Interestingly the same that can happen to the mind. I can't recall the source of the article but it mentioned a mathematician working so hard on a problem for a long time that at some point he could no longer use his brain power to continue doing moderately difficult level math.
I don't particularly find surprising that someone pushing so hard can end up this way, we aren't limitless in our abilities after all.
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.
His book was discussed at the time here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30320639
Well, the marathon was inspired by a hero who died from exhaustion after running.
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.
The article addresses this:
> That’s not to say that athletes in other sports aren’t working hard. They are. But they typically do so within a team environment or under the direction of a professional coach, providing them with well-established frameworks for success. Even though ultrarunning has grown, there’s still little infrastructure to support its competitors. Sponsorships mean full-time careers, but that rarely includes coaching.
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.
It’s well known ultra training destroys your heart.
In any sport.
They tested the blood of marathon runners and found heart attack markers in many of them because the heart muscle is being damaged and healing and scarring and hardening the muscle leaving young ultra trainers with the heart of an 80 year old.
The best modern advice is don’t overtrain.
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?
> They are renowned for their form of prayer that involves running for extended periods of time.
Mark me as atheist!
> he inhaled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the kitchen table
Well that can't help for sure.
"Mysterious"
"Overtraining syndrome"
I don't see why it's so mysterious, fatigue accumulates until something tips you over the limit
Do we know the biological mechanism to cause OTS, though? That would open up avenues for treatment and more precise prevention besides "rest more" (not that that's a bad preventative).
What's fatigue? Is there a fatigue molecule?
Lactic acid?
paywall
Paywalled articles are allowed on HN, but if you pass the URL to archive.is and then post the link here, you can get a few karma points for free.
Not if you're security conscious enough to default-block js.
…or hit the reader button.