Thoughts of a disillusioned athlete

I’m burnt out.  I’m disillusioned.  I want to get back into my routine, but the thought is scary as hell.  I’m tired of the concept that one size fits all, because it doesn’t.  I’m tired of the guilt associated with taking a break.  I know that if I quit I’ll become a pariah; I don’t want to quit.  I want to change (update: I don’t want to just change, I want to evolve.)

I need to create something sustainable.  The key word in that previous sentence is “I.”  Not “we,” and not “my coach.”  No one can give me a training plan — hell, a life plan — that I didn’t have a hand in making.  It’s my goals I need to achieve.  All these plans can do is hope to help me.

One thing I love about Robb Wolf is how he basically refuses to answer questions about training athletes for their sports.  The short of it is… if the person is still progressing, if they’re happy, then why mess around?  What’s the takeaway?  The formula to get someone to continuously improve, at first, is simple.  It’s when the progression stops that it’s hard.  Why is that?

Training changes from physical to mental.  I have a 400+ lb deadlift, but if I just don’t feel like working on that, it’s not going to get any better.  I have a reliable 1:43 half marathon; if I stop running, it’ll only get worse.  At some point, I’m just going to run out of steam.  I’ve got a full-time job, 2 part-time jobs, I need to train for some races I want to run, and I’ve got a social life that is too hectic for its own good.  In the rare time that I can balance all of this stuff, I’m a rockstar.  When something gets out of balance, I’m a mess.

In the last few months, from say late February through today, I’ve been more of a mess than a rockstar.  So how do I fix that?

I’ve been burnt out before, or just tired, or something.  But in those times, I knew that if I got up at 5:30 and went to work out at 6:15, there would be a group of people that would welcome my return, which would fuel my desire to get back on track.  More and more, this is not the case — that group of people is completely different.  The community is so large that it’s hard to re-enter.

This is a different kind of burn out.  This one is making me rethink everything.  For you CrossFit haters that read my blog, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with that… I still believe that CrossFit as GPP and sport-specific training layered on top is way more powerful than the traditional weekend warrior training plan.  Everyone should know how to clean a barbell and squat effectively.

It’s time to go back to square one, to come up with goals.  I need a coach for not only my athletic ventures but for life.  A confidant that knows how to motivate me, not just yell or criticize my food log (which I don’t have at the moment).

I don’t have the answer to this one… I don’t even have a good start at an answer.  All I know is that tomorrow, I need to move.  And how I move is going to be important.

How do you bring yourself back?  Post your thoughts to comments.

Am I supposed to have five 9′s?

I spent the last 12 days in my home state of California, and I had a lot of time to chill.  Do nothing, just chill.  At one point, I sat in a creek drinking coors light and burning the crap out of my legs.  Nothing is good.  Nothing is exactly what I needed.

Over my 12 days in California spent with family, close friends, and quite a bit of alone time, I realized that many of my friends are nomads.  We travel between intense moments with little to no rest.  Any free time is taken up by one or more hobbies, which are another set of intense activities.  We’re always on.

In my industry (the computer one, not the fitness one), we have a phrase called five 9′s, which means that a system needs to be available 99.999% of the time.  That’s practically all the time.  It’s the phrase we use to indicate that something has to be always on, it can’t go down, it can’t break.  I think I’m surrounded by five 9′s people, I think I’m one myself, and I think that’s horrible.

Why is it so bad?  Because the vast majority of those people (myself included), when the 0.001% downtime occurs, quickly realize that between all the stuff, the new friends, the old friends, and more stuff, they’re still alone.  We’re so over-stimulated that everything has to be done for time, for reps, maximal effort, everything we’ve got, nothing but the best.  Sometimes we need to just mail it in to bring some balance back.

In a world where most everything is noise, it’s really hard to find the signal.  It’s even harder if you never give yourself a chance.

