Remember when you were a kid and you got hurt or sick, and you just went to your family doctor and that guy seemed to be able to see you whenever you were hurt or sick, and just about knew exactly what to do no matter what happened to you? I do.
I thought all doctors were supposed to help you and to be able to see you whenever you needed them. I thought they had all this magical knowledge about health and could cure just about anything.
Then something changed. I moved to California and found things were very different. Just about every doctor was so booked up that I couldn’t even get to see them when I needed them. Many were also all about the money and I felt like they wanted me to keep coming back even after I was cured, just so they could bill the insurance company for yet another visit. Or worse: they made the wrong diagnosis on some problems I had, or just had the worst bedside manners I had ever seen. Also, I had never exerpeinced such arrogance in doctors as I have seen in California…! Doctors in my new place of residence didn’t know everything, and I grew to be distrustful of doctors’ diagnoses. I had to develop my own method of carefully choosing doctors that I knew were able to help me in certain areas.
Over the last decade, I had to try out, pick, and choose carefully doctors in the area of sports training and recovery. It was not an easy process; in my early days of training, I would get injured a lot and had to try a lot of things until I found the most effective help I could find anywhere. Thankfully, after many years, I’ve at least tightened down the list of the best sports medicine doctors for me. But one area still remained: internal medicine.
I’m a pretty healthy guy. I don’t get sick very often but when I do, I want to see a doctor RIGHT NOW. Many of the internal medicine folks I got referred to were very good, but were also way too busy. When I call for an appointment, I always braced myself for the reply, “Oh he can’t see you today, but how about 3 weeks from now?” How is that helpful? Am I supposed to suffer for another 3 weeks just so I can get on a schedule?
Then I found The Total Care Practice. A new look at medical care, I found it to be truly refreshing and back to the way medicine should be. You pay a yearly fee to become a member of the practice, and then you can see them as much as you want (up to a maximum of about 30 visits; a healthy guy like me wouldn’t even come close to that!). They always hold time slots open each day in case somebody has an emergency so that there is a time slot they can see you at. Also, you can EMAIL the doctors and….THEY REPLY. WOW. You can ask them any question too!
For a higher yearly fee, THEY WILL EVEN MAKE HOUSE CALLS. WOW. Which doctor do you know will drive over to your house to examine you? And at the same fee level, you get their CELLPHONE NUMBER so you can talk to them virtually whenever you want. AMAZING.
This is the way medicine should be. Doctors be treating you when YOU need them, not when it’s convenient for the doctor to see you. Love The Total Care Practice in Palo Alto!
(by the way, the doctor I signed up with is also an avid athlete – an essential requirement for my doctors now, as I have found consistently that doctors who don’t train and race have a greatly decreased understanding of the needs of athletes and how to treat them…)

I went to the doctor this last Wednesday. He thinks it may be some kind of mild constriction of the lung’s airways, most likely due to some allergy or some other trigger. I got an inhaler and have been using it the last few days. Amazingly, it has started to clear up almost immediately. Now that more air is coming in, my HR is getting more mitigated and back to normal. I am testing out higher effort workouts now.
Yesterday I went out for a 2.5 hour run. It was about 94 degrees and I intended to do 5 loops of my favorite hill run. On the last two loops, I was able to push it and complete the loops faster than my first 3. Breathing didn’t feel bad at all.
Today I went out for a 4:22 ride. I climbed Kings Mountain twice, both with some suggested intervals in the beginning of the climb, with the rest of the climb being at constant power. This also felt OK and I didn’t feel too much breathing restriction during the beginning intervals.
Thankfully, I think I’m pulling quickly out of this predicament. I have about 8 weeks left until Ironman Florida and need to build aggressively for the next 5-6 weeks to peak, and then have about a 2-3 week taper before the race.

