Best Laid Plans

A lot of people ask me what my training consists of these days.

Well...as usual, this is what my "planned" week looks like:

• Monday-teach 5:30am Spin, swim for 30-45 minutes, get on the treadmill until 8:45, then go to Boot Camp (strength training for an hour)
• Tuesday-5:30am boot camp, spend time either outside "running" or on my treadmill at my desk*
• Wednesday-5:30am boot camp, swim, treadmill
• Thursday-5:30am boot camp, spend time either outside "running" or on my treadmill at my desk*
• Friday-attend 5:30am Spin, swim for 30-45 minutes, get on the treadmill until 8:45, boot camp
• Saturday-treadmill or "running"
• Sunday-rest and prep for the week

Now...I know what you're thinking. It IS a lot. AND I haven't done 100% of that planned week even one time! I'm paying VERY close attention to how I'm feeling and VERY close attention to my heart rate variability**.

I'm walking a line so fine I don't even see it clearly most of the time! If you've ever tried to push yourself after an injury, you probably know what I'm talking about. 

In my first appointment with the neurologist who diagnosed the Autoimmune Enchepolapathy, I rattled off all the things I had written down as "symptoms". I felt like a crazy person. None of these things seemed to fit together. One of the strangest ones, or at least the one that made the least sense to me, was my confusion with left and right. I'm not just talking about telling someone to turn right and pointing to the "other right". 

When I would put my hands on a keyboard to type I felt like they were crossed or upside down. I would stare at my hands and move them around trying to come up with any other way to put them on the keyboard that would make sense. One night I was reading a book and had the distinct impression I was reading in the wrong direction. I kept looking at the page trying to figure out what was going on. I had a discussion with Dwayne about it as if I needed to be reminded that it really was correct to read a book (written in English) from left to right, up to down. (That's the night he told me I HAD TO make an appointment with a neurologist.)

When I described all of the weirdness to Dr. Hitchcock, he said those were pervasive symptoms (all over the brain as opposed to being in one area) which led him to believe it was Hashimoto's Encephalopathy. (They don't use that term anymore because they have determined AE has no connection to Hashimoto's, an autoimmune disease of the thyroid.) 

When I look at this chart (taken from the International Autoimmune Encephalitis Society website) I can better appreciate what he was saying. I had symptoms from every area. I'm sure if you read that list you might wonder if something is wrong with your brain too. Let me assure you, if there is something wrong, either you will know or the people closest to you will know. Everyone forgets where their keys are or the word they are trying to say from time to time. Everyone can get an "earworm" stuck in their head, but not usually for days (and nights) at a time.

I fully believe I am mostly recovered now. But when I push too hard (mentally, physically, emotionally) I can have "symptoms" pop up. Imagine you had shoulder surgery. You completed PT and were back to "normal life". But then you went and played tennis all day. Your "recovered" shoulder would let you know it wasn't happy. My brain does that.

I'm not going to lie. It's VERY hard to listen to it sometimes.

I have this thing I say all the time: "ALL stress goes in the same bucket". Stress to the body (workouts, injury, illness, poor sleep), the mind (learning new skills, projects or jobs that require a lot of mental effort), the emotions (going through therapy to deal with "big T" traumatic life events or the loss of a loved one), the will (not being able to do the things you REALLY want to do), the senses (living near a nasty smelling dog food factory*** or hearing loud explosions multiple times a day or living with chronic pain)...all that stress adds up in the same column.

You can't separate one category from the other. You might think that having an incredibly stressful job while you are going through a nasty divorce can be balanced out by killing yourself in the gym (to "work out all that stress"), but you are most likely wrong. Those are all three STRESSES. Relaxation/meditation, deep breathing, massage, LAUGHTER...those are things that go in the other column and will take stress out of the bucket.

Most of the time when overall stress ramps up, and is not properly dealt with, bad things start happening. You start not being able to sleep. You get more emotional/irritable. You might "stress eat". You might have headaches, stomach aches or get sick easier. You might realize you are more forgetful. When stress ramps up in a vulnerable place (an old injury for example), you feel it. You will probably notice it, but you might not take notice of it.

There's another side to that equation. In order to get stronger, systems HAVE TO be stressed. For a muscle to be stronger you have to lift heavy weights. A healthy body will make adaptations in order to handle "more". But these changes don't happen in the moment of stress. The changes happen in the moments of rest.

When a system is under fire, all resources are thrown at the "problem". It's when the pressure is removed that the system can adapt and adjust in order to handle that situation better. This is how we learn new skills, how we handle more of what's thrown at us. 

The art of knowing how much pressure to apply and how much rest to allow is the art of "coaching". A good guitar instructor would never tell a new student to practice 8 hours every day 7 days a week to start out. That teacher knows calluses have to be built up on the fingertips. If someone new tried to play that much, their fingers would probably split open!

But, NO ONE has the opportunity to know your "systems" better than you do. I say "has the opportunity" because we all have our own blind spots! We can want to get back in shape so badly that we conveniently ignore clues that we are overdoing it until it's too late. (Or we can want the Oreos so badly we overlook what it's doing to our midsection!)

Taken from the IAES website.

I have been paying close attention to myself, but I don't always know how to translate what's being "said". Is that headache from stress overload or just a headache? Is that dizziness my brain telling me something or is it a sinus issue? The truth matters but the answer is the same: some kind of "rest" (or subtraction from the "stress" column). Extra sleep, laughter, massage, deep breathing/meditation...

My body might be itching to go work out, but if my brain has had enough, my body is going to have to wait. Think about that shoulder example earlier. If you just had surgery it doesn't matter how much you love to/want to/"need to" swim. It doesn't matter how fit you are cardiovascularly, or how strong your legs are. You will not be able to use that arm to swim (right now).

Sure, where there's a will, there's a way. I'm the queen of "but you can cover incisions with waterproof tape, you can immobilize the arm and do one-arm swimming, you can do drills that don't require that arm...". There's "always" a work-around. But when it's the brain, there aren't really work-arounds that work.

I imagine it's much like someone who has an "untreatable" injury (no cartilage in the knee or a torn labrum in the shoulder). They can push, but they have to know when to back off. (Who else starting singing Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler"?? Surely not just me.)

Thank you for joining me on this journey!

:D

*My treadmill desk...the treadmill only gets up to 2mph. I usually have it on 1.5 if I'm typing something that requires a good bit of thought.

**HRV-there's a lot written on HRV but here's a great place to start if you are interested: https://elitehrv.com/what-is-heart-rate-variability

***I have personal experience with living close to a dog food factory. Trust me when I say you don't have to live very close.