I'll tread some dangerous ground in order to make use of an analogy that I hope will resonate, and at the risk of being accused of an apples to oranges comparison (boy, I'm coming to hate that figure of speech). So let's get right to it, then: the vast majority of people who drink, even those who drink more than they should, are nevertheless aware that drinking to excess does not optimize the drinking experience. Every sensible person who drinks knows that if two beers in an evening puts a nice glow on one's outlook, it does not follow that twenty beers will multiply that glow by a factor of ten. Rather it will likely result in a miserable evening and day after spent wishing that one had stopped closer to two (if not alcohol poisoning, blackout, and death). Somewhere between two and twenty, there's an optimal point and a bit past that is a tipping point where the nice buzz tips over to one or a few too many. Our struggles to know exactly where that is aside, most of us understand, both intuitively and through experience, that too much is too much, and most of us learn to moderate our intake accordingly.
If that is true of drinking, might it not also be true of training? Why does there seem to remain such a culture of excess in training, particularly among those who aspire to the status of elite athlete? Why are so many athletes so foolishly attached to the idea that if a 5x3 minute interval workout is good, then 9x3 minutes must prove to be even better? Why do we so often fail to even ask if 4 X 3 or even 3 X 3 might not be optimal? I recall reading last year on the blog (or was it a Facebook post?) of a rower aspiring to make the Olympic team that this athlete had done an AT workout of something like 8 X 10 minutes and promptly followed that up with a post-row of something like 400 burpees, 400 pullups, and 200 one-legged squats on each leg (one wonders where the coach derived those numbers - did it "sound good"?). That afternoon, the athlete followed it up with a 7 mile run on hilly terrain. The days bookending that day were similarly loaded with hard training. There was, predictably, no chronicle of the quality of rest that this athlete took either before or after. More must be better, right? Maybe the only rest was fitful sleep between bouts of grim intensity and willpower. But perhaps this athlete was mistaken: could it have been that 50 one-legged squats per leg during that training cycle was optimal and 200 was about four times too many? It's worth noting that this same athlete is currently training at far less volume and seems to be faster than s/he was at that point. Admittedly, it could be that the crazy intensity six months ago is driving the speed s/he has now, but it also could be that the seemingly insane volume of six months ago was counterproductive from the get-go.
I also recall seeing a video clip of a Dutch rower who contrasted what he regarded as the stereotypically American mentality toward training of "I'll do as much as I have to in order to get faster and if that means four-a-days that's what I'll do" - with what he thought of as the more stereotypically Dutch mentality of "How much do I have to do in order to attain world-class speed? That's what I should do - why would I work myself to a nub if I don't have to?"
Wherever the optimal point is, it behooves us all to discard the foolish idea that more training is inherently better for us. It doesn't work with alcohol, why would it work with intervals, AT, etc.?
I'll close with another chestnut whose source I have forgotten and therefore cannot footnote but will not claim as my own: Most people's easy workouts are too hard and their hard workouts are not hard enough. If your race pace and faster outings are of sufficient quality, you probably don't need to train to exhaustion as often as you might think.
It's the combination of high quality training and high quality recovery (including both easy outings and outright rest) that produces speed. The best athletes find the balance. Good luck, and remember to stop well short of twenty.
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