Soon I will see the billboards and smile.

Every spring in Berks County, it seems, the catholic high school will rent a few billboards to advertise the percentage of graduates that go on to college. A recent visit to their website, cites 2014 statistics and 94 percent.Impressive? Certainly.Especially when you consider the figure for the local public school, Reading High School, is 62 percent. But any academic comparison between an inner-city high school and a private one is absurd, and one reason why eclipses them all:Tuition.The cost of a private-school education doesn't come principally from somebody's taxes; it comes primarily from somebody's wallet. Paying tuition usually means making a significant investment - and of much more than just money.In most cases, both the parents and the student strive to ensure the student's success. While the same effort can be found in many public-school families, just as many families feel indifferent, apathetic, or even contemptuous toward education.How can test scores matter when the results don't matter to many who take the test? Because of this and the aforementioned tuition situation, comparing private-school success to public school success is misguided.Misguided: that's what I fear could happen to you if you read the views on overtraining - what you might call exercising too much - expressed by a number of personal trainers in articles I've recently read. To avoid that, consider the pitfalls of comparing catholic school and public school.One PT who solely works with cyclists, for instance, estimates that 65 percent of his clients were previously overtraining. While I don't doubt his estimate, it's important to remember that PTs work with the equivalent of catholic-school kids - exercisers with competition in mind or compulsive personalities.The overall percentage of recreational exercisers who are overtrained doesn't come close to that number. So if you don't exercise to compete - either in a sport or with your buddy in the weight room, the bicycle club on the weekend, or the computerized machine in the health club - should you be concerned about overtraining?Maybe. It can occur.But more likely than not, what you experience when you feel tired or sore or unmotivated is what's called overreaching. And there is a significant difference.Overreaching is needed for progress.You don't improve your fitness by doing what you did last week. While that seems silly to write, it needs to be read. The first step toward long-term improvement only occurs when you go beyond previous limits.So let's say you usually run three miles a day four days a week. After a few weeks, you body acclimates.In fact, your body will actually become more economical in handling the workload and expend fewer calories to run just as fast just that far. To negate that, you decide to increase the distance of your runs to four miles.Within a week, you notice a difference, both good and bad - but mostly bad.Your legs feel heavy when you walk up a flight of stairs. Your first thought when the alarm clock rings in the morning is "Not already!" Your appetite isn't what it normally is even though you know you're burning more calories.Congratulations. You have overreached.That means you're headed down the road of improvement. Unfortunately, many take a detour that leads to the land of the overtrained.To avoid that detour, reduce your amount of exercise time and intensity temporarily and increase your amount of rest and nutrients.I can tell you what happens if you don't because I was guilty of this a few weeks ago. My training took a turn for the worse when I went from riding four days a week to five, for about 12 and half hours instead of 10, which has been my typical increase this time of year.But two weeks into the change, I felt bad. Really bad. I had all the aforementioned symptoms and then some.I'd cringe when I'd hear the alarm clock ringing. I was finding it hard to be positive about training - which was making it hard for me to be positive about too many other things.At first, I took the bad feeling to be just another indicator of my advancing age, but after another week of having my legs ache all day, I did what a compulsive sort like me dreads the most: I reduced my training. I went back to riding four days a week for two weeks (though I did add a third weightlifting working to those weeks).The big changes, however, occurred in my diet and my sleep.I stopped worrying about keeping a weight that I feel is best for cycling, and I ate far more carbs - albeit high-qualities ones - and far less protein. I also made sure I slept at least eight hours every night.I felt a difference quickly.In about 10 days, I felt far more than good. I felt more energized during the day, more aggressive on the bike, and better overall than recent memory could recall. And these positive feelings remained when I returned to riding five days a week.In short, if I had been truly overtrained, I would've needed an easier and longer period of recovery to correct it. But I had clearly overreached, and without the temporary aforementioned changes, the poor workouts would've continued and sickness and injury would've been the next result.