Do You Have Exercise Addiction?

If you are drained, rather than energised, after your exercise routine, you may be doing too much too often. Ian Craig explains the problem of exercise addiction and how you can be healthier by focussing on quality and balance rather than quantity.

- Ian Craig

The land of the Cape Epic, Two Oceans, Comrades, Ironman . . . South Africa is certainly a land of extremes. When I moved to this wonderful country from the UK many years ago, I was totally amazed at how fixated people were with volume of exercise. I met people who were spending three hours in the gym daily, runners who did 30 to 40 km 'pack runs' on a Sunday, cyclists who would think nothing of a six-hour ride and triathletes who would try and cram all three disciplines into a day.

QUALITY VS QUANTITY 

Coming from an elite middle distance (800 and 1 500 m) running background in the UK, my ethos was always 'quality not quantity' – this had worked for me throughout my athletic career and there were times that I even needed to reduce my quantity in order to bolster my quality. This at the end of the day is the meaning of a good athletic performance. Although my focus was on the track, I could still do a decent 10.5 km marathon and fellow runners who focussed on these longer distances certainly knew how to run fast and would mostly also consider quality before quantity.

In South Africa, however, I didn't feel like a runner at all when I came here because I'd never run a marathon. Instead of comparing five and 10 km times, as happened back home, runners here compared the number of Comrades and Ironman finishes that they'd achieved – time (quality) almost seems irrelevant.