might expect. Heart rate monitors are really good for base training and will give you instant visual feedback on whether you're training at the most useful level or not... which is often amazingly slow. – Dave CochraneSet a targetEnter a race. You know

to give the worked muscles a break. Higher heart rate, feeling of tiredness, a drop in performance and increased susceptibility to viruses are all symptoms that you appear to have. To reverse the effects of overtraining, you should stop training completely

racing and training. At the start line you should be sweating and your heart rate elevated (60-65% of max). However there are two reasons why this rarely happens: at the start of big races you need to get into position and are probably waiting 10-15 mins

. It carried on pumping blood at a fast rate to muscles that no longer need it in such large quantities, so a backlog begins to build up, causing a reduction in the amount of blood returning to the heart. This leaves organs like the brain going short of blood

is to lose weight, you shouldn't be giving 100% in your workouts. The point is to spend as much time as possible running, rather than running at high intensity. Buy a heart-rate monitor, which can tell you when you're going too hard. At this stage it

-distance runs, so that your heart rate is not as high. Leave the long-distance and faster-paced runs until the weekend, when you have more time to recover before going to bed. – Katherine MarriottNormally, your brain secretes the sleep hormone melatonin, your