I’m into week 2 of my overtrained state. I did nothing for 4 days, and then yesterday I went for a test swim as I was going stir crazy. Besides, I am big on active recovery and not just sitting around. I took it very easy, and then tested some very short sprints (25m). HR climbed up but didn’t feel like my heart was pounding. I suppose that’s a good sign.
Slowly but surely the weird feeling in my lungs is subsiding a bit. I seem to be ok sustaining aerobic workouts, but haven’t tested threshold workouts and probably won’t until at least next week.
First order of business is to get this feeling out of my lungs and just get back to some state of normalness. Then I can ramp again.
(sigh).
The worst thing for athletes is to just sit around. We always want to do something. But sometimes we need to heal and recover. I just keep telling myself that.
I’m going for a 1.5 hour run today and seeing how things go.

Well, I did it.
I managed to put myself into an overtrained state. Good thing to have caught it early and not have it drag deeper into an overtrained state or else it would probably take longer to get myself out of.
In some ways, it really sucked because I didn’t know how much my body could take before getting into an overtrained state. I looked back over the last few weeks of training and know that I was doing a lot of swim sprint workouts, matched with run workouts that had hard, long intervals in them for stamina building, and I was working my way through a bike threshold series which was supposed to increase my tolerance for high heart rates for longer periods of time. Then on the weekends, I would run and bike long which didn’t allow for my body to recover enough.
It was too much.
Last week, I sensed I was feeling a bit overworked and resolved to do a lower workout week (which we should all do every 4-5 weeks) to let the body regroup. But heading to NYC on the redeye and being jetlagged, plus having early morning activities, meant that I was sleeping very little and my recovery was hampered by that. I went for a swim on the day I got off the redeye and felt something give in my lungs.
After that, I seemed to remain in that state where you feel like you did a long, hard workout the day before, except that it feels like that every day no matter what you did.
Still I went for a 1.5 hour run as part of my reduced week, as well as a two hour bike. Both were an easy ride and run and I didn’t test my aerobic system too much, but in the days after it still felt like I was not all back to normal, able to handle the next day’s workouts.
Of course, I hated to admit it to myself but I really needed to take as many days off as possible to get this feeling out of my lungs and my body. So I sit here, typing a blog entry instead of doing a workout.
One of the hardest things for a triathlete to do is to not workout and truly recover. I know I won’t lose much fitness, and more importantly I need to recover. However, I can’t shake the feeling that maybe I’ll lose something more.
Threshold workouts are tempting; you really push hard and feel like you’re doing something good. But too many without sufficient recovery put me here now. This coupled with my age and my body’s ability to grow into these types of workouts meant that my body just could not keep up and now it’s overtrained and needs rest and recovery time. It’s all trial and error frustratingly, although I did sense that I was overdoing it. I’ll have to watch the warning signs and my intuition more closely in the future.

