Welcome to my email newsletter 'Never not [thinking about] running' - a weekly newsletter about running and mental health. If you haven't subscribed yet and you're not sure whether you really want to receive an e-mail from me on every Tuesday, have a look at the archive. Today I took a look into the past and dealt with old topics from university.
Sports psychology
Did I mention here that I have a master's degree in sports psychology? In the end, I never worked in this field, but the subject has never let go of me and psychology is also a topic here from time to time. Especially these days, when I'm thinking about canceling my big A-race for this year and concentrating on other things running-wise.
The same old story
I've been in bed now for two days. Struck down by the flu perhaps. I don't know exactly. After I had sinusitis at the beginning of the week, I thought on Thursday that I would slowly be fit again and could start thinking about running again. But that didn't happen. Thursday night I suddenly got a fever and I've been in bed ever since.
An unusual situation. I can't remember the last time I was so ill. What's more, as a parent, you can never lie in bed with a clear conscience as long as your partner is running the rest of the household and looking after three children. Nevertheless, the last few days have been nothing more than lying in bed, sleeping, watching YouTube videos in between and eating something here and there. I now know a lot about ADHD in children (a potential problem here in the household), about the Siberian railroad and was able to follow how a woman successfully completed the Barkley Marathon for the first time.
Too much pressure?
But back to the actual topic of sports psychology and the current situation. It's not the first time that I've fallen ill while preparing for a major race and had doubts. And of course I ask myself what influence the psyche has on this situation. Am I putting too much pressure on myself? I did a bit of research to find out what can cause such illnesses during preparation.
One of the most common reasons can of course be an inappropriate workload during preparation. You push your body to its limits to such an extent that your body defenses go into overdrive and your body simply shuts down. It could be that the body simply can't do anything more or that you fall ill. Many runners are also familiar with falling ill in the tapering weeks before a big competition. This is often explained by the open-window effect (heavy exertion directly before tapering, the body shuts down - including the immune system - allowing viruses/bacteria to enter). However, the open-window effect is controversial in science.
If you google this, you will get 101 articles about it and what happens there, but if you delve further into the studies, you will quickly realize that the facts are not so clear and the whole story is not as clear as described in the Running World article XY.
Choking under pressure
One psychological phenomenon that describes the influence on performance is "choking under pressure". However, this refers to a phenomenon that describes the loss of performance directly during the competition when there is too much pressure or self-awareness.
Choking under pressure is defined as performance decrements under circumstances that increase the importance of good or improved performance.
The studies on this are manifold. Pretty much everything that is possible is examined.
Of course, that doesn't fit my situation. I suspect that everyday stress has an influence on my training. You can't find much about this on the internet in general or in the databases, but there are at least a few clues.
Stress in general is underrated
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to the body where the stress comes from. It can be sport, but it can also be stress at work or stress in the family. So if you look at four weeks of training, it may be that you do the same program for four weeks with, for example, a 70k weekly workload and the identical running stress score and the body is still stressed differently because, of course, everyday life, work and family come into play.
These stressors don't provide much, if any, musculoskeletal or cardiovascular stress, but they certainly accumulate and inflict a great deal of hormonal stress on your body," says sports physiologist and coach Matt Dixon, MSc. "This is why it is so important to develop a recovery awareness relative to your global stress load and to understand what life events can disturb healthy hormone ratios."
And if you are generally looking for more information on the impact of stress on the body and the immune system (and not on sports training), you are more likely to find it in the medical databases.
"Severe stress can lead to malignancy by suppressing the immune system (Reiche et al., 2004[88]). In fact, stress can decrease the activity of cytotoxic T lymphocytes and natural killer cells and lead to growth of malignant cells, genetic instability, and tumor expansion (Reiche et al., 2004[88]). Studies have shown that the plasma concentration of norepinephrine, which increases after the induction stress, has an inverse relationship with the immune function of phagocytes and lymphocytes (Reiche et al., 2004[88]). Lastly, catecholamines and opioids that are released following stress have immune-suppressing properties (Reiche et al., 2004[88])."
Source
I had actually thought about logging external stress factors when setting up the training plan to see if this had an impact on my health and training, but then decided not to. Looking back on the UTMB training plan, however, I can say that my stress level wasn't that high this year and in hindsight I would say that the reason I got sick now is simply because I have three children in three different institutions and that everyone here in the family and my environment has been sick all the time for months. It was almost inevitable that I would get sick at some point.
As already mentioned, last year I was preparing for a half marathon in April and I would perhaps say that my stress level was so high that it had an impact on my health and I had to stop preparing.
Where to go?
I'll talk to my therapist in the next few days and see what I do about the UTMB. First get healthy and then I`ll see.
Running
I would like to write something here, but that didn't work out this week.
You can find all updates on my training plan for UTMB Obernai here.
The end
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