Chasing the Runner’s High Part III: Stressed Out

Sometimes you just can’t work up to the mileage you want and your previous fitness feels so far away.

We’re going to talk about why that is ok.

Here we are. Almost six months since the initial lockdown due to COVID-19, and five months since my partner decided to try running. We successfully got him going, we addressed some physical pains he was having, and last time I talked about the importance of consistency.

Where do we go from here?

Well, there hasn’t been much consistency for either of us. The lack of tangible goals like races, the increase in work stress, and planning a wedding (surprise!) has started to take a toll on both of us. There have been more post-work naps than runs recently.

Do I feel guilty for that? Yes! The feeling of being a slug on a run is AWFUL. My weekly hours of activity has taken a nose-dive in the past 3 weeks and there are moments when I feel shameful for not getting myself in gear. It is hard while everyone else is out running the highest mileage ever and breaking milestones.

I am here to say take a deep breath and let that sh*t go.

Our bodies are wonderfully complex and capable of so much. However, there are some things it just cannot do, such as differentiating types of stress. Stress can manifest in many ways - social, health, financial, just to name a few. However, exercise is ALSO stress. A physical stress that is imparted on our bodies to facilitate adaptation. Unfortunately, our bodies are not sophisticated enough to differentiate between these different types of stress. It’s like drinking different brands of bottled water - they are all claim to be “different”, but it is all perceived by our bodies as just being water. And like our ability to consume copious amounts of fluid, we can only tolerate so much stress before we burst (hopefully you make it to the washroom before that point).

It just so happens that while I was writing this last week that JOSPT released an article titled “Moving Beyond Weekly ‘Distance’: Optimizing Quantification of Training Load in Runners”, and it has found a mainstream audience, as it was profiled on Outside Magazine’s website. The article picks apart the o b s e s s i o n in the running community with “weekly mileage” as a way of measuring progression and prowess. They define two parts to overall training load:

External load can be defined as distance, pace, and time spent running.

Internal load is much more complex. It includes not only physiological response to exercise and tissue load (the mechanical stress on the joints and muscles), but also your Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) which is more broad and can be influenced by things such as fatigue, nutrition, and daily life stress. This can impact how your body tolerates external load.

A fatigued 10k at a set pace will place a higher amount of tissue load on your muscles and joints versus a refreshedd 10k at the same pace. You are not generating and absorbing forces as efficiently, therefore there will be more strain on your tissues. If you think about this example for a moment, you can see how your body will accumulate more fatigue and without sufficient recovery, you will not come back ready to take on another effort the next day. And this is how the cycle into overtraining and potentially injury can start. If you only obsess over getting the distance covered at the prescribed pace, it could become a long-term problem.

So how can we find out how much internal load we are under before working out? Objective approaches such as blood lactate levels and ground reaction forces have shown promise, but the real magic - how to measure the tissue-specific stress that is accrued during activity - isn’t as easy to measure. Regardless, that doesn’t help the average person, because I don’t expect you to have a professional-grade analysis lab in your pain cave at home. What we can use instead are commercially available heart rate monitors and sleep monitoring tools can give you insight to how recovered you are and help curb your fatigue.

Another nice hack listed in the article is creating a training stress score for yourself by taking the time spent running in minutes and multiplying that by your RPE (1-10) to give you an idea of the amount of stress you accumulated during a workout. Some might pick up on the fact that this is essentially a version of Training Stress Score, which has been widely used by cyclists who employ power meters.

If you want to go real bare bones here, you can also just take an honest look at yourself and how you are coping in life. Have you been stressed out more than usual? Has sleeping been an issue for you? These are questions you can ask yourself to see if today is the day you go and smash out a hard tempo run, or if you need to respect your body and dial it back. You won’t lose fitness, but it might give your body enough of a reprieve to bounce back better than ever.