Sue Reynolds did not start training until she was 60. By 70 she was a world aqua bike champion, working with an Olympic-level coach, and training twice a day. She came out of the swim at a world championship with a three-minute lead on the entire field. Then she was diagnosed with overtraining syndrome, and the world stopped. We chatted about this in our recent podcast.

Sue's story is in her new book, Across the Line. But the lessons it contains are not really about Sue. They are about a pattern I have seen repeatedly across thirty-five years of coaching, and one that the endurance world consistently refuses to name honestly.

The athletes most at risk are the driven ones

There is a particular type of athlete who ends up with overtraining syndrome. They are not the ones who lack commitment. They are the ones who have too much of it. High achievers. People who have pushed hard in every other area of their life and brought that same mentality to sport. The kind of athlete who finishes a session that should have broken them and writes "woo hoo, finished the workout" in their training log. Because completing it felt like a victory, regardless of what it cost.

Sue describes what she now calls edited honesty with her coach. She was reporting fatigue, but the joy of finishing the sessions was drowning out the signal. Her coach was getting mixed messages. And because Sue had the mental capacity to keep completing the work, the data looked more or less fine until it suddenly was not.

This is not uncommon. I see it all the time with athletes over 50. The same traits that built their careers, in business, in sport, in life, which means grit, relentlessness, a refusal to quit, become the exact mechanism of their undoing when there is no wisdom sitting alongside them.

Overtraining syndrome is a medical condition, not a mood

This distinction matters enormously and is still not well understood. Overreaching is a normal part of hard training. You push beyond your current capacity, rest appropriately, and come back stronger. That is the process. Overtraining syndrome is what happens when the balance tips so far that rest alone no longer restores you. It is not tiredness. It is not low motivation. It is a medical condition with real physiological markers including disrupted cortisol, depressed metabolic rate, immune suppression and sleep dysfunction so severe that athletes describe dreading going to bed.

Sue's resting metabolic rate had dropped by 36 percent before anyone caught it. Her easy watts felt like threshold. Cuts were getting infected because her immune system had nothing left. And because none of this is visible from the outside, no one around her understood why she had stopped training. She went four weeks without posting on social media because she could not face explaining something she could barely explain to herself.

One of the most insidious aspects of overtraining syndrome is that it has no set recovery timeline. A broken collarbone has a prognosis. This does not. It could be months. It could be years. In Sue's case it has been the better part of three years before she had a green light to race properly again.

Listen to the full podcast conversation HERE:

​What would happen if an age group triathlete trained like an Olympian​

The goodwill loan nobody is tracking

Athletes and coaches spend an enormous amount of time tracking training stress. Volume, TSS, heart rate, power. What almost nobody is tracking is total life stress, which is the thing that determines how much training the body can actually absorb.

Sue's overtraining did not happen because of one brutal training block. It happened because of a combination of hard training, holiday travel, disrupted sleep, missed naps between sessions, time zone changes and the cumulative pressure of trying to perform at an elite level while also being a grandmother, a wife and a person with a life. Any one of those things alone was manageable. All of them together, without adequate recovery, emptied the tank faster than anyone noticed.

I describe this sometimes as a goodwill loan. You can borrow from future recovery, but like any loan, it has to be repaid. Keep borrowing without repaying and eventually the debt collector arrives, and by that point the bill is much larger than anyone expected.

Grit is not enough on its own

Sue's summary of everything she learned is the one line I keep coming back to. Grit not accompanied by wisdom is a disaster. The same traits that carry you upward, which are resilience, relentlessness, a refusal to quit, are the exact traits that can take you downward if they are not held in check by experience and self-awareness.

There is no expiration date on wanting to compete. Sue is clear about that, and I agree with her completely. Athletes in their 60s, 70s and beyond can and should push themselves. But pushing hard as an age group athlete over 50 looks different from pushing hard as a professional with a four-year Olympic cycle. A professional can empty the tank because they know when the tank needs to be empty. For an age grouper, the goal is to still be racing in thirty years. That requires a different kind of intelligence about when to push and when to stop.

Asking for recovery is not weakness. Stopping a session that is hurting you is not quitting. Telling your coach the truth about how you actually feel is the most important data you can give them. These things take as much courage as any hard session. They just do not get celebrated in the same way

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Overtraining syndrome is a medical condition that occurs when training stress consistently outpaces recovery capacity. It is not tiredness, not a motivation problem, and it does not have a predictable recovery timeline. The athletes most at risk are not the uncommitted ones. They are the most driven.
• Total life stress draws from the same recovery budget as training stress. Holiday travel, disrupted sleep, time zone changes and emotional demands all count. Tracking training load without tracking life load gives a dangerously incomplete picture.
• Asking for recovery requires as much courage as completing a hard session. Telling your coach the truth about fatigue is not letting them down. It is giving them the data they need to keep you healthy and training for the long term.

If you are the kind of athlete Sue describes, driven, committed, with a tendency to push through when you should be stepping back, SWAT is built around the structure that protects you from yourself. Consistent, intelligent training with recovery built in from the start. Find out more by clicking the link below:

Thanks for being part of the tribe. I’m here to help you stay Battle Ready! Simon