Oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage, and inflammation create an environment in which DNA damage can occur. The results of animal studies have shown that overtraining can cause DNA damage in blood, skeletal muscle, and liver.
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/
That's really not a lot, it's like 3 days / week of running a slow 10k.
Curious what the consensus will be a few years out.
Well yeah, that seems more important. /s
Article is faintly ludicrous.
Extreme endurance exercise is bad for your body. Medicine has understood this for years. Marathon runners, cyclists and swimmers have one of the highest incidences of atrial fibrillation once they pass age 60. If you took a blood test right after running a marathon, doctors would think you’re having a heart attack.
> Back in Montana he started running 25, sometimes 30 hours a week, fasting to drop any extra weight off his already thin frame and beating himself up in the margins of his training logs.
> Skaggs told me after Hardrock, he took a single day off, then started training for a marathon. “Stupid-hard running,” he says, “and the symptoms just kept getting worse and worse.”
This article is about people who are damaging their bodies through extreme, unnatural exercise - and then they are surprised that they’ve damaged their bodies. This publication is blithely unaware of how ridiculous this sounds. Like reading a Reddit thread of coke addicts earnestly cheering each other on to consume more and more coke, then being disappointed when their nose disintegrates.
I suppose it’s scientifically interesting that we don’t know the cause down to the biomolecular level. But that’s not surprising either. Other than genetic disorders that can be traced to a single faulty protein, or those caused by some external causative agent like a toxin or a virus, we don’t really know the root cause of that many diseases.
Well that can't help for sure.