Sleepless Endurance

I've battled insomnia all my known life. Haven't really got into the Why's and How's, I just have it. I suppose I could have by now worked with alcohol or sleeping pills to develop an action plan but I try to live better than that. Though when GHB was legal, I finally found out what it was like to fall asleep in five minutes. Instead I try to work off my sleep rhythm and when that roughly 90 minute mark comes along I do what I can to fall asleep. It is not all that reliable. 

Which is why I really enjoy Friday family dinner and movie night. We have homemade tacos and later pile in the parents bed to watch a kid friendly DVD. If I am lucky, I will fall asleep and stay asleep till an early rise for training with the team. 

Last Friday I feel asleep at 8:30pm. Nice. But was wide awake at 12:30.  Suck. Nothing was going to get me back to bed so I went through my DVR shows downstairs. Then I got restless around 3am and decided to run on the treadmill for a couple hours. Around 5:15 I hit the jacuzzi with a cup of coffee for a sunrise prayer session. Then Mighty Mo got up and the day went on. 

I really thought I would be asleep early Saturday. Yet as my wide awake timer finally hit 24 hours on Saturday night I was staring at my ceiling in bed wide awake. I grabbed a book and finally two hour later, I got eight hours sleep. 

These really hard insomnia sessions tend to really throw off my body rhythms and my eating cycles.  I can't really put 100% into everything like I normally can. As an Optimist, I look forward to Mondays as the start of something fresh. A new opportunity.  Regardless of how I feel inside, I have to push it just as hard and recover on the back end. This is one instance where I am not a fan of long weekends. 

Maybe the monsoons will bring me some sanity.

These last several weeks have for me, quite unusual.  I uncharacteristically sleep till the last possible moment, then rush out the door to work. Work has been nothing but stress and anxiety, deadlines and expectations.  My only solitude is the lunch time run or ride that no sane person wants to do in this kind of afternoon heat.  Then I get home late and stay up late decompressing.  My weekends have not been full of training or rest, but connecting with a boy growing up to fast and a daughter who wants nothing but warm milk, Kraft cheese and to cry over incoming teeth and anytime the word, "No" is uttered. At her or not. My greatest failure is not being the husband I have to be. 

Last week saw the conclusion of my effort in several projects at work and most of the ongoing story lines in my personal life so hopefully this upcoming week will return me to a more normal mindset. I could use it. While I have a very survivor like mentality, a mindset that is fluid and adaptable; I much prefer a mechanical life, I know what and how and why something goes up and down. 

First off, we need to resolve Mistresses auto accident several months ago. Part of my disconnect must be the fact that I am driving borrowed vehicles. We hope that by the middle of August the settlement will be complete and we can get something in our name. Mighty Mo and I have wished for years to buy a Jeep as a weekend vehicle but now it might be my next daily driver.  That would make he and I very happy. The expectation to buy another vehicle and even one that could bring he and I so much joy, has got me over focused on car buying websites.

Mighty Mo's health has had some serious ups and downs the last several months and while it seems everything is in a remission, it is not time to let the guard down. We have been burned by that before. This quality of life issue is part of the reason we are considering a Jeep sooner than later.  Mighty Mo has some big steps coming up for him this year and it's more important than ever that he and I have a iron bond.

I have always, always believed in being worth more than I am paid.  Many people may not understand that affirmation. It doesn't mean I am underpaid, it means I am indispensable.  As a mindset it has always benefited me. As a business owner, as a partner, I mentor, inspire and train people and I need more education on my own behalf to continue to be the tip of the spear in my position. To that end, I have to finally move forward with some professional development that involves some sort of schooling or certification. I love to learn, I cannot stand academia. This will mean more stress for me. 

The good news though is that the monsoons are finally here in the Valley of The Sun. After threats from meteorologists all weekend, we were hammered by 15 minutes of hard, sideways ran and hours of that rain smell. As someone who has a very depressed sense of smell and can acutely smell rain, I love it.  Rain rejuvenates me.