I just read an article in the NYTimes about Dara Torres, the swimmer who made the Olympic swim team at 41 years of age. The first amazing thing is her age, which challenges the notion that as we grow older we must slow down. In fact, the NYTimes article cites many studies that refute that claim and that we can maintain high performance levels well into advanced age. At some point, I want to post about that once I dig more into age and performance. But the second amazing thing I read was her recovery regimen, which consisted of having two essentially full time trainers who stretch her out and massage her muscles after each workout.
Yesterday I (half) joked with my physical therapist on what would it take to be my personal recovery specialist, meeting me every day (including weekends) after my workouts and then doing her therapy magic on me so that I could recover faster for the next day’s workouts. I wasn’t able to find a model that worked, but I’m still thinking about it!
In absence of having a personal therapist, we must all bow down to the fact that recovery is important and that it does change over time as we age.
My first clue on this was last year, when I began doing laps up Old La Honda, a 3.3 mile steep climb. I would find that this workout was quite extreme, by my body’s standards, and that one day off was not enough to recover me for my normal middle of the week workouts.
Oh I did try though. I would take my usual Sunday off completely doing absolutely nothing. Then on Monday morning, I’d hit the pool and try to run. Sometimes my Monday sprinting workout would be ok, and that was topped out at 2000 meters anyways so the length of the workout did matter. But after that, I would switch into running clothes and hit the treadmill for a workout and found that I could not maintain any sort of endurance workout, let alone a threshold workout at all! I would inevitably peter out at around 20min or less and head to the shower. During these workouts, my heart rate would climb very quickly and my ability to sustain the aerobic, or anaerobic, effort was nearly impossible. Even on the next day when I would ride on my Computrainer, I could not sustain a normal bike workout; high wattages were impossible to maintain, let alone attain them.
Eventually I gave up and listened to my body. I’d take Sunday completely off, and on Mondays, I would try for a swim sprint workout and sometimes I’d be ok. After that, I’d run a form workout on the treadmill for about 20 min. On Tuesdays, I’d do a pedaling efficiency workout for about 30 min and that’s it. Then by Wednesday morning, I’d be pretty fully recovered for a great swim and run workout at normal levels.
I’m 42 now. I need more recovery time. But I am also getting faster as my Ironman times have been whittling down race after race. I am pretty sure I have not maxed out my ability yet either, as my marathon time has also been dropping as well. Yet, our conventional thinking has us believing that older people can’t still perform and should slow down, and that we can’t speed up unless we’re stressing our bodies practically every day.
I think conventional thinking is wrong, and many others are thinking that too.
Here are my notes on recovery, and especially for us 42 year old folks who refuse to believe that we can’t race Ironman when we’re 90:
1. You gotta listen to your body! But you also have to have the right intuition about your body, which can be learned. Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I have developed the ability to really know what my body is capable of at the time. I know when I feel really great (the easiest) and can go out and do a normal workout. I also know that when I just don’t have it. These are the times when it’s obvious I can’t sustain a normal workout and I’d be frustrated quitting in the middle. And then there are the unknown times when I feel a bit tired, but am not sure how much. These are times when I go out facing a normal workout but decide after I warmup. During warmup, I test my body and see how it responds to the efforts. If it doesn’t seem to have it, then I either stop or just do a form workout, or just go for an easy ride, run or swim.
2. You need to accept that you may need more recovery days. It was hard for a while, thinking that I was doing something wrong. But I gave up with that notion and proved to myself that I was still improving despite not having a “normal” set of workouts throughout the week. Even this year, as I ramp up laps up Kings Mountain, I find that I need Sundays and Mondays for recovery. As I increase my laps, I may add Tuesdays which was similar to last year. But that’s what my body needs and that’s what I give it.
3. Recovery doesn’t necessarily mean do nothing. Sundays are the days I absolutely do nothing. After the long hard workout on Saturday, I don’t think it’s a good idea to try anything on that day. But on Mondays and Tuesdays, I practice active recovery, which is do a light workout which activates the muscles and gets circulation going to flush out bad stuff and promote healing. It also lets the body know that you’re not going into non-active mode and keeps the body in that place of athletic improvement.
4. Work on neural muscular activation at a minimum if you can’t do a normal workout. Instead of running a normal fartlek workout, I might do track form workouts like strides, kick backs, etc. This stimulates my nervous system but doesn’t stress my aerobic system which hasn’t fully recovered yet. On the bike, I’ll do pedaling efficiency workouts which consist of one legged pedaling drills and high RPM spinning. For swimming, it means form practice drills to improve my form. Proper form in all three sports is super important and it is always possible to practice them in lieu of aerobic workouts.
5. Use physical therapy to help your muscles recover. I know we’re not all pro athletes, but I go to physical therapists every week and they use ART and Graston to take the tension out of muscles, and help scar tissue realign faster. Otherwise, I would need too much time for my muscles to relax and release tension by themselves due to my age. They help me get back to doing a great workout over the second half of the week. I would love to be Dara Torres and have someone work me over after every workout for recovery. Still working on that!
6. Ice is awesome for recovery, especially ice baths. They really help get the bad aerobic by-products flushed out of muscles faster.
7. I have not found anything that helps my aerobic system recover faster though. It just seems like time and rest are the only thing that really get it back on track. I’ll keep looking though.
8. Taking Sportlegs anti-lactic acid capsules also helps to prevent accumulation of lactic acid in your muscles, which increases stiffness and soreness.
The important thing is to acknowledge that we are growing older. We need to be aware of this and accept that we can’t train and recover like when we were 20. But the good thing is that if you do this right, you’ll still get faster. I know I am.

