Striving for balance

There is a training concept so fundamentally true it deserves to be a law, which is this: There is a limit to how much stress a human body can absorb. When that limit is exceeded, breakdown increases to the point of damage. There are also these corollaries: 1) The breakdown limit varies significantly between individuals. 2) The limit is not a sharply defined point.

Note that I said stress, and not training stress. I am focused here on training, but stress is stress. When we train we aim to create manageable amounts of tissue damage, which gets repaired when we rest. Our body overbuilds the repair, which makes us stronger. It is our immune system that responds to the damage by creating chemical markers that signal cell building factories to repair the damage. The same immune system that fights off viruses and other nasty stuff. Emotional stress also places demands on our immune system. Stress is stress, and when our immune system become overloaded, bad things happen.

That first corollary includes a twist. We often compare ourselves with other athletes and admire those who can train more without breaking down, but we also compete with our younger selves.

The second corollary should appear self-evident, as it applies to everything about our bodies. If we exercise lightly we do not create enough stress to trigger tissue improvement. As we increase the training load, by increasing intensity or duration, we gradually enter a dark zone in which the repairs are never complete – we are not fully recovered. Eventually we reach a point at which the inflammation is noticeably painful. This is not acute injury, like a bike crash or stepping in a rabbit hole on a run. The unchecked buildup of damage typically occurs over weeks, yet the pain comes on suddenly. We want to avoid getting anywhere near that point. The way to avoid it is to get enough recovery.

Getting the stress/recovery cycle correct is a good example of how tricky the balance thing is. Too much recovery and we lose the improvements we are working for. Too much stress and we end up with an overuse injury, and very likely lose much of what we gained. We can choose to do a little something every day, or one massive workout on the weekend that requires a week of recovery. Somewhere in there is a sweet spot. To complicate matters further, the older we are, the more recovery we require.

If you are a triathlete you are undoubtedly pressed for time. You may want your day to be all about training, but there is work time, family time, house cleaning time, marketing time. You get the idea. It is all about balance.

Even if you hit the training/recovery sweet spot and do a great job balancing your schedule, there is more that can go out of balance. As a triathlete you prefer to spend the limited training time available working in one of the sport’s three disciplines, swimming, biking, and running. Oh, and getting those balanced is another thing – I’ll skip that for now. The danger inherent in this approach is that we train primarily in the sagittal plane, which is to say our principle muscle movements are fore and aft. This results in some muscles getting strong, and others, not so much. Why is that a problem? Because when we are called upon to move in ways other than how we train, our powerful, agile muscles will overpower our weak, untrained muscles and pull joints out of alignment, straining the connecting tendons and ligaments. The places most at risk are the lower back, the knees, and the shoulders. Some would include the upper back in this list.

Like all overuse injuries, the onset will build slowly, over days or weeks. The resulting pain can start as a nagging ache, or come on all at once. In any case, the solution will take time and should include working with experts.

The best approach is to ensure these muscle imbalances never happen. How? By exercising the muscles that are not getting enough attention.

Remember what I said about the time crunched triathlete? We want to fill every available workout opportunity with a swim, bike, or run. How do we find the time to do core and flexibility work? You say you do yoga? Like, one night a week? Ok, that’s ninety minutes a week of core and flexibility, going up against maybe twelve to fifteen hours a week of sagittal plane work. Does that sound balanced to you?

The good news is we do not need to spend as much time on flexibility work as we do developing our major movers. What we should aim for is a little bit every day.

My turn to struggle with injury

As part of my coaching education I have been reading books on a variety of subjects that I believe are important for a coach to know something about. One of my favorites is The Brave Athlete, by Simon Marshall, PhD and Lesley Paterson, a must read for every athlete. Another is Roar, by Dr. Stacy Sims, PhD, a book every female athlete should read and highly recommended to anyone coaching women. And of course there is my bible, Joe Friel’s Fast After 50.

There is one book I struggled with, Rebound, by Carrie Jackson Cheadle and Cindy Kuzma. It is full of useful and informed information, but it is all about recovering from injury. It begins, “We’re sorry you’re here, but we’re glad you’re with us.” I was not injured and I found this second person voice (you can do this, you should watch out for that) hard to relate to.

Not anymore. 

I have been training as if my year consisted of Ironman 70.3 Hawaii (“Honu”) in June, and The full Ironman in October, planning to do both virtually like I did last year. For me the primary goal is staying active and healthy. Racing is fun, but the logistics and expense are challenges I don’t need right now. 

