Too Much of a Good Thing
Reading Time: 8 minutesHow Much Exercise Is Too Much?, When the pain of exercise becomes greater than the benefits of the exercise itself., Overtraining syndrome: How much exercise is too much?
This is an installment of Good Fit, a column about exercise.
Like a lot of runners, Adam Devine uses exercise as stress relief. He got sober in 2013, and picking up running a couple of years later helped him keep at it, he said.
But in 2020, Devine, a lawyer, thinks, he took it too far. He was living in Brooklyn, trying to stay alive in a global pandemic while surrounded by mass death. He was also getting divorced. He didn’t want to lose his sobriety, so he ran 5,000 miles that year—about a half-marathon a day—instead.
He doesn’t see what he did as something virtuous or worthy of praise. Instead, he replaced one addiction with something else that made him hurt.
‘You get used to being in pain,’ he said about addiction. ‘You get used to being in a dark place, and sometimes the running can be a way that you can feel that familiarity with being in a dark place and being in pain but not having it be done to you.’
He even knew that what he was doing at the time was too much, but, he thought, ‘at least I’m the one turning the screws. Nobody else is doing it to me. This is me doing it to myself.’
That it is possible to exercise to the point that sport becomes self-harm is not a view often expressed in the endurance sport community, where going to extremes is lauded. Run a marathon? Bet you can do 25 in 25 days! Run as far as you can in 24 hours on the same loop over and over again—and you didn’t even make it 100 miles? Why did you even bother? It’s not unusual for athletes in ultra-endurance sports, both professional and amateur, to take the stance that they have surpassed the norm and will continue to push higher, farther, faster, until they finally reach what they consider the pinnacle of their performance, and then try to pass it again. And again. And again.
No pain, no gain. No days off. No limitations. Death before DNF (the designation ‘Did Not Finish,’ meaning you had to drop out of a race).
Except these aren’t life tenets. They’re workshopped marketing slogans and Instagram mottos, and we are real, live human beings. We are limited, and we can hurt ourselves, whether by attempting a multiday hike without any training, strapping into a Peloton day after day after day without rest, or working out outside during a ‘code red’ air-quality alert. We can even die if we go forth unchecked into extremes. In May, a 36-year-old Indiana woman ‘became pulseless‘ while attempting to hike the Bright Angel Trail of the Grand Canyon in one day, despite big, glaring warning signs from the National Park Service cautioning against doing so. In 2021 a runner fell to his death during the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc’s Sur les Traces des Ducs de Savoie 145-km race. In 2022 it happened again, in a team-based 300-km event. But even for those of us who can’t dream of qualifying for an event like that, living in the wake of these athletes can be a factor nudging us into self-harm. We’re pressuring ourselves into hurt.
Exercise is treated as a benefit for what ails you, and it’s been shown to do everything from reducing the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and certain kinds of cancers, to increasing life span and improving mental health, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC and World Health Organization don’t have caps on their recommended levels of exercise, just minimum targets to try to hit. We are encouraged to take the stairs instead of the elevator, to get in more steps. We sign up for 5Ks, and then half-marathons—and then we try to complete those miles even faster, which of course must mean we are better.
But exercise is not a panacea, and it can’t cure all ills. If it could, ultra-endurance athletes would not have higher rates of mental illness compared with the general public, as research is starting to suggest might be the case. Although overtraining syndrome has been getting more attention, and exercise addiction has long been studied as tied to eating disorders, the effects of too much exercise has, since about 2000, been sidelined. Jill Colangelo, a visiting research affiliate at the University of Bern in the department of forensic psychiatry, is one of the experts trying to right the course. Colangelo also writes for Triathlete and posts about her experiences and research on her Instagram page.
A study she published with colleagues in February in the journal Sports reviewed 25 papers discussing psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, ADHD, and schizophrenia in ultra-endurance athletes. These findings show a possible higher incidence of mental-health issues and composite psychopathological vulnerabilities in this group. Colangelo says more follow-up is needed. In the meantime, though, the lesson is clear: You can’t outrun your problems. And more exercise isn’t always more helpful.
But if you’re already inclined toward mental illness, especially as a high-achieving, anxious, and sometimes depressed person (as I am), it’s easy—even if subconsciously—to tell yourself that to be excellent, you must exercise above the minimum, to assume that it is good to do more than the norm, in perpetuity, even if it’s causing you physical and mental harm.
Endurance sports can become a vice of excess, said Sabrina Little, who is both an elite ultramarathoner and an assistant professor of philosophy at Christopher Newport University. In her upcoming book The Examined Run (also the title of her column at I Run Far), she writes about a conflict she faced when asked to do an ad for the shoe company that sponsored her at the time. The campaign was about having no limits, boundaries, or ceiling on our potential as athletes. She was asked to give a sound bite on this idea but just couldn’t do it. ‘I have theoretical qualms about the idea of being limitless. I could not make that claim,’ she writes.