This last week, after my long ride, I decided to try a pair of compression tights which cover my entire legs instead of just my calves. I was curious to see if they would work on my entire legs, versus just in my calves.
I had a pair of 2XU Tights which I hadn’t tried before and put them on now.
It was a warm day in Palo Alto and those tights were kind of warm to wear. I wonder about racing in them during hot climates, but perhaps I would just get used to them. I walked around all day with them and only took them off to go to sleep.
I think they definitely worked. My legs weren’t feeling as tight as on days that I didn’t wear those tights. The next morning, they were definitely less wiped out and felt fresher than without wearing those tights all day.
I think combining the tights with ice baths, which I will start to do once my ride times get longer, should help my recovery a great deal.

Fascia is this connective sheath that surrounds and holds all of your muscles together. It can contract and relax and helps support the function of the muscles within.
As I train for Ironman, I find that this year, my fascia is creating some more interesting problems. It seems to be tightening up more this year than in previous years.
It’s been tightening down on my kneecaps in response to heavy training and causing some pain there during the morning after. My solution is to grab my trusty spoon and give spoonage to the area around the kneecap, which magically causes the fascia to relax and release its clamping down on the kneecap. I also experience the fascia just literally tightening up to a point where my legs are super stiff from running. I have to remember to loosen them up by accentuating my kick back during running, which seems to lessen its pressure. Also, in my calves, the fascia doesn’t relax fast enough in the next day; I often have to use my TP Massage Roller to loosen up the fascia around my calf muscles.
No matter what, I go each week to ART and Graston which helps my fascia to release after hard training and gets me going for the next workout. Without it, I would not be able to keep up with training day after day.

This last month I’ve been slowly ramping out of the base phase and getting my running up to about 1.5 hours. I’ll maintain this for many months and don’t really need to run more just yet, as I’ve still got about 6 months to go until Ironman Florida and don’t want to burn out.
Last week, I ran my 1.5 hours and the day after my calves felt a bit tight and sore. They felt kind of overworked and it was a bit unusual as I had been running 1.5 hours for my long run for a few weeks now. But it was more warm than usual and I thought that this may have contributed to a bit of extra soreness.
I thought about ways to remedy this and then I remembered my Zensah calf compression sleeves. I got those and put them on and it worked great! First, the compression seemed to relieve the immediate soreness somewhat. By the end of the day, my calves felt much more fresh and a lot of the soreness went away.
This is truly magical! I hope to use my compression sleeves more in my training for Ironman Florida, and I plan on using them during the race, no matter how dorky I look.

My physical therapist turned me on to Anatomy Trains. In their own words, Anatomy Trains are:
“Anatomy Trains provides a precise map of the ‘anatomy of connection’ – the whole-body fascial and myofascial linkages, leading to holistic strategies for health professionals, movement teachers, and athletes to resolve complex postural and movement patterns.”
What all that means is that just because you are sore in one place, that treating that location may not help you in the long run. Local treatment may relieve the symptoms, but it turns out that problems in one area are often the chaining effect of muscles, structures, and posture running all around your body.
I have a classic Anatomy Train issue. When you look at the muscles where I tend to have problems, they all run up and down my body in one of the Anatomy Trains. So when my physical therapist treats me, he doesn’t just work on the areas where my tightness/soreness are, he works the whole chain up and around my body to make sure they are all relieved of tension and back into functional mode.
The effectiveness is really amazing. My physical therapist related to me a patient who has this nagging problem and it would not go away, but once he started treating the Anatomy Train in which the problem resided, it turned out that the nagging problem finally went away and the patient’s performance also increased!
I find this myofascial stuff fascinating. Years ago, they knew nothing about this and the science and medicine has advanced greatly. Given that I am trying to achieve some sort of athletic excellence relative to myself, and I push my body quite hard given my age and ability to recover, treating my body as a system of Anatomy Trains has worked wonders in keeping me going through the season and injury free.