Embrace the Suck

And so it begins…

It is my first day off after my first full week of overnight shifts. I have a tingle in my throat, it feels full, my head feels heavy, my ears have a slight ringing in them, and I’m acutely more sensitive to strong smells that threaten to bring on the headache that is knocking at the door of my frontal lobe.

Years of training for marathons and ultramarathons have taught me the importance of our immune system and the many things that can impact our ability to stay healthy. More specifically, I’m referring to my ability to recognize when I am opening myself up to succumbing to an acute viral illness.

It took me 10 tries of running marathons to finally achieve a Boston qualifying time. I remember one of those tries was in the Fall of 2007. I was commuting daily from the Phoenix area to Tucson for pharmacy school and had two school aged children at home. I had been training so hard all Fall to run the Tucson Marathon. It was Wednesday, 4 days before the race, and Peyton threw up in her bed in the night. She was 7 years old and I found her sitting up and crying in her bed with vomitus all over her Disney princess nightgown. It was everywhere. In her bedding and mixed all in her hair. I carried her to the bathtub. Being that she was 7 and heavier than toddler weight, I could not keep her at an arms length distance. I washed her body and pulled chunks of food from dinner out of her shoulder length locks, threw her bedding in the washer and tucked her back into bed.

I’m guessing you can figure out what came next…

By Friday night, I was the sickest I had ever been in my entire life. My bathroom became my bedroom for the night as I alternated between the choice of sitting on the toilet or on the floor in front of it. When my stomach wasn’t retching and my guts weren’t squeezing the ever living daylight out of my insides, I was vacillating between feeling like my bones were literally made of ice or sweating so profusely that I wondered how it could possibly ever be winter anywhere. I have never in my life felt that death would be a relief from suffering until that night. And I thought it many times over until the morning sunlight arrived and I finally defervesced.

If you have ever had an acute gastrointestinal illness (aka: stomach bug), you will understand exactly the feeling of sheer exhaustion that ensued. It was now Saturday morning, and I was supposed to be preparing to drive down to Tucson for the race. You can imagine my disappointment when I realized that even leaving my home without actively working on rehydrating myself was an asinine thought to entertain.

I have had a number of times in my life where I was actively preparing for months on end for an athletic competition. And each time I got sick during the preparation months, I learned more about my body. While it was for sure near impossible to have prevented getting that GI bug from my daughter short of decontaminating her while wearing a hazmat suit, there are definitely signs in my body I have learned to recognize to alert me to the fact that my immune system is becoming fragile. Any time it is fragile, I open myself up to allowing a viral illness to takes it’s hold on me.

Those who know me know that I don’t take athletic training lightly. I struggle with rest. I struggle with slowing down my mind and taking time to do things like sit and read a book or work on my photo project. (My photo project which has barely even been started. Super need a dedicated body double for that one to get kicked off the ground! But that’s a topic for another day.)

But when I start to feel a certain constellation of symptoms, I pay attention. I pay attention because if I don’t immediately make changes, I WILL get sick. But if I intervene right away, I have a narrow chance of being able to turn things around and minimize my downtime. I want to get back to training hard as fast as I possibly can. But life doesn’t always give us what we want. Sometimes our bodies send us messages that if we don’t do something different on our own, we will be dragged kicking and screaming to do something different by way of sidelining us to the couch unable to even get up for a snack.

I, personally, like to live my life by choice. I don’t want to be dragged kicking and screaming into an illness against my will. Yes, it is absolutely unavoidable at times. Yes, even if we do everything right. But in the instances where I can influence my body’s ability to rebound before that point, I will accept the opportunity to do so.

I think sometimes people misinterpret the common saying “no pain, no gain” to mean they should continue to train into and during injury or into and during illness. Unless you are actively IN a competition and this is the only way to win, this not the best strategy if you want to improve. I’d also argue that if you intend on continuing after a competition, it still is not the best strategy.

This saying is obviously more appropriately referring to the acceptable and anticipated pain of pushing your body to improve. Pushing your muscles to failure or near failure to break them down in order to rebuild. But maybe for those of us who enjoy training so much, “pain” represents the mental pain associated with taking a step back when needed. Taking that rest day. Skipping the gym when you feel on the brink of getting sick. Drinking more water. Taking extra vitamin C and zinc. Fueling your body with high quality foods and less sugar. Skipping the caffeine or drinking it early in the day to ensure sleep is not affected. Avoiding that alcoholic beverage that will only serve to create even more cracks in your body’s immunity.

So back to today. I only had two nights in the last week of work where I slept more than 7 hours and four nights with less than 6 hours of sleep. I continued to train. Now my body is sending me those signals that I need to proceed with caution. And so today I am listening.

Less dramatically and more specifically speaking, I still shortened my sleep and woke up at 2 pm so as to attempt to flip my schedule back to daytime, skipped caffeine, took a 6 minute “cold” plunge (71 degrees), spent 40 minutes outside laying out in the sun reading and spending quiet time with my sweet horses who missed me, took the day off from the gym, I’m hydrating, increasing vitamins, fueling my body with good food (dang, I wanted pizza today to celebrate my first week, but decided that was a bad idea), and I’m writing this blog post. I’m doing very light chores like dishes and have no other expectations of myself except for getting into bed by 7:30 pm, reading the Throne of Glass using my 90% blue light blocking glasses, and getting some freaking sleep.

Here’s hoping I successfully flip my schedule back to traditional daytime living!