Beyond the Runner's High

Running can become all-consuming. It can swallow you up and become your life. Which is often a great thing! Running has so many benefits: it can boost your mental health, reduce weight, and help you live longer. But with everything in life, you have to be careful. Too much running can lead to some serious side-effects. These can be the ones we all know about such as physical injuries, but also hidden ones like Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) or even mental health issues.

Physical injuries are the obvious ones, and chances are you’ve been injured at some point in your running journey. In fact, 50% of runners will experience an injury each year. I get injured when I push way too hard beyond what my body is prepared for. I have had Runner’s Knee three times, and each time it’s because I have jumped up the mileage by way too much. And I haven’t complemented my running with strength work or stretching.

I hate both of these things. If I can get away with not doing them, I will, and I will make up any excuse I can to avoid them. But first on the high mileage. The common rule of thumb is to not increase your mileage by more than 10% each week. I also find this to be true with down weeks. If I’ve been doing, say, 80km weeks for three weeks in a row and then drop down to 60km, I need to ease myself back up to 80km. I can’t jump right back up there.

Now, back to strength training and stretching. The muscles involved with running are so complex. When you run, these muscles take a beating and break down. They can break down so much that they cause injuries. Strength work makes these muscles stronger so it takes more to break them. This is what I neglected when I upped my running. My muscles broke down, and I had to do a lot of work to build them back up.

When I am training and hitting my own goals and I’m uploading to Strava, I always, always end up comparing myself to others or obsessively checking the number of kudos my latest run has. We all do it somewhere, be it on Instagram or Facebook or any other social media. If I see someone has a higher mileage week than me or hit a PB, I think I should be doing better. And when I can’t match it or don’t do better, it brings me down. This in turn can become a cycle. To combat this during my training blocks, I might not upload to Strava at all or I will turn off Strava notifications. This means I can still get the stats but I’m much less likely to end up doom scrolling because I received a notification.

Finally, I want to touch on running and under-fueling that can lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). This is a tricky one and can impact the body in many ways. Essentially, it is when the body does not have enough energy left over after training to perform its required functions. You might find that you have less motivation or pick up illnesses easier. Your body does not have enough energy to fight infection like it usually would.

For me though, it affected my hormones. It dramatically decreased my libido and even when I was in the mood, I would have erectile dysfunction. In addition, I noticed that I no longer had morning erections. This is obviously super uncomfortable to write about. But it’s so important! This was a huge wake-up call for me, and I had no idea what was going on until I was speaking to a friend about it and they mentioned they had experienced a similar thing. It’s scary!

So, I am now focused on getting enough food to fuel the running and all the other jobs my body needs to do! I’m sleeping more and listening to my body when it is tired. That might mean taking a day to let it fully recover from a hard session.

Look, running is amazing and I love it so much! There are just a few things you need to look out for to make it more enjoyable.