A big part of what I have been doing is refining how to put together a training plan for senior athletes, which I consider my specialty. For Honu I decided to give reverse polarization a try. I followed the example from Friel’s Triathlete’s Training Bible with an eye to the advice he gives in Fast After 50. The hardest part is getting in enough work in three disciplines while allowing adequate recovery time.

I was doing fine until the transition into the build period. Normally that would be where the focus shifts from long and slow to short and high intensity. With reverse polarization it is the other way around. I was starting to go long on the run and bike when along came the virtual Hapalua Half Marathon. No problem, I ran it the same way I did this kind of thing last year, a one hour out and back from my car as a refill station. A long training day. I gave myself the rest of that week off and aimed to settle back into my training plan with a two hour run on Sunday.

Here comes the monkey wrench. Pattie and I have enjoyed playing in the University of Hawaii Gamelan for over forty years. The group meets for several hours every Saturday afternoon, which pushed my long runs and bikes to Sunday. To play gamelan we sit cross-legged on the floor.

About a year ago rehearsals came to a sudden stop as Covid-19 restrictions took hold. We returned to greatly modified rehearsals on February 27. After every session Pattie and I hobbled around like old folks. I even felt the effects through Sundays. 

On April 11 I ran the half marathon. The following week was a regular R&R week, very short, easy efforts. On Saturday when I sat down to play my right hip flexor was stuck. I could not get my knee down to the floor, and it hurt. I waited, I coaxed, I said nice things about my muscles, and eventually it got down, but it was never happy. The next day I returned to normal training with a two hour run. As I sat down to eat my pre-workout snack I felt a sharp pain in my lower back. A spasm. Hmm. When I got to the start of my run I told myself to warm up extra and if it hurt to run, stop. I was fine. That afternoon I was less than fine. On Monday morning I crawled out of bed and could not stand up straight. My back was, as they say in aspirin commercials, killing me. That was April 19.

I have used Mike Zanoni before. He is a master at acupuncture and many of his clients are athletes. I called him right away and got an appointment on the 22nd. The next day, a Friday, I felt so good I wrote in my log “return to training.” Actually what I meant was I would abandon my training plan and follow a simple rehab routine, a short, easy bike ride every morning and a swim every afternoon. The only problems were getting there. Once I was on the bike or in the water I was fine.

One nice consequence of this plan was that Pattie decided to accompany me on the afternoon swims. It was great to finish up the day’s work, drive down to Ala Moana, swim for thirty minutes, and make it back for dinner before the sun went down. Mike even pitched in, doing some of the meal prep, and he joined us on Fridays for a gourmet picnic.

I thought I was doing great and was looking forward to returning to my full schedule, up until Sunday, May 2nd when things came undone. I did my planned hour and a half ride, but only managed it after taking a couple of Advil. After that, it was a repeat of April 19. I already had a Monday morning follow up appointment with Mike, but when I walked in all bent he looked at me like ‘Oh man, what did you do?’ 

Mike did some deeper work and ordered two days rest and only light exercise after that for the remainder of the week. He also agreed with my decision to bring in Sonya Weiser-Souza, my old masseuse now living in Reno. We did a Zoom session Tuesday morning where she gave me a set of exercises aimed at relieving the immediate stress and developing new movement patterns to allow the range of motion I need to do all the things I want to do, without injury.

To summarize, for anyone acclimated to chairs to suddenly start sitting cross-legged on the floor for two or three hours at a time, there are going to be problems. Painful problems. The older we get, the harder it is for our bodies to accommodate such changes. In my case, add to that a set of leg muscles developed to work in a single fore and aft motion (the sagittal plane for those taking notes). Asking them to move into a very different position, and stay there, is bound to cause trouble. I appear to have some tears in my right gluteus minimus and the locked up muscles along the right side of my lumbar spine have displaced my sacrum. The good news is that this should be repaired rather quickly, as long as I do not go back to long sessions of sitting on the floor. That remains something to train for, and Sonya’s daily routine is designed to do just that.

A major theme of Cheadle and Kuzma is expressed in the title, Rebound. Look upon injury as a way to improve, to bounce back and end up better than you were. With a little help from Mike and Sonya I have set my goal to enjoy freedom of motion in all directions so that I can do everything that comes along without limits.