Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I think the cooties might have finally caught up to my family and I.
We should have the test results back in a few days but my wife and I have taken turns with fever, chills, headache, and sinus congestion. Speedy and El Duderino have both showed similar although thankfully less severe symptoms.
Admittedly, riding 18 and change miles on zwift with the beginnings of a sinus headache and following it up with a few glasses of wine might not have helped.
Figure 8’s through watopia
The next morning when I couldn’t clear my left ear and the sinus headache was in full swing, the 1.1 mile swim date with my wife didn’t do me any favors either.
It is hard to stop the momentum from a full training plan, especially one that is supposed to be peaking, as opposed to being sidelined.
I was willing to look past a few of the more subjective and intuitivemetrics of how I was feeling, as well as some of the more objective ones (like increased body temp and respiration rate) in the name of a training plan. The results were probably not advantageous.
Thankfully no signs of respiratory decline
I’m grateful that my biggest concern is how I will bounce back for competition. I know that not everyone’s run in with the cooties is so favorable.
I’m grateful that I can be an effective father/husband/provider while still in cootie recovery mode.
I’m grateful that I have taken my own advice to stockpile fitness for times of trouble. I hope that my stockpile pays dividends as the calendar closes is on race day.
I swear I don’t know what happened ma
I’ve talked ad nauseum about how SerenityThroughSweat makes me a better, calmer version of myself. How engaging a strenuous physical activity pushes on the pain receptors, enabling the pleasure centers to have their turn in the aftermath.
The cooties have taken this option off the table. So not only are my wife and I not feeling so hot, but I think I’m in a (at least short term) below baseline hormonal state.
Photo evidence of the cooties in the house
I’m reminded the quote from Fred Jung played by Ray Liotta the movie Blow “sometimes you’re flush, and sometimes your bust. When you’re up it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down you never think you’ll be up again. But life goes on”
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.
Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I was listening to the Huberman lab podcast episode 32 on pain and pleasure, and it brought me back to something my highschool rowing coach used to tell me.
Dr. Huberman is a Neurobiologist and professor at the Stanford school of medicine and his podcast covers a number of topics with a scientific and specifically a neurobiology approach to various topics.
Dr Huberman, does an excellent job covering very complex scientific topics, breaking down on a mechanistic basis what goes in the body and brain while remaining surprisingly approachable to the novice, unscientific enthusiast.
El Duderino was very excited to go full cannibal on Halloween. A lollipop eating a lollipop
The episode on pain and pleasure was a two hour deep dive into the various ways we experience and modulate pain and pleasure and how the two are interconnected. Specifically of interest, to me anyhow, was the research around dopamine reward prediction error by Dr Schulz
The study explored the way that dopamine levels are modulated when behavior is rewarded on a variable schedule. The best example of this is slot machines in a casino. Not knowing when you are going to win and then getting a bigger reward than expected makes the behavior more rewarding (from a chemical perspective not necessarily a financial one)
Dopamine is not really a feel good hormone, it is actually a behavior reinforcement and learning hormone. The dopamine levels in patients did not change significantly and actually dropped after a reward was received. The dopamine is instead released based on anticipation of the reward so that the behavior used to obtain the reward is what is learned.
Pumpkins and protons, not spooky but groovy
This is one reason why athletes feel so connected to their training and preparation prior to a win. The dopamine is released in anticipation of the win to reinforce the training behaviors.
This same concept can be applied to our own behavior outside a clinical setting. We can regulate our self rewarding in order to continue to motivate behavior. The thought being, if you reward yourself every time you engage in a behavior you want to keep doing, your dopamine response will gradually decrease. Whereas if you reward yourself on a variable, intermittent, or otherwise randomized schedule for that same behavior, your dopamine levels (which help drive motivation for that behavior) will remain higher.
Pumpkin everything
The practical application example that was given was rewarding yourself or your teammates after a win or a hard training session. There is certainly something to be said for celebrating your accomplishments, but celebrating every time can lead to reduced dopamine which in turn would lead to less desire to perform those actions that lead to the win in the first place.
In high school I joined the crew team my freshman year and was lucky enough to be part of a few very successful boats. Competing in both a lightweight eight man boat and a lightweight four man boat, my friends and I won numerous local regattas, placed at the NY state championships and even won a Canadian national championship.
Keeping myself honest with the speed work mixed in.
After every win, regardless of whether it was our local club race or a national championship ship our coach would say “enjoy it today, because tomorrow it doesn’t mean shit”.
While that’s not my particular coaching style, and that type of coaching and motivation isn’t for everyone, it seems that it is at least backed by the science of motivation and dopamine reward pathways.
Halloween half marathon by coincidence (not planning on making that one a thing)
By not celebrating our wins and overstimulating a dopamine response, our desire to obtain a reward and thus the behavior that was required to obtain that reward was reinforced.
As with most topics we cover here, and many more we don’t, a delicate balance must be struck to obtain optimum levels of pleasure, dopamine modulation, and serenity for that matter too. In a first world of instant gratification, a self regulated variable reward protocol can help us reinforce good behaviors on the path to serenity.
Adding up miles and time in the saddle as IM FL 70.3 approaches
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.
Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to talk about stress, especially the benefitial sides of stress for various areas of health. Maybe even reframing stress in a more positive light.
Stress gets a bad rap. Sure modern life is full of stressors, and you can always find something to worry about if that’s what you are looking for. In it’s most basic form, we need stress in order to have an adaptation response. We need stress to grow.
El Duderino and daddy day
I can’t think of any group of people that doesn’t have multiple stressors in their life, but parents, aviators, and athletes each have their own unique variety.
One of neat things about stress is that the body doesn’t really differentiate between where the stress comes from. Did you just run some sprints, fly through some turbulence, did your toddler hurl his plate of trail mix across the kitchen? Your body doesn’t discriminate, it just responds.