I suppose to summarize, I am tired of waiting. Waiting for a car settlement. Waiting for a new vehicle. Waiting to start some type of schooling. Waiting for my sons health to decide what to do. Waiting for my daughter to talk. Waiting for my body to decide its fully healed or not. The one thing I don't have to wait for is the support I get from Mistress. And that means a lot.

Dead Legs

Every day that I wake up, I lie in bed for a few moments and do a 'how am I feeling" diagnostic on my body. Does anything hurt head to toe?  Should that be hurting, or ache?  Like everyone I feel the affects of my training and a little soreness doesn't mean I can't have an outstanding day. In fact it affirms I am alive and able, capable of doing tremendous things. 

The last two weeks I have done this test in bed, I feel just fine, normal if you will. My head is clear, my back, arms, neck all check out A-OK. I got really sick a weekend ago but that came and went really fast. When I stand, I can walk without limp or pain or any discernible difference between how I have walked for years. When I am walking around, standing for a period of time or bending over they look and act just fine.  

But the fact of the matter is that this is a false positive because my legs are dead. I have nothing in them. I have all the proper mental mindset, time and motivation for a workout using my legs but when I try to use them I've got no power in them. A week ago I had a little cramping in my quads in them doing the day, I attributed it to latent lactic acid and certainly not painful but lately they feel normal. Probably because my training has tapered off so badly. 

It is very frustrating. My legs feel well rested yet I can not get anything moving on a run or ride. They are heavy and almost clumsy. Tests on leg presses and extensions show the same inability to produce consistent output but upper body testing shows the same results I am accustomed to. 

Of course I know the body can go into a rut from time to time. I have heated. I have massaged, elevated, and stretched. I have been worked over by a chiropractor for any physical deviations and I am good to go. I have adjusted my calories and I am changing my supplements. And yet so far, when I go for test runs or use stairs or ride a bike, my legs feel like I am 72 hours post marathon. I would love to take this as some sign to rest but I have been essentially resting for almost two weeks dealing with this feeling and it is not solving itself. 

It is obviously frustrating. All I can is try each day to go through the motion and hope that it self corrects somehow. I'm going to swim this week and see what happens there. Not much leg action needed for what best describes my swimming, horizontal drowning. We will see what happens. 

In-betweens

Most people look at Monday's as the beginning of a new week, a fresh start. The last week which was never as good as it should have been was followed by a weekend where you ate and drank more than your guilt allows and you didn't train nearly as hard as you should have. But hey the week before was really hard!. 

All kidding aside, Monday is a serious day not because marks a new week but because its a day of In-betweens. It took all the willpower in the world to not eat the last couple pieces of pizza for Monday's breakfast.Start the day off right and get back on track. You even packed some food to avoid snack trays and processed meals. But man you really wanted a hamburger over the weekend and never got it. Those two donuts you had Saturday tasted so good and its been a long time since you had one, so why not?  You always pass them up at the coffee shop and they look so good, never had one from there. 

Have you caught on yet that this happens not just on Mondays but every day of your life when you decide to get back on track with something?  It is so easy to fall off the good food wagon and when we try to hop back on it's moving pretty fast which means we are all bound to miss our first few hand holds and have to try again Bad habits from the weekend carry over to the next day. It is these times when we are In-Between, following the right path and following the easy path. Sometimes we are inbetween for only one meal, sometimes it goes a whole day. Admit it when your on a training high and get really sick, an Inbetween could last the whole next week. 

A Inbetween is dangerous because it attacks two different mental attitudes. The first is the 'I've earned this' attitude because you have made great strides in your goals, lost weight, gained strength, speed, shape and your rewarding your good behavior with bad. The second is the egocentric process of believing you are in control of yourself. You can start and stop destructive behavior without intervention. You are in control. 

