Trail Notes | Coaching and Training

your life is part of your training load

Running a Full Life.

Caregiving, Stress, Sleep and What They Do to Your Training.

When the week goes sideways and the planned session does not happen, it is usually not because of a lack of discipline. It is because the actual total load you were carrying that day was higher than the plan accounted for. That is a training problem, not a character problem.

The women in our Her Trails community are not just trail runners. They are parents, caregivers, professionals, partners, daughters and people carrying responsibilities that do not pause when the training plan says Tuesday is a tempo run. This is the reality of female endurance sport, and it is one of the most under-addressed areas in coaching literature.

The physiological research is increasingly clear that stress is stress. The body does not distinguish between the stress of a hard interval session and the stress of a difficult week at work, caring for a sick child, managing a family crisis, or navigating a period of poor sleep. All of it counts. All of it draws from the same recovery pool. And all of it must be accounted for in training decisions if we want those decisions to be grounded in reality rather than an idealised version of the week on a spreadsheet.

This Trail Note is a coaching reflection on life-load: what it is, how it interacts with training, and how to make intelligent decisions inside it rather than fighting it or collapsing under the guilt of not matching the plan.

Trail Note  ·  01

What life-load actually is

Life-load is the cumulative stress carried outside of training. It includes occupational stress, relationship stress, financial stress, caregiving demands, parenting load, emotional labour, grief, health challenges in the family, housing transitions, and any other psychosocial stressor that activates the sympathetic nervous system and draws on finite recovery resources.

Research by Saw et al. (2016) into athlete wellbeing monitoring found that non-training stressors were among the strongest predictors of perceived recovery and training tolerance in endurance athletes. The body monitors total allostatic load, not just training load. When life-load is high, the system's capacity to absorb training is reduced. Continuing to train at the same volume and intensity as in a low-stress week is not consistency. It is overreach.

Understanding life-load as a genuine training variable is not an excuse to skip sessions when motivation is low. It is a physiological reality that intelligent training decisions must account for.

Trail Note  ·  02

What poor sleep does to training

Sleep is not recovery time that happens alongside training. Sleep is where the majority of physiological adaptation actually occurs. Growth hormone secretion, tissue repair, glycogen restoration, immune function, neural consolidation of movement patterns and emotional regulation are all predominantly sleep-dependent processes. When sleep is compromised, the training stimulus is largely the same, but the adaptation window closes or shrinks.

Research by Fullagar et al. (2015) found that sleep deprivation reduces submaximal and maximal exercise performance, increases perceived effort at a given intensity, impairs thermoregulation, alters glucose metabolism and increases injury risk through reduced neuromuscular control and reaction time. Even modest sleep restriction, defined as 5 to 6 hours per night, accumulated over multiple days has measurable effects on athletic performance.

For caregivers with young children, for shift workers, for those managing health challenges in the family, poor sleep is not a choice. It is a constraint. The coaching response is not to pretend training can proceed normally. It is to acknowledge that a hard session on 4 hours of disrupted sleep is not the same session as on 8 hours of solid rest, and to adjust accordingly.

Trail Note  ·  03

Caregiving load is not optional stress

Many of the women we coach are primary or co-primary caregivers for children, ageing parents, partners or others with health needs. Caregiving is invisible labour in the sports science literature, which has historically focused on male athletes or female athletes without dependants. But it is not invisible in the body.

Caregiving carries anticipatory stress (always monitoring, always planning ahead), sleep fragmentation, emotional load, physical demands (lifting, carrying, assisting), and mental bandwidth cost that leaves less available for training decision-making, form execution, and the kind of focused presence that quality sessions require. It also often means training windows are narrow, unpredictable or subject to cancellation without notice.

A training plan that does not account for this reality will feel like it is failing even when the athlete is doing everything she reasonably can. A coaching approach that does account for it builds resilience, not rigidity.

Trail Note  ·  04

Making training decisions inside a high life-load week

The decision framework for a high life-load week is not complicated, but it requires honesty rather than habit. The goal is to match training stress to actual recovery capacity, not to match last week's volume or the plan's prescription.

Trail Note  ·  05

The hormonal layer: stress and the female athlete

Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, directly interacts with the hormonal environment of the female athlete. Chronic elevated cortisol can suppress LH (luteinising hormone) and FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone), disrupting or delaying ovulation and shortening or eliminating the luteal phase. This is one mechanism behind exercise-related menstrual disruption, but it is not exercise alone that drives it. Life-load-induced cortisol elevation contributes meaningfully.

This means that in a high life-load period, a menstrual cycle that becomes irregular, shortened, or delayed is not necessarily a training load problem in isolation. It may be a total load problem that includes life stress, sleep restriction and training combined.

Tracking your cycle alongside life-load data gives you this information. If cycle changes coincide with periods of high life stress and reduced sleep rather than only with training spikes, the picture becomes clearer and the response can be more targeted.

Trail Note  ·  06

Running as a release valve and when to guard it

Many of the athletes we coach tell us that running is the one thing in the week that belongs to them. It is a genuine psychological resource: evidence supports the mood-elevating, stress-reducing effects of moderate aerobic exercise, including reduction in perceived stress, improvement in sleep quality and regulation of the stress response. Running through a hard life period is often a very reasonable choice.

The distinction to hold is between using running as a positive coping resource (a short, easy run that restores rather than depletes) and using running to avoid or override what the body actually needs (forcing a hard session through genuine exhaustion because stopping feels like failure).

The run that keeps you sane in a hard week has value. The run that you force because you cannot give yourself permission to rest has a cost. Knowing which one you are doing requires honesty that training culture does not always make easy.

train the life you have, not the one you planned

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