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.