There is an ancient expression used in endurance sports: "It's better to be 10 percent undertrained than 5 percent overtrained." I've never been too sure what to make of this expression. I mean, isn't it best to be 100 percent perfecly trained? But of late my attitude toward this unattributed piece of wisdom has changed, largely due to the frequency with which I see athletes--paticularly American distance runners--perform surprisingly well in early-season tune-up races and other races preceded by relatively moderate training, and perform poorly in peak races preceded by very high training loads.
I'm starting to believe that there's no such thing as being 100 percent perfectly trained for a race--or at least that there's no way to know whether you're 100 percent perfectly trained. What the maxim that I cited at the beginning of this post now means to me is simply that one should always train somewhat conservatively in order to minimize the risk of overtraining. It's not that one should try to show up to races undertrained. It's that training is a blind process, in the sense that you cannot discern a clear line marking the threshold between undertrained and overtrained ahead of you. If you try to feel your way right up to this limit in training, you put yourself at great risk of crossing it, and I do believe that every step beyond the limit is equivalent to two steps behind it.
I think I overtrained myself slightly for my last marathon in December. This year I'm going to take a lesson from Dathan Ritzenhein and others and train with a bit more restraint. I still plan to do some workouts that are just as hard as the toughest workouts I did in my recent marathon ramp-up; I just won't do as many of them, and I will train more lightly betwen them as well. It's worth a try.



Reminds me of my first run at Wildflower in 2006 I think. Sam McGloane set a new course record. She's said at the pre-race meeting, for the Oly distance, that she'd recently come off an injury and was not able to do the training she'd wanted. For the really fit types, not me, I wonder if a little less intensity might be in order just to be really rested. Sam didn't seem to indicate that the difference may have been due to improvement in the areas not affected by her injury but don't know for sure. Also reminds me of one of the marathon sites, Hal Higdon perhaps, where he was surprised to hear of a runner that ran 3 mi every other day with a long run on the weekend and had a pretty descent finish time.
These bodies are wonderful machines.
TriTroy