Fatigue

The past several weeks (actually closer to 6-8weeks)  I’ve been feeling pretty drained and been having a hard time waking up on time and getting the motivation for my workouts.  I figured it was a bit of burnout, or maybe the stress of a new kid/bad economy/life at a start-up/financial scare due to deferred salary/slight sibling angst along with head strong 3 year old toddler/ etc,  or just plain in my head/being a wuss.
I was handling it the way I do most things of the sort – use mind over body and push on.  Granted, over the years I have learned to pay attention to my body more and more, so I did back off from 13 hours of training per week to around 7-9 hours of training over the past 3-4weeks and slept in to 7am many mornings.   Last week was really low for training at just barely 5hrs and while my key workout felt good, I was getting worried that that was all the training I was getting in, but I’ve been getting more and more exhausted (and more and more easily irritated) despite the pull back on training hours, so I was confused.  Sometimes I get tired from lack of exercise, so I was starting to think maybe that was what was going on; except that I had a constant feeling like my legs were about to cramp and I kept on getting a sour stomach.

Today, Hillary and I went to see our acupuncturist – great lady who really knows her skill; she got rid of Hillary’s allergies that were becoming quite severe, helped Hillary with fertility to get pregnant with Tana, greatly helped Hillary through both of her pregnancies, and got rid of my chronic sinusitis that had stumped several specialists who all thought surgery was the only remaining option.  We are strong believers in her abilities.   The first thing she said when we started our consultation was, “you look exhausted!”.  We went over how I was feeling, what was going on in my life, how my digestion was doing, etc and then she felt my pulses and checked a few pressure points.  After the checkout she told me that she wasn’t at all surprised that I was feeling drained.  I had apparently over-ruled my body’s warning to me that it was tired and had been running on adrenaline for quite some time; so much so that I was/am deep into adrenal fatigue and near adrenal exhaustion.   Not the disease, just literal overuse.   oops….
So now I need to back off and listen to my body a bit more, take some supplements to help reverse things, relax and make sure to de-stress more, and most importantly get more sleep!  My current training level is ok, and since its a major source of stress relief for me along with other benefits, she encouraged me to continue (especially lunch time exercise at work).  Racing this weekend is fine too;  she just pre-warned me that my performance may be a bit lack luster as my adrenal glands won’t be working too well yet.  Tour de Los Alamos may be another year of citizen’s class rather than cat4 as I haven’t put the miles in yet to race 52miles with longer climbs (flat would be fine as I could hide in the pack from the wind), so I may have to go for the 26mile route as I know I’m trained for at least 30miles of racing hills currently.  I’ll be bummed if so, but probably won’t make my decision until I get down to NM and register there.  The rest of my race season should be good to go; if I allow myself to recover.  Sounds like a great excuse to spend even more time with Tana and Brenna!

yup – I’m still head strong and need a wake up call, from trying to be superman, back into reality every now and then…