A runner's body provides data showing what happens when exertion is sustained with recovery and what happens when it is sustained without it. The same logic appears in the science of stress, in occupational health statistics, and in the WHO's classification of diseases
SANTO DOMINGO. – Last Sunday, October 18, a marathon was run in Santo Domingo, and the occasion serves to review a commonly used phrase: “live life as if it were a marathon,” and to examine what happens to the body and emotions of those who take it literally, without a goal and without rest.
The image was popularized by Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who in her TED talk defined grit as perseverance for very long-term goals, and summarized it as living life like a marathon, not a sprint.
The parallel with health is relevant because the marathon is used as a model of prolonged effort in adult life, and because sports medicine has a large body of literature on what happens when that effort is prolonged without proper recovery.
This literature is summarized by the joint consensus of the European College of Sport Sciences and the American College of Sports Medicine, published in 2013 under the direction of Romain Meeusen.
The document states that successful training requires overload, but must avoid the combination of excessive overload and inadequate recovery.
When an athlete recovers, the drop in performance is temporary and eventually leads to improvement. However, when the balance between training and recovery is not respected, non-functional overtraining occurs, and in extreme cases, overtraining syndrome, characterized by persistent fatigue, decreased performance, and mood changes, according to Meeusen and colleagues in a subsequent review in the Aspetar Sports Medicine Journal.
The same authors point out that those who suffer from it may need months or even years to fully recover.
In the body of someone who never stops, the physiology of stress offers the explanation. Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen, of Rockefeller University, coined the term allostatic load in 1993 to describe the physiological effects of chronic stress.
In a 2020 article in The Journal of Neuroscience, McEwen and Huda Akil defined this burden as the price the body pays for being forced to adapt to adverse situations, and noted that overuse and dysregulation of adaptation mediators accelerate diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and affective disorders.
When stress is prolonged, McEwen stated, “the protective mechanisms become overloaded and cause damage.”.
Occupational health statistics bring this mechanism to the public. A study by the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization, published in 2021 in Environment International and based on 37 studies on ischemic heart disease and 22 on stroke, with more than 768,000 and more than 839,000 participants respectively, concluded that working 55 hours per week or more is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to a 35- to 40-hour workweek.
Both organizations estimated that long working hours caused 745,000 deaths from these two diseases in 2016, a figure 29% higher than in 2000, and that 9% of the world's population works long hours.
On the emotional level, the WHO included professional burnout in the ICD-11, with the code QD85, as a syndrome resulting from "chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed", with three features: exhaustion, cynicism or mental distance from work and reduced professional effectiveness.
The organization clarified that the term applies to the work context and not to other areas of life.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes a broader scenario in The Burnout Society: people who exploit themselves within a performance society, with fatigue, boredom, and indifference as psychological consequences, according to the synopsis of the Spanish edition.
Hartmut Rosa, professor of Sociology at the University of Jena, argues that acceleration does not make people happier and contributes to increasing alienation, according to the editorial description of his book Resonance, and in the headline of an interview with La Tercera, he defines it as "a structural problem of modern society."
Furthermore, perseverance alone does not equate to well-being or performance. A meta-analysis by Marcus Credé of Iowa State University, along with Michael Tynan and Peter Harms, which compiled 88 samples and nearly 67,000 people, found a moderate association between tenacity and performance, and an overlap of approximately 0.84 with conscientiousness, a well-known personality trait.
The parallel, viewed from the perspective of Structural Wellbeing, reveals a difference that the sources don't explicitly state: a marathon has a 42.2-kilometer limit and a subsequent recovery period. Meanwhile, everyday life tends to do without both.
In that scenario, the symptoms of someone who runs non-stop, such as persistent fatigue, altered mood, and wear and tear on the body, coincide with those that sports medicine describes in the overtrained athlete.
Based on the evidence gathered, sustained effort pays off when it is alternated with recovery and becomes harmful when recovery disappears.
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