Doing too much has cost me heavily once again.
I’ve been training for a half marathon since November, with a clear plan in place since Christmas. Everything went great. I ran my first 10k race in January, achieving a better time than my 5K in December.
I stuck to the simple training plan with three weekly sessions. It went so well that I felt I could do more. I started increasing the pace and doing a little extra here and there.
One week, I ran 17K on Saturday, my longest distance so far. I felt super energized afterward, even though it was really hard. When I didn’t feel any real muscular pain in the evening or the following morning, I had a genius idea: why not play indoor football with friends the next day? If I don’t feel my muscles, I must be invincible, right?
So, I played football for over 2 hours, not even 24 hours after running my longest distance yet. Surprisingly, I felt pretty fine. My legs were sore, but there was no significant pain.
Without thinking much more about it, I stuck to my plan. Tuesday Speed Training, Thursday mid-distance, Saturday long distance run. I felt pretty good, even on Saturday when the next long distance was on the schedule: 19K.
When Overtraining Really Hits You Hard
The first 10K went smoothly. Then, at kilometer 14, I started feeling pain in my knees. I really wanted to finish this longest distance, so I pushed myself.
KM 15: This really hurts.
KM 16: Just don’t stop, even though this feels bad.
KM 17: I’ve come so far, and I’ll have 3 days to rest. It’ll all be fine.
KM 18: It feels like my knees are going to fall apart, but I’m not a quitter!
KM 19: Finally, my longest distance ever! Hope I didn’t mess up my knees…
That was a month ago. Since then, the longest distance I’ve been able to run without pain is 4.5KM. I really messed up my plan, and honestly, I should have known better.
After a few weeks in pain, and not fully understanding what was happening (“I’m so unlucky, why does this happen to me?”), I asked a good friend who is an athletic coach for high-performance athletes.
Hearing about my pain, these were his first three questions:
- Did you gain a lot of weight in a short amount of time? —> No.
- Did you increase your speed before the pain started? —> Hmm, yes. How did you know that?
- Did you add extra training before the pain started? —> Hmm, yes, but I didn’t feel pain until a week after.
He smiled and explained this is a common mistake. If we increase the load on our body by more than 15% in a single week, we risk injury. His questions covered the most common ways to increase our load:
- Weight
- Speed
- Distance
A good training plan already accounts for a 5-15% increase in load. That’s what makes me run faster or longer over time. But adding football training and speeding up when it wasn’t part of the plan threw everything off balance.
Apparently, it’s also common for the problem to not appear immediately. What happened when I ran 17K and played football was that my body didn’t fully recover. So, by Tuesday, I had only 80% of my strength. Hard training strained my body, and I couldn’t fully recover until Thursday. Another hard training followed, and by Saturday—before my longest run yet—my body was severely stressed. Not at 100%, but maybe at 40%.
This might have been fine if I’d just run 10K easily, but I pushed myself through 19K, trying to go faster than my plan said. That’s when my injury happened.
Trying to go a little quicker—and adding extra—was meant to make me progress faster, but it resulted in a 4-week break and a serious slowdown of my marathon training. I’m only now slowly building up my training again. I’m optimistic I can still run the half marathon in April, but I won’t be able to progress as much as I would have if I’d just stuck to the plan…
Most Chess Players Are Tired, Unfocused, and Waste Time
The same principles apply to chess. Ironically, this is exactly what I tell my students: don’t overdo it. What makes things harder in chess is that you rarely experience pain so obvious that you can’t continue training.
The symptoms are much more subtle:
- Lacking focus
- Slowly draining mental energy
- Motivation fading away
- Training intensity decreasing
Just like my running example, the effects are not immediate, making it harder to understand the cause. You can overdo it in one week and still feel fine the next. But the longer you push beyond what your brain can handle, the more you’ll suffer from it.
In amateur chess, it’s common to hear of an adult improver who eventually has to quit chess because they burn out. This is the worst-case scenario of overtraining. As I wrote about before, overachievers in the corporate world (CEOs, lawyers, business owners…) are especially prone to overdoing their training and burning out.
The desire to get ahead faster, cut corners, and feel special pushes us to overdo it, and eventually, our bodies pull the plug.
Sounds Like You? Here’s How to Avoid It
- Start small. I did this well by running 2-3 days a week without a specific goal for a month before starting my structured training plan.
- Follow someone who knows the risks. The plan designed by an experienced coach helped me avoid burnout.
- Trust the training. This is where I went wrong. I felt I could go quicker than the plan allowed and pushed myself too hard in every session. The point of a good plan is to have recovery runs, faster runs, and long runs. Going to 110% every time isn’t what brings the best results.
- Increase training load by a maximum of 10% every week. This is a good benchmark to avoid overtraining and pushing yourself too hard.
- Think long-term, not short-term. This is something I teach and follow often, but sometimes I fall back into wanting everything now. My injury is the price I paid for that.
Remember, progress takes time. Whether it’s running or chess, consistency and balance are key. Pushing yourself too hard might seem like the shortcut to success, but in the end, it’s the steady, sustainable effort that leads to real growth. Stick to the plan, trust the process, and avoid burning out—it’ll pay off in the long run.
Keep improving,
GM Noël
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