Dead Legs

Audio Transcript

Coach Dylan: Hi there Runners Connect fans and friends. Today we have a great question from Colin.

Colin: I’m just looking to get some advice on what I should do if my legs have been dead for the last few weeks.

I have a marathon planned five weeks from now and recently it appears my legs have been unable to recover and at every run I’ve just felt sluggish and slow. Do you have any ideas?

Dylan: Thank you for submitting your question and to be honest, this is something I have a lot of experience with and something that I can relate to on an empathetic level.

The first thing I believe that you may need to do is look at when you first noticed the onset of the dead legs.

This can be caused by many things but first off, we need to evaluate our logs and see what has changed in specifically the most recent weeks of training.

Some of the more common questions that we need to be asking ourselves is, did I increase my mileage, intensity, or both at the same time?

We need to understand where we are currently, compared to our previous build ups or training blocks.

New territory can present symptoms that take time for your body to understand and needs to adapt to and understand what it’s being fed.

We also need to ask questions about our rest and our stress. How has my work-life balance been recently?

Are there any changes there? have I been sleeping well at night? What about my nutrition? Have I been consuming enough health benefiting in calorie filled foods to accommodate the rigors of my marathon training?

There are a lot of questions to be asked but it is important that you explore all the facets of your life to create an understanding on what may have led to this current place in training.

Once we have an idea of what may have led to this heavy leg feeling you’re experiencing, we now can take some precautions to allow for more recovery time from running and running workouts.

Note that marathon training brings periods of highs and lows.

I’ve never had or known someone who didn’t have a rough patch in their build up. I’ve had bad workouts and weeks till the dead legs and sometimes this is completely normal.

A lot of times I come out of this really dragging few weeks of training and I’m great and I start hitting my workouts again.

A lot of has to do with the marathon training and what we’re asking and what we’re requiring from our body to do.

It is important that we make a distinction of the abnormal which is a draining feeling, tiredness, and an overall loss of interest in what we are doing.

This sounds a lot like overtraining and making this distinction is incredibly important and once we do, we need to take immediate action.

In the acute stages of overtraining, it can be corrected within a week or two of lighter volume. Chronically it can be a completely different story.

It’s important to understand that when I mean by acute overtraining, I don’t necessary mean it in a bad way.

We have to overstimulate to get to our next level of training. Now it’s when we keep overstimulating and adding that on top of each other like blocks, that is when we don’t allow enough recovery to allow us to bounce back in to make the adaptations that we ideally would like to have.

I certainly hope that we may not be on the verge of this, but it is always a possibility and it’s always a lingering thought in the back of our heads.

A lot of time in the marathon build up, we write a long fine line between doing too much and too little.

Much of the time we roll the dice and put our money on what’s coming and expecting to come out of this period with ideal fitness, but sometimes we don’t listen to the calls of our body and that’s when things go downhill.

Despite my rambling, this is what I recommend for you to do in the short term. I would recommend you check your prior training logs and data and bring yourself to realize how you may have gotten to this point.

This should give you an idea of where to begin and how to make positive change. In the short term especially with feeling like this for multiple weeks it seems, I think it’s best to cut your runs by up to 50% in the next two to four days.

Maybe take one full day or two full days of complete rest and continued to do light runs for the next two. Skip all workouts this week and just focus on getting quality easy runs in.

I would like you to also minimize outside stress and do all you can to stay off your legs as much as possible. Ideally, we come back with a renewed mindset and a better feeling in our legs.

Hopefully a quick recovery and a few more solid weeks of training before you take that next leap down into the taper period for the final weeks.

Try to stick it out for just a few more weeks and plan to bring it home strong. It’s okay to take a step back to make a couple steps forwards.

We learn more about ourselves and learn more about this in time or how training affects us in so many variables of ways and how we can build upon during our future training cycles.

I know for me, there’s certain workouts that just leave me drained and it’s hard for me to recoup mentally and physically after those workouts. A lot of times I understand this and, so I need to take a little bit more recovery and maybe break down the pacing a little bit more.

I have had a history of letting stress and anxiety get hold of me when it comes to training so refocusing my mindset and my idea towards training was incredibly important for my success and keeping my head on my shoulders in training, for example.

With only a few more weeks ahead I wish you the very best. I recommend we keep it light and enjoy some down time to refocus your mind.

Put that focus on other activities something that you enjoy before throwing yourself back into the mix.

Thanks again for submitting your question and I hope everyone enjoyed the topic of this podcast. I’d love to hear your feedback and always thank you so much for your support.