So when I tweeted a while back about slowing down the game, it wasn’t just in relation to athletic endeavors (although at the time it was).  I think I need to spend more time “off,” because being on all the time is impossible.

I want to the find the signal.  First stop: get rid of the loneliness, it’s been around too long.

Motivate, re-dedicate

For once, this is not a race report, it’s a vacation report.  I finally took a meaningful vacation.  As in, out of town, away from my normal stomping grounds, friends, and home.  I spent the weekend camping with an entirely different set of friends, many I haven’t seen in a long time.

I think a great barometer of the quality of a friendship is how “resumable” it is.  When you graduate high school and then college, and then move away, you find yourself wanting to keep in touch, and maybe you’re successful for a bit.  But over time, people get busy, and life happens.  This is why I love my Memorial Day weekend trip.  It’s called Dogpatch, and it’s a big ass reunion.  And you can tell who’s different, which connections are weaker or stronger.  And it’s good to know that when I came back, I felt like all the friendships resumed.

To be sure, Austin is now home for me (I miss it when I’m gone, and I do miss my Austin friends just as much as my California friends these days).  But California sure feels great when I make it back here.  Why?  The ability to totally reset.

There’s no better way to take things into perspective than getting the hell out of dodge for a bit.  And while we have no wifi or cell reception at Dogpatch, the Starbucks 4 miles away does.  So I can make a quick trip back into town to catch up on reality if I want.  And in my reality scanning while waiting for my Venti Iced Americano, I came across a post by lifestyle coaches Melissa Urban and Dallas Hartwig (aside: just reading Melissa and Dallas’ material is awesome. you should do it too) about their Whole30 participants sticking to the diet (and their commitments) during the long weekend.  Nutrition aside, there’s one line in particular that struck me:

Take a minute today and list one thing in comments that is significantly better NOW than it was two weeks ago, thanks to your Whole30 efforts.

I’m not participating in this round of the Whole30, but if you’ve followed my blog, you’ve noticed that I have a lot going on lately, both personally, professionally, and in my weekend warrior endeavors.  So as part of my reset button, I’ve instituted some Whole30 tenets that I know have worked for me in the past.  No need to list those here, because my point is that regardless of what you’ve been up to, go back to the bold text, read it, and do it.

After two weeks, reduced training volume, some serious deadlines checked off, and a slight cortisol management scheme, I feel like I’ve got my groove back. Energy levels are back up and steady, I’m back to making progress in the gym, and most importantly I’m back to feeling clear in my head.  I’m happier than I was even a few days ago.

Now I just need to find a way to keep it up when I get home.

The last line from that post that I need to share:

Motivate, re-dedicate, and then get out there and enjoy your holiday weekend.

Replace “holiday weekend” with “life.”  Motivate, re-dedicate, and then get out there and enjoy your life.

Training is an event

In my walk back from the coffee shop to my apartment, I spent some time reflecting.  We spend tons of time training our bodies to do great things, but how much time do we spend training our minds?  Many don’t.  So when life deals a shitty hand that can’t be resolved with strength of body, you’ll need strength of will and strength of mind instead.

That thought immediately brought me to two quotes from Rip, here’s the first:

On response to a guy who had some life problems lately and afraid of sounding like a “pussy”: You don’t sound like a pussy at all. You sound like a normal human being, just like me, who thankfully has a barbell to keep him sane when things get shitty…and realize that one workout out of thousands does not affect your overall progress. Training is a process, not the events of one day. [Source]

That sounds like it was directed to me, even though it wasn’t.  And if you wanted to recap the last few “personal posts” of late, that’s the general message.  Powerful people are powerful in body, mind, and spirit.  You must train all three.

Second quote:

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

So that tells me how to train my body.

What are the most powerful exercises to train one’s mind and spirit?

Welcome to the world of adrenal fatigue

If you’ve read my last few posts (the ones that are not workouts), then you’ll notice a theme: I’ve got a lot going on.  If I think back to the beginning of the year, I had an amazing string of 6 weeks of MEBB work, not much stress, good times in life, and general happiness.  My diet was dialed in.  Everything was good.

