The sprint diary that is going backwards
Rohan is a Class 11 student who runs the 100 m for his junior college; his personal best is 12.4 s. He trains five evenings a week under his coach, but with the district selection 12 days away he has quietly added a sixth session - 8 × 200 m alone on the road near his home - for the last ten days. Board practicals have cut his sleep to about five and a half hours. Over the past week his morning resting heart rate, which he logs in a diary, has climbed from 58 to 72 beats per minute. In yesterday's time trial his 60 m split was 0.3 s slower than a fortnight ago. He tells you his legs feel heavy, his appetite has gone, he wakes at 3 a.m. for no reason, and he has had a sore throat for two days. He asks whether he should start taking a friend's creatine capsules and add a seventh weekly session before the trial.
1. Read Rohan's diary figures and symptoms together. What is the most likely explanation, and which features are clear evidence while which are ambiguous?
Read the worked answer
The pattern matters far more than any single number.
- Resting heart rate +14 bpm sustained for a week is well outside normal day-to-day variation (usually about ±3–5 bpm). It suggests his body is still in a stressed state hours after training.
- Performance moving backwards while load moves forwards is the key contradiction. Correct overload produces adaptation; here the 60 m split got slower despite more work.
- Sleep disturbance (3 a.m. waking), appetite loss and 'heavy legs' are the classic non-performance markers of overreaching sliding into overtraining (unexplained underperformance).
- The sore throat is the ambiguous feature. It could be part of the fatigue picture or the beginning of an infection. That distinction changes everything, so it must be checked - temperature, whether the throat is actually inflamed - not assumed.
- Normal soreness does not behave like this. Delayed-onset muscle soreness settles in 24–48 h and does not wake a boy at 3 a.m.
- The likely cause is a two-sided error: load went up (a sixth session, harder road surface, no coach watching form or pace) while recovery went down (5.5 h sleep). Neither alone explains it; together they do.
So the answer is not 'he is unfit' or 'he is lazy' - it is a recovery deficit created by unplanned extra volume.
2. Using overload, recovery and individuality, plan his next 12 days. Should he add creatine or a seventh session?
Read the worked answer
No to both, and for different reasons.
- Seventh session: he has already broken the overload rule by adding load without controlling progression. More volume now would deepen the hole he is in. Overload only works when it is followed by recovery that lets adaptation happen.
- Creatine: it is not a fix for a recovery deficit, he is a minor taking an unsupervised supplement given by a friend, and it will not undo lost sleep. At school level the correct advice is to refer supplement questions to a doctor or qualified sports nutritionist, not to a teammate.
Plan for the 12 days:
- Cut volume 40–50% immediately. Drop the unsupervised road session altogether; keep two short, fast sessions (e.g. 3 × 60 m at 95% with full 4–5 min walks) and one technical session. Speed is preserved by intensity, not volume.
- Insert one full rest day and one active day (easy walk, stretching).
- Sleep is the main intervention - target 8–9 h, which means negotiating study timing rather than just saying 'sleep more'.
- Keep the resting-HR diary and add sleep hours and mood on a 1–5 scale, so the trend, not one reading, guides decisions.
- Food and fluids: restore regular meals with a carbohydrate snack before evening training; loss of appetite is part of the syndrome, so small frequent meals work better than one large one.
- Check the throat daily. A resting HR that is still elevated plus a sore throat is a reason for caution, not extra training.
- Tell the coach the whole picture. Individuality means the plan is built for Rohan, not copied from a teammate who trains six days happily.
The taper, not a seventh session, is what will make him faster on selection day.
3. On day 5 his resting heart rate is still 70 and he reports a temperature of 38.2 °C. What changes?
Read the worked answer
Everything changes: this is now a medical question, not a training question.
- Fever plus persistent tachycardia points to infection, not just fatigue. Training through a febrile illness carries a real risk of complications, including viral myocarditis in young athletes, and can turn a two-week setback into a two-month one.
- Stop all training until he has been seen by a doctor. A student first-aider or coach should not diagnose the cause or prescribe rest days by guesswork.
- Do not 'test' him with a time trial to see how he feels. That is exactly the wrong experiment.
- Return to play must be graded, not instant: after the fever settles and he is cleared, start with light aerobic work, then skill work, then full training, advancing only if resting HR and mood return to baseline. A practical rule is to resume at roughly half the previous load and rebuild over one to two weeks.
- Inform the coach and, if the trial is missed, the selectors in writing, with the diary as evidence. A documented illness is a fair reason; an unexplained absence looks like indiscipline.
- Reflect afterwards: the original mistake was adding a sixth session in secret. The fix is a written weekly plan agreed with the coach, with one named person responsible for monitoring sleep and resting HR.