How I Avoid Burnout: Hailey Danz, Olympic Paratriathlete

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Hailey Danz, a paratriathlete, trained seven hours a day for the Tokyo Paralympics, only to see the event postponed in March. Then the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., where she’s lived for three years, closed its workout facilities, and her team stopped training together. “The team environment is normally really motivating for me, and that went away,” Danz says. She borrowed medicine balls, kettlebells, and other equipment from the center and biked 40 days in a row. “On day 40, I was like, I never want to be on a bike again. I’m so over this.”

Danz, 29, says that burnout risk is high among endurance athletes. “It’s that feeling of being so exhausted and fatigued that the idea of going out and training is more than you can handle; it’s both mental and physical,” she says. She grapples with it a couple of times a year in the best of conditions. “My coach and I have gotten into a nice, little groove where we can kind of predict when it’s going to happen and take action to prevent it,” she adds. Here’s her strategy:

Recognize the signs

“For me, sleep is usually the first sign—when I’m not sleeping well, and I also get pretty irritable, I know that I’m getting close to burnout.”

Find a new environment

“All I need is like, half a day, or maybe a day.” Sometimes, she’ll go trail hiking instead of biking, or (in pre-pandemic times) train separately from the team for a day, “and that’s usually enough to reset me.”

Ease up on yourself

“With all the unpredictability, I had to give myself permission to say, ‘OK, I’m not feeling like a super-hard run today. I can change the workout, maybe do it tomorrow,’ which is something I don’t normally do in-season. You have to be a little flexible.”

Reimagine your goals

“For the first month of the pandemic, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I don’t need a race, I can just train to train.’” She started to burn out until her team planned a relay ride across Colorado, from Utah to Kansas, mostly in 30-minute segments, raising money for a food bank. “That was huge for us, and having something to train for was so helpful. But what was really special about it was that it was so different from what we typically do, like riding in the middle of the night and staying up for an excessive amount of time.”

Remember to rest

Danz went home to visit her family for two weeks, exercising an hour or so a day. “It’s very important for preventing burnout, so that when the time does come to really train hard, I’m actually ready to do that and not feeling burnt out going into it.”

Know your “why”

“If you really want to be in it for the long haul, you dig deep and figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing, and that can get you through rough patches.”

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