Endurance athletes tend to be strong willed and uncompromising. Most have a game plan in place for training and racing. This is a good idea and something we strongly recommend. Problems arise when the athlete's game plan is no longer working, due to any number of unforeseen circumstances, but he or she makes the mistake of thinking that deviating from the game plan will be worse than making a change on the fly. One of the more common times this happens is after a poor race.
Many athletes think the cure for a poor race is to train harder and harder.
Instead of recuperating and focusing on optimizing their training, many athletes will train themselves into the ground. This only digs a deeper hole for the athlete who needs to recognize the symptoms of over training and spend enough time recovering completely. The most common symptoms of overtraining are irritability, restless sleep, elevated resting heart rate and inability to reach peak heart rates during training. As an endurance athlete, make sure that time spent recovering is taken as seriously as the time spend training. Another time it's not a wise idea to stick to a game plan that isn't working is during an event.