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👋🏻 Hey Reader!
Saturday August 22 · Week close
An athlete wrote to me a few weeks ago:
"Henri, I'm doing the sessions, but I show up to each one already tired. And I finish worse than I started." |
He wasn't talking about a bad day. He was describing a pattern of weeks. And that isn't mental weakness — it's information your body is giving you.
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The distinction that changes everything
FUNCTIONAL fatigue → clears with a rest day
NON-FUNCTIONAL fatigue → doesn't clear, and precedes overtraining
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😮💨 The five real causes
| ① Load without proportional recovery |
| It isn't just how much you train — it's how much you recover between stimuli. And not every "high intensity" stimulus costs your system the same. Lumping them all in one category is a planning error. |
| ② Insufficient or fragmented sleep |
| The most underestimated pillar. No training block, however well designed, compensates for chronically fragmented sleep. That's where muscle repair and hormonal regulation happen. |
| ③ Unintentional energy deficit |
| Eating to "look light" instead of eating to perform. The symptoms are nearly identical to overtraining — but with a different cause and a completely different solution. |
| ④ Accumulated cardiovascular load, unmonitored |
| Prolonged effort carries a measurable cardiac cost, particularly relevant in masters athletes with years of high volume. Not cause for alarm, but for attention: the heart needs real deloads, not "easier weeks" that are still demanding.
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| ⑤ No strength work |
| Many exhausted runners avoid strength thinking it'll "take even more energy." It's the opposite. Strength doesn't compete with endurance: it sustains it.
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What to do this week
① Audit your real load, not the planned one. Compare what you actually did — including work, sleep and family life — against what your plan assumed. There's almost always a gap.
② Treat sleep as a session. With the same seriousness you treat a threshold interval. If you consistently sleep under 7 hours, no volume adjustment fixes the root problem.
③ Deload for real. A week at 80% of usual volume isn't a deload, it's inertia. Substantial reductions are what produce genuine supercompensation [PMID:37163550].
④ Add strength twice a week. Squats, Romanian deadlift, unilateral work and core. It frees up recovery budget for your key running sessions.
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⚠️ When this stops being a training question
If the fatigue persists more than two weeks despite adjusting load, sleep and nutrition — or comes with a sustained elevated resting heart rate and performance that won't improve — it's worth a medical evaluation, including blood work. There are causes of exhaustion no training plan can solve, and ruling them out is part of training intelligently.
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My perspective as a coach
Racing on the track in the masters category taught me that fatigue that doesn't improve with a rest day isn't solved with more willpower — it's solved with less ego and more structure.
Most of the athletes who come to me exhausted don't need a harder plan. They need a better built one: with real deloads, integrated strength, and expectations around sleep and nutrition as clear as the ones for their intervals.
Exhaustion isn't the price you pay to improve. It's evidence that something in the system needs adjusting.
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Your question today
Does your tiredness clear with a rest day, or have you been dragging it for weeks?
Reply and tell me. If it's the second, I'll help you find which of the five causes is yours.
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Coach Henri
USATF · TrainingPeaks · Certified Functional Strength Coach
That's the week. See you Tuesday — rest properly this weekend.
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