Wow, I still have an
ultra-running blog. I’m surprised blogger hasn’t yanked it yet as part of some
cleaning-up of non-active sites. Apparently, you can also still find it on
trailrunningsoul.com. Of course, for any
new content since February, you’ll need to look at milk cartons or amber alerts
on the side of the highway. So, what happened?
I’d love to have some really cool excuse like I’ve been in the Himalaya
climbing Annapurna or training to become a Ninja, or off diving wrecked pirate
ships in the Bermuda triangle. But the truth is, since the Winter Psycho Wyco
race, my trail running success has been a little hit & miss and the impulse to write
has been miss. So here’s a quick run-down…. DNF at Free State, got really,
really sick, wife and I had a baby (Tristyn Riley Mooney!), DNS’ed a race in
May, got a new job, moved to a new town, bought a house, had a training
injury, somehow PR’d at the Psummer Psycho 50k, got really, really sick again, decided
not to run the Hawk 50, DNS’ed another race, finally got healthy and here I am.
I spent most of the summer
fighting a mystery illness. Ultimately I think there was a good chance it was
overtraining. I just felt profoundly tired all the time. I can’t say with 100% certainty
that it was overtraining since I was in a stressful new job and had a colic
baby at home but I was sure hittin' all the symptoms of over training. I also had a couple weeks of flu-like symptoms. Anyway, when I decided not to run in the Hawk
100/50 miler because “I just didn’t feel like it”, I realized it was time to
see the Doctor.
Fortunately, my doc “gets’ Ultra
runners. This is good. How do you think most Doctors respond when you present
with “…I’m a half hour slower on my 25 mile runs and I feel tired”? My Doctor is a little more understanding. He recognized a change in baseline and
decided to be thorough. EKG, lung x-ray, and blood tests for…pretty much
everything. We ruled out cancer, aids, Ebola, sinuse infection, Lyme disease, lung
disease, allergies, asthma, and really everything else. The EKG showed signs
of a slightly enlarged heart but this is normal for endurance athletes.
However, given family history, he decided to put me through a stress test. We learned three things from the stress test. First, it takes ultra marathoners a long time on the treadmill to have our heart rate approach
the “threshold” needed for the test. Second, gyms must have the 30 minute time limit
on treadmills because apparently this is when they break and a nurse has to
call IT and the IT guy gets mad because “….he was on there for how long at what
incline?!?, and the nurse and cardiologist get
happy because they’ve been trying to get a new treadmill for years but the
administrator won’t order one and “…now he has no choice”. Third, my heart is
fine.
Overtraining and stress. That
was my diagnosis (though I’m not a Doctor). So, I did what every runner does…I ran
through it. Well, sort of. I did back off on mileage and sat out a couple of
races I normally run. Eventually, I came out of it and I’m running strong and
feeling like myself again. Over the last month I’ve gotten my running volume
back up to normal.
So I’m back. In fact in two
days I’ll be running a 100k and I hope to have a run report done this weekend.
Please blogger, don’t delete my site and stress me out, I promise to add new content
semi-regularly.
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