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.

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.

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.

> he inhaled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the kitchen table

Well that can't help for sure.

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.

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?

"Mysterious"

"Overtraining syndrome"

I don't see why it's so mysterious, fatigue accumulates until something tips you over the limit

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