And then I went to Vegas.  And San Diego.  And Colorado.  And Canada.  Then there was SXSW somewhere in there.

And the list goes on…

My Type 1 personality leads me to believe that I can handle all of it.  I can burn the candle at both ends.  Work, train, party, race.  Hell, I won my age group in a duathlon with 1 week of prep time.  I’m invincible, right?

Wrong.

(aside: HUGE thanks to those who checked in with me after reading my last post.  Now that I have an explanation for what’s going on, I feel MUCH better now… I’ve got some personal life repair work to do, but that’ll come in time)

In thinking about the last week or so, culminating in the last post I wrote, I spent some time thinking about what I’ve been up to, and why I would have such high highs and low lows.  And then, listening to Robb Wolf, something hit me… adrenal fatigue (funny thing when you run into this listening to the Paleolithic Solution podcast

Robb ran into this situation,  best described from his blog post:

For those of you unfamiliar with this condition, your adrenals begin to give out [due] to too many life demands. Sleep, stress, training can all take their toll. I think I’ve had a mild to moderate dose of this condition for a LONG time. I have always burned things pretty hard … This combo of shitty food and bad sleep really takes me down at the knee caps.

…

What my adrenal fatigue boiled down to was this: Crushing fatigue most of the day, only perking up a bit in the evening. This is a reversed  cortisol profile in which I have higher levels in the evening than morning. this is about a stage or two away from the full systemic melt-down that leaves on in bed, immune compromised and generally feeling like death. Cortisol competes with testosterone for the substrate pregnenalone. High cortisol means insulin resistance, low strength and slow recovery. Excessive metabolic conditiong makes things worse. What’s excessive? You never make progress, you feel like absolute death doing anything over a few minutes duration. I’ve also had 4-5 sinus infections in the past about 8 months. No bueno.

This. Sounds. Familiar.

I’ve had similar issues with energy levels.  I didn’t want to get up in the morning.  I couldn’t get to bed when I needed to.  My mind was constantly racing at night, and I got really bad sleep.  My diet went to shit — for every good meal, I would have 2 bad ones.  I was drinking way too much, way too often.  And I was still trying to train hard and race.  Do a google search for adrenal fatigue and alcohol, and you’ll find countless results that contain the words “emotional outbursts.”  Awesome.  Do another one for adrenal fatigue and emotions, and you’ll find more results that link the two.  Bingo.

No wonder my CrossFit WODs have been crap, my races have been a bit slower, I’ve been constantly sore and irritable.  No wonder people have asked me if I’m ok several times a week for the last several weeks.  No wonder I’ve felt like I was walking on a wire for the last month or so.  And no wonder the situation culminated with two emotional outbursts that I can’t explain, because the kind of thing I reacted to is not something I normally care about.

I’m overdoing it, big time, and it’s all got to stop.  Yesterday.

I started my plan to recover on Sunday.  Here it is:

• CrossFit WODs will be short.  I’m going to lift and do some CrossFit Endurance track/pool/bike work.  All of it will be short.
• I need to get back into my routines that I know work for me.
• I need to cook meals more often than not, and they need to be solid.  Which also means I’m going to be food logging for a month.
• I’m going to stop drinking until Memorial Day weekend, where I’m going camping with lots of old friends.  And then I’m going to stop drinking again until after my Half Marathon on June 6.  After that, we’ll evaluate it along with everything else.

How will I know I’m good?  When I can:

• Sleep well.
• Even out my energy levels throughout the day.
• Feel happy, constantly.
• Train well, with purpose, and with great results.

If your world is going haywire, and you’re one of the Gen X Weekend Warrior Rockstars, take a step back and read what Robb Wolf and Melissa Urban have to say on this topic.  Maybe your candle is burnt out.  I know mine was.