Part 3: “Why am I slower, it must mean I need to work harder.”

Upon my return home I had surgery and totally disappeared into a black hole. Days would go by without leaving home. I put off friends requests to get involved “nah, I’m good” I would state. I knew I needed to get out to feel the Indian Summer sun’s warmth and go for a walk and my mental state knew that that was the right thing to do, but getting myself to go through the physical motions to enact what my root psyche wanted to accomplish just would/could not happen. My global outlook on life is one of appreciation and thankfulness with the perspective that I am so happy to be doing something every day that has me waking up to pursue it with everything I’ve got such that I’m driven by this happiness to the point of... it clouding my ability to see what each day, and the drudgery that comes with it, brings. I was depressed. Badly. Normal daily functions and activities were a chore. It’s times like these that I reflect upon and know that I need to tap into my network of “family” here in Boulder. It is communal love and friendship that can much more quickly restore your health than you attempting to go it alone.

Throughout December and January I eased back into training. In the back of my mind something was still not right,

“Why are my numbers lower, why am I still getting heavier, why can I not sleep, shit, more hair is falling out. I know! I need to get fitter, let’s go train some more. Yep, that’s the solution.”

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

February becomes March and suddenly the writing on the wall has become too blatant to further ignore. The more I work, the worse things get, the slower I become. I still am able to get up everyday and go out and do the work but it is a terrible chore, my macro view of life and appreciation for all this opportunity is and my desire to simply “go outside” have blinded me to any realization of what is going on. I have some blood work done but even before my consultation we begin to back off. I am asked to wipe away my positive macro view of life and think about how the day-to-day is going. It dawns on me. Things are not good. Forced to really look inside and see what’s been going on is a crushing blow. Even though I was getting up and going out the door each day I wasn’t feeling anything, all my senses were mute, never felt hungry, sleepy or tired. Then the revelation hits and I pause for a moment. Everything hurts. I get home to Colorado and hardly do anything for a week. The “funk” has returned as well. Something is seriously amiss when the sight of the snow capped continental divide, high above the spring green foothills and valleys below, does not elicit an endorphin rush from me.

One of the manifestations of Adrenal Fatigue/Exhaustion is the lack of primal drivers. The concept of listening to one’s body and doing what it asks of you. I don’t feel these any more. My first consultation with the specialist takes place. I’m one very messed up puppy. A second round of tests is ordered but it’s fairly evident we know what is going on. My body is broken, badly. Hormones drive much of the processes that go on in us each and every day. To train any more would only further damage an already long ago destroyed system.

I had discussed, prior to the specialist chat, with my coach and friends/co-workers the prospect of not racing this season. Despite weighing the evidence that we had at the time it still seemed preposterous, but really there was no other action that I logically could have taken to make this better. During the consult I was advised that, “you might want to strongly consider taking the year off so as to take the proper measures to get yourself healthy and operating correctly once again.” Despite this being what one doesn’t want to hear the entire conversation actually ended up being what I DID want to hear. If I had been told, “oh, you’re fine, just go train harder.” I think I would have completely lost it. But to hear that no, I was not in fact crazy and there was a reason for my lack of improvement despite my extremely dedicated efforts was such an enormous RELIEF! A huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. No longer was I burdened with the thought that despite my work ethic perhaps I just sucked.

Given that the second round has yet to come back we can only postulate as to what we believe is going on. It is largely believed that I have a combination of being in a chronically over reached state (largely referred to as chronic fatigue) resulting from my over dedication and over intensity efforts in my training as well as adrenal fatigue/exhaustion. While I know and have spoken with a good number of people who have gotten into the former I have yet to find many that have fallen into the pit of the latter (encompassed within the latter is thyroid, adrenal, testosterone, etc). Symptoms of this mess include, inability to sleep, inability to come out of sleep, weight gain (and mostly muscle at that), hair loss, never feeling hungry, lack of appetite, glucose and insulin regulation and many more. Basically when you train there is a bodily response to that something that is largely hormonally driven. Without the proper call and response of a normally functioning system repair doesn’t happen, there is no rebuilding, there is no advancement. Nothing works.

This isn’t going to fix itself. Simply resting and taking time off may address the over training component but it does not tackle the much, much larger issue of proper hormone regulation.

Part 4.1 where we go from here…