GoKawiilOver the past decade, ultrarunning has gone from a fringe pursuit for distance freaks to a hypercompetitive sport attracting big-time sponsors. But a mysterious training condition is suddenly plaguing its ranks, robbing a generation of top athletes of their talents and forcing victims to wonder: Is it possible to love this sport too much?
In May of 2012, a thousand of the world’s best ultrarunners were lining up for the start of the Transvulcania Ultramarathon, an 83.3-kilometer course traversing the volcanic outcroppings of La Palma, in the Canary Islands. The atmosphere was taut, a mix of pent-up energy and anticipation, and the runners milled about, checking their watches and exchanging high fives. “Bienvenidos, amigos,” yelled a scrawny Spanish announcer with a spectacular black mullet.
At the front of the queue, 34-year-old Mike Wolfe was trying to focus on the day ahead. A thin-faced, introspective Montanan, Wolfe had recently quit his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in Helena to concentrate on running for the North Face’s global athletic team. Transvulcania was his debut as a full-time professional, and even though he had set a course record at Wyoming’s Bighorn 100 in 2010 and won the extremely competitive North Face Endurance Challenge Championship in California’s Marin Headlands in 2011, he felt he had something to prove. A good performance would help validate his unconventional career turn.
Lately, however, his 160-mile training weeks had seemed harder than before. He wasn’t sleeping well and was constantly hungry. Just before flying to the Canaries, Wolfe went out for a casual training run with a few friends and could barely keep pace. Five hours later, he inhaled a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the kitchen table and made an unremarkable entry in the meticulous training logs he keeps: “4:50, plenty of vert. Moved well, tired today with hard pace.”
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When the gun went off, Wolfe fought to stay toward the front of the stream of Transvulcania runners, which were bottlenecked on the narrow singletrack. He redlined the first 6,000-foot climb with an up-and-coming American, Dakota Jones, and the sport’s reigning king, Spaniard Kilian Jornet. He kept up with the leaders as they strode across the spine of the island, but about halfway through the race Wolfe began to slow. He wasn’t cramping or bonking—he’d experienced those things often enough to know when he’d gone out too fast or not eaten enough. This was different.
“I didn’t push myself too hard,” Wolfe, now 37, told me last September, reflecting on the moment when his running career began crumbling beneath him. We were sitting on the grass near the finish of the Rut ultramarathon in Big Sky, Montana, a race Wolfe codirects, watching his 11-month-old son, Colt, play with a box of animal crackers as the last runners came across the line. “It wasn’t like my stomach was bad or I couldn’t eat. It was like my body was just shut down. Like, Nope, you can’t run that hard. I’m not going to allow it.” Eight hours later, Wolfe finished in 13th place, confused and crushed by his performance. It would be another year before he found a label for his ongoing malaise: overtraining syndrome.
Anton Krupicka. (Photo: Joel Wolpert)
Wolfe’s death march to the finish line at Transvulcania was the beginning of a long and painful battle with the condition, a poorly understood disorder that afflicts endurance athletes training at the outer edges of human performance. Still rare in most power and speed sports, cases of overtraining syndrome, or OTS, have steadily increased in the endurance ranks over the past decade. As ultradistance events have gained popularity, a generation of top ultrarunners are suddenly breaking down faster and in greater numbers. The past seven years have seen the rise and decline of at least a dozen elite competitors, including Anna Frost, who won the women’s division of the North Face Endurance Championship in 2011; Anton Krupicka, two-time winner of the Leadville 100; Geoff Roes, who set a new record at the 2010 Western States 100; and Kyle Skaggs, who demolished the Hardrock 100 record in 2008. Each of them reached the pinnacle of the sport only to mysteriously struggle to repeat their best results. Transvulcania was the start of Wolfe’s own precipitous fall.
“OTS is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in my 30 plus years of working with athletes,” says David Nieman, former vice president of the American College of Sports Medicine. “To watch someone go from that degree of proficiency to a shell of their former self is unbelievably painful and frustrating.”
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