Running to Death

As a cross country runner, I am always running around even if it’s not at practice but at practice I run even more. It’s the name of the game. Most people find it incredibly difficult to fathom why on earth we put ourselves through the torture that running puts on your body. I enjoy running a lot that’s why I still do it. However, as I have been running many problems have come up, mostly due to how much I run. Many times during season I’ve been overly fatigued, normally, you might get a little sore and tired but not these times. I have been running farther than my body should be going. At the peak of the season I was hitting about sixty miles a week. That’s farther than most marathoners go for their training runs, and we don’t race anywhere near that far. So why would we need to train with so many miles? We don’t. It just doesn’t make any sense.

The over exhaustion has caused many people on my team to get injured or to quit because it’s too hard to run so much. Running is already hard; we all know that, we don’t need to make it harder for those actually willing to do it. For those people that are lucky enough not to get injured it causes them to experience major energy lose. This is one of the leading reasons for the injuries that come to the athletes later on in the season. If you’re always tired your body won’t be able to properly heal itself, thus defeating the cause of working-out (getting more muscle). If you can’t build the muscle needed for the sport why do it?

All of these things add up and start to collapse on the person and it becomes a downward spiral that ends in utter defeat and lack of self confidence. It could, if taken to the extreme, destroy a person’s life. And all that needed to be done was to back off the hard battering on the body from the malicious miles of running.