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The Runners Who Went So Hard They Were Never the Same

Athletes train for years to overcome pain, exhaustion, and fatigue. But some people take it too far and are never the same again.

OTS exists on the far end of a continuum of stress on the body, because in addition to the normal stair-step improvement we talked about earlier, there's another idea called ‘functional overreach,’ which means an athlete intentionally overcooks it for a training block. Carver: With this in mind, it's easy to see why overtraining syndrome began disproportionately plaguing the ultra running community, which especially 10 years ago had little professional infrastructure and was largely made up of amateur athletes trying to juggle everyday life with training for a hundred mile races. But at a certain point when you're really, really training hard, in other words, when you're on the verge of overtraining, that breaks down and the act of going and running for three hours, you burn a lot of calories, you come back, you just don't feel like eating.

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