When Dave Scott was a young boy, a first-class stamp cost five cents. But Scott’s father, a frugal man, gave his son the responsibility of delivering the family’s outgoing local mail by bicycle. The youngster challenged himself to complete the route increasingly faster. It was Scott’s unofficial indoctrination into endurance sports.
He played team sports in high school in the early 1970s, but preferred individual pursuits, notably swimming, bicycling and running. He swam competitively at the University of California-Davis and combined sports in his workouts; he was among the pioneers of triathlon, the continuous three-sport endeavor.
Scott, now age 70, became the sport’s best. He won events in several countries including the 140.6-mile Hawaiian Ironman World Championship—the sport’s most prestigious event—six times, beginning in 1980. He trained scientifically, combining rigorous daylong endurance workouts with a regimented diet. Scott’s routines were diverse but he swam, bicycled and ran with one philosophy: More was better.
Scott is a self-described “endorphin lunatic.” A renowned coach in Boulder, Colorado, he’s maintained his superior fitness—to an extreme. And his decades of extreme exercise proved unwise.
In June, Scott underwent open heart surgery to repair two aneurysms and two valves. Decades of overtraining damaged his heart, a life-threatening scenario he now shares with numerous other endurance athletes.
“If I don’t get it (exercise), it just makes me go haywire,” Scott once said in an Outside magazine article. “It rules my life. It’s a powerful drug for me. It’s huge. It’s gigantic.
“When I feel good about my exercise, I feel invincible. I can handle any kind of hurdle and I can meet any kind of challenge head-on. And when I don’t have that morphine-like endorphin feeling that resonates throughout my body, it affects everything. It affects my personality, it affects my confidence and it affects my ability to interact with other people.”
In recent years, Scott joined many champion endurance sport proponents in discussing the dangers of too much exercise. But overtraining isn’t limited to professional athletes whose livelihoods depend on their successes; it’s also problematic among recreational athletes and is often called Overtraining Syndrome, or OTS.
“Part of the healthy mindset is really valuing recovery, and I think that sometimes athletes think recovery is wasting time or is not an important part of training,” says Kathy Feinstein, Ph.D., a licensed mental health counselor and certified sport performance consultant and owner of KAF Consulting in Naples. “I think that athletes, particularly adult amateurs, should really understand recovery and how it contributes to getting stronger, getting faster and getting better.”
Without balance, including proper rest, OTS can quickly become problematic. Anemia, chronic dehydration, diminished libido, heart arrhythmias, hormonal imbalances, loss of appetite, “mysterious pains” and staleness in the legs are among the symptoms.
Athletes experiencing sudden bouts of anger, lethargy and repeated colds, coughs and low-grade upper respiratory infections are also exhibiting potential signs of OTS.
The American Council on Exercise, or ACE, headquartered in San Diego, is a nonprofit organization promoting healthy lifestyles and their positive effects on the mind, body and spirit.
But the organization also knows well the dangers of overtraining. It details potential warnings, including restlessness during sleep, mood swings and lack of motivation. If performance isn’t improving, it could mean more rest is necessary. The ACE equates training too hard to hearing a popular song too often. Overtraining can ruin the enjoyment of exercise; repeatedly hearing the same song often can make the tune irritating.
“I don’t think we ask the question about overtraining often enough,” says Feinstein, who has provided sport and exercise psychology consulting services to teams, coaches and youth, high school, collegiate, adult amateur and professional athletes since 1998. “One of the telltale signs is fatigue; another is muscle fatigue that doesn’t resolve normally or illness. Athletes will get colds a lot. Sleep disturbance is huge.
“Increase in their resting heart [rate] is common. With the monitoring we can do now with the Apple Watch or a Fitbit when there are notices of increases in resting heart rates and sleep changes, those are signs you are overtraining. Awareness is the key. But the challenge is that when athletes are overtraining, they really don’t want to recognize it. What’s happening over time is burnout.”
According to Healthline, the online health information provider headquartered in San Francisco, exercise addiction can occur from a variety of unhealthy exercise practices, from negative body image to working out because of feelings of anxiety or guilt.
Dr. Dermot Phelan, a cardiologist and sports medicine expert in Charlotte, North Carolina, succinctly stated the growing concern.
“The concept of overtraining is that any form of exercise, when practiced in excess, can contribute to harmful levels of inflammation of the body,” he says.
Feinstein, whose clients include many young team athletes, adds the predicament of “perfectionism.”
“If you think about a kid whose parents or a coach have really high expectations, they are going to drive themselves really, really hard based on those external factors,” she says. “Perfectionism is athletes who only want to get it perfect. They don’t want to give it (training) up. But your body is going to say ‘no’ and that’s what happens. It starts to break down.”