Lots of easy walking days this week in recovery
The response is a cocktail of hormones that trigger a myriad of reactions that have helped us survive and evolve as humans. One of the primary hormones is adrenaline/epinephrine. This is a case where my highschool chemistry teacher would say “in the scientific community why have just one name when two will do”.
When we experience any event that our body has deemed as stress, amongst other things, adrenaline is produced in the body by the adrenal gland and in the brain by the medulla oblongata.
Two boys in recovery
Adrenaline/epinephrine then has a number of downstream effects such as increased energy and alertness, increased blood flow to muscles, tunnel vision or a singular focus, increased memory retention, and increased immune response.
From an evolutionary standpoint these all make a ton of sense, if something was trying to eat you, the adrenaline boost would better equip you to escape, learn from the event, and heal any injury you might sustain.
Exploring koosh balls, gravity, and surface tension
The stress system it turns out is not just for unplanned, try to stay alive type of events, but can be activated at our discretion to engage all of those benefits. The following study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, demonstrates just that.
In the study of 24 participants was split into two groups of twelve, with one of the groups receiving ten days of training in mediation, breathing, and cold exposure, and the other receiving no training. Each group was then infected with E. Coli.
The intervention group which was trained had “profoundly increased plasma epinephrine levels”. This led to increased levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines, decreased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and lower flu like symptoms. The study ends with “In conclusion, we demonstrate that voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system results in epinephrine release and subsequent suppression of the innate immune response in humans in vivo.”
The breath work, cold exposure, and meditation served to activate the stress response, while also modulating it (too much stress for too long a period as we all know can be a bad thing). This allowed participants to have a significantly better immunological outcome to a pathogen exposure.
Balancing stress is always a tightrope walk, too much and you risk burn out, too little and you won’t evolve or adapt. The magic of the sympathetic nervous system and epinephrine pathway is that your daily SerenityThroughSweat habit (assuming appropriate application) also comes with an added immune boost.
A light cardio week with a minor surgical intervention
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty (and maybe even a little stressed too) my friends.
Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I am very excited to talk about pacing.
After signing up for Ironman FL 70.3, and trying to follow a more primal approach to both my diet and my exercise, I have spent the last eight weeks in an aerobic base building phase.
Family farmers
Eight long weeks of limiting my heart rate to 180-age beats per minute. There were times when I felt like I was crawling. There were times when I wanted to spit out the bit, rip off the bridle and let my legs loose. There was more than one occasion where I considered smashing my fancy gps watch with a heart rate monitor, that chirped so innocently at me, reminding me of my departure from aerobic training zones.
Finishing up that base building phase and entering a speed phase felt like being released from a cage. My first sprint workout, the singular focus, the tunnel vision, the wind rushing past my ears, the awareness of the restraint that had been removed to let my legs explode, propelling me down the pavement produced a primal liberation. A liberation not just of my heart, lungs, and legs, but also my mind and my mood.
Chomping at the bit for this speed work
Endurance training is its own special kind of masochism. There is no way around a little suffering if you want to complete long and hard physical challenges, normally however, they come with a chemical/hormonal reward pathway. This is our body’s way of initiating the fight or flight response, and become better suited to complete those same challenges again in the future. Testosterone, human growth hormone, cortisol, and insulin like growth factor 1, are all elevated after endurance training sessions.
This chemical reward is a notable component of SerenityThroughSweat. I’m not above a little chemically induced serenity, I just prefer sweat as the acquisition currency.
And right back to low and slow miles on a long CAE layover
Limiting yourself to the aerobic zones, removes a significant amount of that chemical reward. Studies show that reduced relative work intensity, especially in trained, as opposed to sedentary individuals, will produce a corresponding reduction in hormonal response.
This meant eight weeks of long, slow, miles in the saddle or on the trail, with an incessant heart rate monitor chirping, and a diminished chemical return at the end. Nonetheless, this aerobic base building is an essential part of my training program, one that requires appropriate pacing.
Typically, pacing is used in the connotation conserving energy, so as not to tire out before the finish. This aerobic only pacing was more like completing the session using only half the tank. This was training with an artificial, and annoying, constraint.
Getting underway on the next SerenityThroughSweat project
There is a purpose to the pacing though. Even at anaerobic sprint intensities, upwards of 70% of your energy come from the aerobic production system. At sub-maximal efforts, like those in most endurance events or everyday activities, that percentage is even higher.
Building your aerobic engine, slogging through those slow, laborious miles, is training the engine that powers the vast majority of your activity. It may not be glamorous, but it is the work that pays dividends.
Training primarily aerobically also paces your body to respond to the chemical and hormonal rewards we mentioned above. The body is much better at noticing relative change, than it is overall levels. Said another way, if you are constantly chasing the a runner’s high into a red zone heart rate, your body will adapt to those elevated chemical levels. If your training is primarily aerobic, those high intensity sessions send a powerful chemical signal because the levels of the suite of growth hormones are elevated, relative to normal training response.
Recovery work and an MAF test, all 150 bpm or below with constant reminders
I see a lot of similarity in my interactions with my boys, especially El Duderino. The emotional and chemical reward I feel when they learn how to do something for the first time is a high I will keep chasing.
But the majority of our interactions seem like a crawl toward progress, (often with the same reminder to keep my heart rate down).
Maybe you are less familiar with burnout from a training regimen, but I think every parent has felt burnout at some point. Pacing, of energy, effort, engagement, and expectations, can make all the difference in finishing a day with hugs and smiles versus resentments, and frustrations.
El Duderino at the science center
When in doubt remember that pacing is your friend, and no matter how annoying it is, that incessant chirping reminder to adhere to your pace can help guide you towards serenity.
Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.
