I'm working out of some overtraining. In my case I'm unable to get my HR up to even my training and racing paces.

I'm finally at the point of building my mileage and paces back up. Racing short has been OK but today is the first time I've been able to run over 10 miles since June.

I've basically had 4 weeks of light training and now I'm at 1 week up and 1 week easy. The next cycle I'll try 2 weeks up and 1 easy. If things go well I'll try to get on track to make it to the start line of LCN in Miami near the beginning of November.

overreaching... probably
ots - probably not

Tough to know when you've crossed that line though. If you don't feel better after going z1 for a while, you'll know which side of it you fell on.

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My Blog - http://leegoocrap.blogspot.com

Following this thread. I'm not nearly in the position that you are and I'm certainly not overtrained but when you hear coaches and pros talk about fatigue accumulation from doing too much interval work I'm wondering how long it takes to get rid of that quote-unquote deep fatigue.

Food for thought. Isn’t this exactly how you get into overtraining?
Body says rest.
You want to workout your way out.

agreed with the sentiment. It's sorta like the bargaining phase of the five stages of grief, the difference here being that lack of acceptance (as in, failing to stop completely and let the body recover) could make things worse

now, I fully appreciate that everyone is different, but for me, it went like the following for over-reaching (and perhaps eventual over-training):

trying to get back into things too promptly after a cold in early April 2012; tried to get my form back but couldnt; did quite a bit too much road racing (which adds mental stress as well), and finally feeling utterly spent by the end of that month.

I took about ten days off and tried to restart. At first, things actually worked well for about 2 months (from May until July), but then the wheels finally fell off for good in early July. Legs had no snap and felt tired all the time; I tried to exercise some, but even the low-intensity ones felt as if someone took a tenderizer to my quads. From late July to early September of 2012, I basically did jack squat. Fortunately, it was sufficient to reset things. Some who go through this end up suffering half a year or more, often with endocrine imbalances.

Take a month off, and restart easy. It's a safer approach than seeing if one could get away with additional exercise when the body is sending out messages to stop

I was overreaching last year a month out from my first IM. Went on a shortish run, with a few short tempos and stopped into the second 5 min of tempo. Just couldn't do it, and walked home. Rest HR went about 10 beats up. Didn't do anything for 5 days and after that only did short and easy stuff (relative, after all, 4 weeks out from IM I was in the best shape I had been before this happened). In that last month I managed 1 run longer than 10k (14k) and 1 2-hour trainer ride and 1 5-hour, very easy ride outdoors, all others were shorter, mostly easy. Skipped a few planned long runs and rides, which wasn't great for my confidence, but I figured I could better start the race with a little more rest, than being a little overreached/overtrained. I would have done a lot better if the race had been a month earlier, but I did all right (for my ability) and the goal was finishing. And it shouldn't be too hard to set a PR next time :).

I only really came out of the hole about 2 months after the race though.

Exactly my first thought just from reading the thread title!

"I did too much, can I fix it by doing just a little more?"

As others have implied, take some time off and allow your mind and body to fully recover. This means plenty of non-training activities and very limited physical efforts. Read, catch-up on neglected house chores, socialize with family and friends.....totally reboot. There will always be future training and races.....

I disagree with the others here. Part of the insidiousness of true overtraining syndrome is that you quickly become simultaneously overtrained and out-of-shape.

I don't believe being completely sedentary is healthy. True "Zone 1", e.g. runs at a light jog, biking at leisurely roll, or - better yet - just doing some completely different activity like surfing, is mentally and physically healthy.

I think you are ignoring two things:

-1) is the person in question disciplined enough not to stray too much out of Zone 1 during the entirety of the rest period? Anyone who'd ask this question in the first place is in the bargaining and not accepting phase of things. Say one needs to be tranquillo for an entire month, but begins to feel better half month in, there's a good chance that the person in question may push things again, long before s/he is ready to do so.

-2) how much of that fitness could be retained by doing something that low in intensity? even in the best of times, one loses a few percentage of peak performance numbers (at least 3-5%) from previous season's high to the next season's low, and that's usually as a result of drastically reduced training load. Someone who's just experienced over-reaching by definition hit a local maximum in performance, and wherever the restart will be, it'll be lower than that previous local max.

anecdotally, I lost slightly more than 10% the season I over-reached, but in other seasons, I'd lose about 7-8% anyway when I just noodled.

granted, moving about would be nice, but that activity needs to be quite low in intensity (such that a moderate hike would probably be considered too intense)

My answer would have been yes, years ago. An easy day or two would normally work when I was doing about 700 workouts a year with two a days.

Today, I can say that a single day off works wonders. At first it was a shock to the body and I was out of sorts for a day or two. Now I can take a day off when I feel like it and there is even more benefit when taking the day off and not feeling out of sorts. It would have been helpful earlier to have learned the benefit of taking a day off to avoid injury or over-training.

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Indoor Triathlete - I thought I was right, until I realized I was wrong.

+1.

Hard to seriously over-train yourself if you have one full rest day per week. Not to mention your weekly workouts are generally more enjoyable.