I thought perhaps you guys with all these ‘triathlon’ personalities might be interested and I bet some of you have similar overtraining stories. Just a valuable lesson learned...

My sophmore year of high school, I had the best swim season ever. I took 2.5 seconds off my 100 breaststroke time getting a 1:13.0 at the varsity championship. Going into junior year, I was psyched. I was going to be a full member of the varsity team. The first few weeks of the season went well. I came to practice ready to swim and gave it my all every day. At the first meet, I got a 1:13.8 in br. Shortly after that though, the 2.5 hours a day, 6 days a week of highly anaerobic practice really started to get to me. It was a tough term academically as well. I was getting less than 5 hours of sleep a night. My arms and back had been sore for weeks and not recovering. I spent an hour a day in the trainers doing shoulder exercises and sitting with ice packs strapped to my shoulders. I practically needed someone to push me into the pool each day at practice and there were still 6 weeks to the championship. I still gave it my all once I was in the water as I tend to be, or I used to be, more tough mentally than physically. The yardage continued to increase. My subsequent race times were 1:14, 1:15, 1:16, 1:17. I could do a 1:17 when I was 12 years old. By the time peak week came around, I had been running a cold and fever for a month, I couldn't fall asleep, I couldn't wake up once I did, I had no appetite so I was probably running a 1000 calorie deficit per day, and my shoulders hurt doing daily activities. But I stupidly did not want to show that I was less tough that my teammates who were stronger and had more base yards than I did. So I crammed in the yardage way past where I could hold good technique. I peaked at 8000 yards, nearly twice the yardage that I peaked at the previous year when I had such a great season. Finally, when we tapered, and my coach tends to over-taper the team on average, I still wasn't recovered completely. I managed to squeak a high 1:15 at the championship, but that was much slower than my expectations for myself that season. If I did a high 1:13 on nearly no training, on a proper training plan where I was listening to my body, I should have been able to do at least a low 1:12 by the end of the season. And even during the yardage build up, my time should not have increased; it should have improved or stayed constant. I spent the next few months -- my first cycling season -- doing very minimal training with the 'slow' group per the coach's orders. My HR probably never got above 150-155 during practice. I was mad at him at the time because we both knew I was faster than that, but I have since thanked him. I still had to take most of the summer nearly completely off save for my first triathlon in August which I completed easily with no training, just recovery. My last season of swimming, my senior year last year, I was extremely under trained because I could not do much yardage on account of my shoulders and knees. My times were slower (from 1:16.8 at the first meet to a low1:15 at the championship), but at least I improved from the beginning to end of the season. I still sustain shoulder damage from that junior year season (it will take extensive rehab that I don't have time for at the moment to fully correct). So the moral is... don't over train. It will cause injury and/or discouragement.
It is always better to be a highly motivated under trained cyclist (or triathlete or whatever applies here)

Btw, I don’t blame my swim coach – I really should have listened to my body, talked to the coach about the training instead of just being a stubborn glutton for pain, and I could have had a good season. But this was all more than two years ago and I have found that I like cycling and tri’s as much if not more than I ever liked swimming. After a year completely off from swimming (except for the swim portion of 4 sprint tri’s), I can enjoy swimming 1-3x per week for 2-4000 yards… And I certainly won't overtrain, at least not to that extent, again.