You may have earned the right to go off your diet or your training plan for a day or two. You're rewarding yourself and you should. It's when you have to make the decision to eat the oatmeal over the pie, or go to 5am swim over the warm bed that creates the Inbetween. And trust the experts, ego is pride, double the pride, double the fall. Never be so sure of yourself that you self sabotage a day or week to indulge in gratification.

Creating positive habits are not 100% protection from In-Betweens. It is however a great way to stay away from pitfalls. Planning a cheat meal or cheat day, scheduling rest in a hard training cycle, even planning walks inside your run workout all defeat these inbetween moments we eventually confront. 

Recognize when your inbetween the path you want and the one you don't . Be prepared to fight against being a common man for one more meal or one more day. Your worth it. 

Grand Canyon: The Adventure Interrupted

It is 4:28am Saturday morning, the sun still 45 minutes from rising behind me as I stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The glow of civil twilight over the south rim is a magical moment and yet I stand on that wonderful precipice with great emotional distress and not a little bit of physical discomfort as I bid farewell to fifteen friends as they run past me.  When we all ate dinner just eight hours earlier, if someone had said I would be too sick to hike in the morning, the table would have erupted in laughter.

Yet there I stood, the taste of fresh vomit in my mouth and the rumbling in my stomach telling me there is still more to come. Around 10pm Friday night my stomach started to feel queasy. By 11:30pm a trip to the bathroom confirmed undigested dinner in my stomach. Then as if I didn't believe the results my body reconfirmed the message every thirty minutes for the next  several hours. I started getting text's from the group around 2am, people too excited to sleep already up and goosing the rest of us to be ready to leave at 3:15am. I sent a reply to one, 'puking and the other all night. See you in the lobby'.

For those that know me well enough, know there is no error in that message. I live by the illness code of, 'It's better to show up and be sent home, than to not show up at all.' Besides, in the pitch dark, I was the only one who knew how to drive to the hiker shuttle from the hotel and I took my logistical responsibilities for the trip seriously. I had planned the entire trip from booking and paying for the hotel, to parking passes, to maps, to dinner reservations. I mentored most of them for hours in the months prior on training for heat and proper gear. 

When I activated my Polar heart monitor at 3am and the readout showed 105, I wanted to believe it was adrenaline but deep down I knew had to be one more symptom of why I should reconsider this hike. I even took it off and reset it, hoping it would show a more realistic number, which it did not. My roommate announced  my onset at the lobby meet up and there was righteous concern but no absolute barriers to my attempt. An hour later as the shuttle bounced along in the dark, my HR now only in the 90's and my stomach flipping,  I compromised with myself that I would only go down a couple miles to see how I feel.

You know when your in an audience and you clap just a few seconds too long and people stare at you? Or a group laughs at a joke and you laugh way to loud and show way to much enthusiasm and it makes everyone uncomfortable? Yeah that was me when by the clarity of a half dozen headlamps in absolute darkness, the air filled with joyous excitement for a Grand Canyon adventure, I vomited next to a tree.

My business partner walks over to me and tells me he won't let me go any further. I need to go to bed and stay there. He reminds me of the two years it took to recover from my last heat injury and with temperatures promising to be over 110 degree on a 26 mile hike, I had gone as far as he would allow. Honestly I was relieved. As the group moved past, most of them gave me respect for the effort of even getting dressed and making it to the trail head. They offered sympathies and thanked me for making the trip possible for them.

Needless to say, just laying in bed I got worse as the day wore on. A round trip to the ice machine exhausted me. I suffered a hot shower with goosebumps. I met air conditioning with sweat. Classic miserable flu like symptoms. I don't even want to imagine what would have happened if I had gone down that trail for that distance in that heat. I heard later a Ranger announced 130 degrees at our turn around point.

By Saturday night I was still too weak to join the dinner I had set up downstairs. As they ate steak and celebrated their triumph, it took me two hours to eat a bagel with peanut butter. By Sunday morning I was weak and dehydrated but felt like a human again.  A breakfast buffet reminded me of the energy I would need to drive home so I forced down a small plate. I was shortly joined by friends walking in on tight legs and aching knees more concerned for my well being than their own immediate state. 