She recognizes that perseverance can be a good thing, she told me over the phone. Perseverance can help you finish writing a paper, a thesis, a presentation, a book. For athletes, perseverance helps you train for a race, and then stick with it even after the going gets rough.
‘But there’s also an intransigence vice of excess with respect to perseverance that’s committing too long, to where it no longer makes any sense and is damaging to you,’ she said. Insisting that you stick with something at the cost of all else, including your work, your family and friends, turns sport from virtue to vice. ‘Maybe it’s a sensitive time in your parenting life when you should really be spending more time with your kids. It ceases to be praiseworthy,’ she said.
Little said her husband, David, who also runs but is not a professional, will let her know when something she’s proposing seems extreme to those outside the elite-athlete world. But often, for many of us, external feedback comes in the form of praise. We’re reinforced by co-workers and relatives who are impressed as we recount our feats, as well as strangers’ social media comments and likes. Athletes who go to the most extremes are often rewarded by glowing profiles in major publications, influencer partnership deals, even shoe and apparel brand sponsorships. Of course, those giving us shout-outs or money don’t know what this excess of persistence might be costing us.
I’ve been writing about running since 2010, and can often recognize when I see someone taking running too far. But that didn’t insulate me from doing it myself. In 2021 I steeped in the praise heaped upon me after I finished my first 24-hour race (even though, no, I did not make it 100 miles) and wrote about it for the New York Times.
My sense of accomplishment, buoyed by all those kudos, papered over the truth: I hadn’t been able to run the same since suffering a stress fracture in 2019. Whether it was that injury, the effects of the stress of trying to stay alive during a global pandemic while also writing about mass death, or a combination of both, the harder I tried to run, the worse I performed, and the worse I felt about it. The mental and physical benefits of training for long-distance races were overtaken by my anxiety and frustration about not being able to run like I had before, followed by anger at myself for not being able to fix it, and self-recrimination that I was a bad person because I couldn’t. I would lie awake the night before a long run, stumble out into the dark on four hours or so of fitful sleep, and beat up my legs until I couldn’t stand it anymore. After, I felt a sweet—but brief—release of the tension that had been weighing me down.
In April, I dropped out of a 24-hour trail race 13 hours in. It was set on a 4-mile trail we were to run over and over and over again, but it turned into an obstacle course of mud-slicked rocks as the day (and rain) wore on. By sundown, I couldn’t stop crying. So I dropped out early, checked into a Holiday Inn, ordered a very tall, crappy beer, and admitted to myself that my reason for signing up hadn’t been because I wanted to run. I went into the race seeking out the postrace feeling of relief, of praise, and the reward of allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted, to sleep in, to take long, slow hikes with my dog instead of pounding out miles—as if I could not already do those things without the ‘permission’ that completing an ultramarathon supposedly gave me.
Devine still runs a lot, most recently finishing fifth in the Rock the Ridge 50-miler in May, but not as much as he did during that stretch of 2020. He also identified what he loves about running, which is people. He remarried this past fall, and his first date with his now wife was a run. He continues to train other runners, and support other runners, as a coach of the trail running group for the Prospect Park Track Club.
That role in the running community has helped him clarify his relationship to the sport. If he had to choose between running himself or supporting others, he’d pick supporting every time. ‘I consider the mental benefits and the spiritual benefits of the community—to be of service to that is where I drive my motivation for doing these things,’ he said. ‘If I’m not being in service of that at some level, then I really need to question what I’m doing.’
I’m still questioning what I’m doing. When I recently filled out a questionnaire from a new therapist, and she asked if I was engaging in self-harm, I paused, then said, ‘I don’t know.’ Because I don’t. To find out, I’ve temporarily quit the sport. It’s the first extended break I’ve taken for a reason other than physical injury in 15 years. It’s been easier to stop (and now sleep soundly) than I anticipated.
That hasn’t ended goal setting, though, as I’m trying to deadlift a certain weight by September and also planning to hike the entire 50-mile Batona Trail through the Pine Barrens in New Jersey in one 24-hour period. But my mother, a marathoner herself, doesn’t look at me as if I have two heads (or a goatlike head, as the Jersey Devil allegedly does) when I tell her that these are the goals I’m striving for.
I still don’t exactly know where my line between persistence and excess was, or where or when exactly I crossed it. Through therapy, Devine is also trying to stay conscious that such a line exists, even if he can’t readily identify it all the time. ‘I don’t know if there is a bright line or even a shifting line. It’s more a momentary value judgment that you can’t really say, one way or another, until you’re presented with it,’ he said.
Sometimes we’re like Roman Roy in the finale of Succession, pressing our stitches against our brother’s shoulder until they burst, craving the relief brought on by (mostly) self-inflicted pain. I couldn’t stop until I was forced out. And at this point, I’m grateful for it.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/endurance-running-ultra-overtraining-syndrome.html
Ref: slate
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