GINA KOLATA

September 3, 2008

UNTIL last spring, running was going great for 15-year-old Erik Kraus. He had been training hard without a break for 18 months and was becoming faster and faster.

Then, when spring track started, something went awry. Every time he raced 1,500 meters, his time was 15 seconds slower than in the previous race.

Erik’s father, Dr. William Kraus, a runner himself and a cardiologist at Duke University who studies exercise, was concerned. Erik was tired all the time; his legs felt heavy; he was frustrated, irritable. Could it be the condition that athletes dread: overtraining?

Overtraining is the downside of training, the trap that can derail an athlete’s success. It’s a real physical condition caused by pushing too hard for too long. It can happen with too much exercise, too much intense exercise, or both. Its hallmarks are poor performances, exhaustion and apathy.

“You just feel bad,” said Dr. William O. Roberts, an internist at the University of Minnesota who specializes in treating athletes and is a former president of the American College of Sports Medicine. “The spark is gone.”

It can come on so insidiously that before athletes know it, they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral. The harder they train, the worse they do.

But there’s another trap — the overdiagnoses of overtraining, said Dr. Steven Keteyian, the director of preventive cardiology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

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