My final experience at the Grand Canyon, listening to those stories of perseverance and victory, at least ended my stay on a good note. I didn't get the weekend I wanted but plenty of others did and that actually made me feel good.  As for me, I'll be back to finish the trip in my own time.

Big Ass Event #2 2010: Grand Canyon Hike

My theme this year seems to be endurance feats that don't require entry fee's. This weekend I travel north with a couple of my partners and a dozen of our executive to do a one day Grand Canyon event. We are going to hike down to the river using the South Kaibab corridor then run past Phantom Ranch about an hour then return to the south rim using the Bright Angel trail. 

I will be honest, I am excited for this trip but not this date. It was originally scheduled for mid-May when the weather was much more favorable. The river is going to be 104 degrees at a minimum and by late morning  should be well over that when we turn around. 

Known as the crazy endurance nut in our group, rumor has it I was starting at 2am and doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Damn Paparazzi. Not true at all for this date. It is suicidal to do a rim to rim to rim in one push this time of year. Even the people who do that route often, won't do it in the summer. If we had done this in May, well different story. 

This is the same hike with almost all the same people as the canyon trip I took last Fall. This time however, its half the size going and all capable of moving with some urgency instead of plodding or hobbling along. The only difference is we are adding a extra couple hours on the other side of Phantom Ranch where the temp will climb like an oven heating up.  

For myself, I will be going on this hike weighing forty pounds lighter and with better gear and clothes. I have really analyzed and updated my hiking, trail running gear over the winter and made some smart decisions for better ventilation, hydration and sun protection. My pack will also be ten pounds lighter. I am only packing for myself this time and not holding group items. Just the essentials for my food and safety. I will be wearing my SPOT 2 again and setting up a Shared Adventure page for people to follow my progress. More on that Friday. 

Random Musing, May 27

It has been a stressful week here at Endurance Pursuits. So instead of a long rambling discourse, I am going to list some things that have been on my mind, in no particular order.

• You don't need a weatherman to tell you its hot in the valley. The wax based chapstick tube that melted on my car console is proof enough. Time to switch to Vaseline lip balm.
• I suppose the other no-brainer on the same subject is when you reach in the gym bag for stick deoderant and it melted all over my workout shirt. Time to switch to spray or colgne.
• When a person gets a job at Whole Foods, does the company provide hemp clothing and accessories or does the employee wear their own?  I suppose the patchoulli oil is standard in the employee break room.
• I had to buy a pair of jeans that fit, 'cause I've lost some weight. I like boot cut and as I kept trading down on waist sizes I realized that the bottom of my pants looked bigger than my thigh and waist area. Never had that visual on me before. Its a little weird.
• I'm officially more concerned about EMP damage due to terrorism than global warming and a little pissed off that our government spends more money on the later than the former.
• I have a bad habit of telling my wife I will be home at a certain time and then not getting home till much later.
• I realize only now in life that I am a massive introvert who likes to be around people than an extrovert who needs quiet time.
• I don't like phones. I only carry my phone when neccesary and turn the sound off most of the time. If I don't recognize the number I probably won't answer it.
• I often don't listen to voicemail for several days.
• I am an optimist. Fatalism bores me, these people rarely die doing what they dread, so its a broken record. Realists usually have a myopic self centered agenda. Pessamism usually makes people sacrastic and most people don't do sarcasm well. Really.
• I love my hot tub but realize it doesn't aid my legs in recovery as well as elevation and ice.
• I believe in sensible footwear at all times. I think people who wear flip flops with any outfit for work, school or daily errands are sloppy and repulsive. Flip flops are only sensible for things like showers, pools and beaches. The definitely should not be worn with jeans.
• I have gotten so used to my electronic book reader that I think its kind of a hassle to turn pages in a real book now. But I suffer through it.

Have a great day.