Given the new and rather large goal I’ve set myself for this year (for those of you that missed it you can check out the original post here) the first thing I decided I needed to do was get fit. Now I’m not in bad shape but I knew I could be better and I also knew that in the coming quest my physical fitness would be a force multiplier on everything I did. Allowing me more quality time on the water, less likely hood of injury and a higher level of performance both physically and mentally.
Obviously as a smart and well educated man the first thing I did was rush out and spend every minute training…Surfing, SUP’ing, Kiting, Cross fit, Yoga, Pilates, I signed myself up for a Spartan Race…I reasoned I was fairly fit anyway and my body should be able to cope with the added demands. My diet has been optimized over the last few years and I was eating very healthily, I’d also upgraded my sleep and while not perfect was regularly getting 6 – 7 hours a night of quality sleep.
In short I figured I could take it.
3 weeks in and I was pissed.
Little things were really annoying me, (like who’d left the cap off the toothpaste, and who the f**k had moved my favorite mug…I live alone, so guess what the answer was) I had to drag myself out of bed in the morning, I was fed up, everything seemed too much effort. My sleep suddenly dropped to 4 – 5 hours a night, I couldn’t bring myself to do the work I desperately needed to do, I had brain fog and couldn’t think straight and most worryingly my performance on the water was getting worse daily…much worse.
Added to that my mind retreated into dark places, I started being overtly negative, getting down easily and the world just seemed to lack its sparkle.
These were symptoms I’d often associated with the second day of a hangover after a weekend bender. The day after I’d feel terrible physically but often the left over adrenaline from the night before would keep me buoyant, but then the next day, once that adrenaline had left my system, I’d crash emotionally and beer blues would catch up with me in a BIG way.
Now this was an astute observation, but I had given up drinking 5 months ago and since then really hadn’t been to this place emotionally, so this left me puzzled.
The other thing it reminded me of was when I get really stressed out over a fairly extended period of time, ie. when I’m rushing to meet a deadline. My brain would be on fire for a week or sometimes even a month and then one day it would wave a white flag, check out, and leave me to deal with the emotional fallout, which often involved contemplating my existence and general worthiness to exist, which often led to fairly dark places.
So you can see I was pretty keen to get out of this place.
For a few days I was stuck…I was eating well, exercising plenty, kiting loads…all the things that usually made me so glad to be alive, and I still felt like crap, maybe I was just a dysfunctional misfit doomed to live this emotional roller coaster, hey, at least the highs were good.
Then as I reached the top of a flight of stairs by my house, a pathetically short flight of stairs, I stopped and noticed my body. I was breathless, slightly dizzy and had a burning in my legs as if I’d just run an ultra marathon.
I had a brain wave…
Maybe I was overtrained?
This was an effect I’d been aware of for a long time. Hell, we don’t just teach about it, we preach about it on our Evolve courses, but I, like most people, believed that it applied only to other people and not to me.
Could it be that my training was having this effect on me?
But I thought exercise was supposed to help deal with stress?
Turns out that mental stress and physical stress are experienced in the same way. They release the same neurochemicals and hormones into the system so you don’t actually know the difference between the stress of being late for work every day or the stress of running a marathon every day…the reaction is the same.
Or in other words the stress of overworking before a deadline is the same as the stress you put yourself under by drinking too much.
Now here’s some thing I had never considered, exercise actually acts as a stressor for your body. It seems so simple once you realize the truth. By exercising we are stressing our muscles out, we are deliberately overworking them so that they are forced to grow. This is what the Training Effect is all about.
As we’ve already mentioned stress is felt in the same way no matter what the source and this overtraining stress is no different. So if we don’t allow ourselves sufficient time to recover in between exercise sessions all these hormones which are so useful if we are being chased by a Tiger (think Cortisol and Adrenaline to name some of the more well known ones) stick around in the system and guess what?
They aren’t actually that good for us long term.
Their function (at a GCSE text book level) is to suppress the normal functions of the body, digestion, reproduction…the bits we normally really, really like to do, and divert all the bodies resources to escaping from that damn Tiger. This is great if you need to prepare your body to run like crazy or to attempt to go mano a mano with said Big Cat…as they turn you into The Hulk, but at the expense of many other critical systems which are essential to long(er) term survival.
Now for the last few months I have realized that in us humans, the physiological must be nurtured before the phycological. That if you want to change your mindset you must first change your physiology…we go into this in more depth on our evolution courses, but suffice to say just by smiling you’ll likely change the way your feel, trying to do the same thing sitting absolutely still and “thinking” yourself happy is much more difficult.
So could my overtraining be responsible for my shitty moods?
It certainly seemed possible.
So I resolved right there and then to take a week off, to change the physiological…at least a week, no kiting, no nothing, just a bit of walking, until my body was telling me it was time to go back.
The first few days were torture. I would look out the window at the kites on the water and sigh, my body would crave the adrenaline shot and the “Man” energy throwing weights round a gym at Cross fit gave me…but I resisted.
For a few days nothing happened, except a case of constipation, due to a decreasing metabolic rate and a lack of water, (because of my stressed out state I forget to drink). Thanks to Dr. Google I decided this was Appendicitis and so caused myself even more stress (yes, I can be that dysfunctional).
Then about 5 days into the process I woke up, having slept a little better than the previous nights and instantly the world seemed a brighter place. I went about my morning routine and was genuinely excited about work, the future and life in general. In conversations with people I was much more present, I could feel that warrior inside ready to face the world and kick ass.
My performance at work increased massively, I was more creative, more daring, more willing to try new things and more centered in the now rather than worrying about the future…and on the water I blew myself away.
My performance was better than it had ever been. Mentally I felt more energized, more willing to go for new stuff and better able to analyze and improve the mistakes I made in learning. I was able to stay out for much longer than normal and had some of the best sessions of my life in those days…coming back off the water each time I felt a deep level of contentment inside, that feeling that only being outside in nature, ripping it up and really giving your all can give you.
I had to rethink my approach.
I had to accept (however hard that was) that I had found and then exceeded my own biological limits in the proceeding weeks and that pushing it (as I have been constantly told I need to in life to succeed) had done me more harm than good. I fully believed that I could extend these limits over time, but I needed to find a new strategy for doing so, something that would allow me to train but not overtrain…in short I had to train short & smart, not long and stupid.
What’s more I had a theory, one that I will test over the coming months. That this cycle of train, recover and improve doesn’t just apply to the physical aspects of training but also to the mental aspects and to the skill acquisition process. That recovery is simply the most important part of the whole process.
That I don’t just need to learn to train like a machine but more importantly to recover like a mother f*****r.