With intense and prolonged training certain athletes experience overtraining, staleness, or burnout. The over trained conditions reflect more than just a short term inability to train as hard as usual or a slight dip in competition level performance as you mentioned you were a swimmer. It involved more chronic fatigued experienced during exercise workouts and subsequent recovery periods. It associated with sustained poor exercise performance, frequent infections mostly upper respiratory, and general malaise and loss of intrest in high level training. Injuries are also more frequency in the overtrained state. Although the specific symptoms of overtraining are highly individualed. We really don't know the etiology of the syndrome. What we do know is neurondocrine alternatons that affect the sympathetic nervous system, as well as alteration in immune function are likely involved.
These symptoms will normally persist unless you get some rest. With complete recovery requiring weeks or even months. But like you said you are around month four now. So has the symptoms been getting better or worse?
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