OK - I’m Struggling…
Over the past couple of months, but this past eight days in particular, I’ve experienced what I would describe as the culmination or confluence of a number of different stresses and struggles. It’s felt as if the sum of all the difficulties and challenges of this past 14 months has finally burst the floodgates and beaten me down. As a result, I haven’t been journaling this past eight days because I didn’t want it to be just a repeating message of negativity.
This past couple of months, I’ve found myself alternating between states of anger and frustration, quiet resignation to my fate, and (mostly) a kind of numbness. Thankfully, I’ve still been able to experience moments of joy and fun with my family and also been able to laugh on occasion with some of The BTG crew, but those moments have been relatively few and far between as of late. I’ve found myself resorting to moments of forced mania and silliness to try and give myself a boost, but those moments are fleeting and fade away as quickly as I am able to elicit them.
I’ve even contemplated just chucking it all in and sticking my head in the sand until things are back to “normal”, but I quickly realized that all that would accomplish is giving myself more time to sit and be angry or frustrated, and would take away an important outlet and small piece of normalcy for the members of The BTG community (and for myself), and would just make me a more miserable person to be around.
The Pandemic
I won’t bother going too deep into the struggles I’ve had around this, because I honestly feel that SO many people have it worse than I do right now. There are many who have lost and suffered so much more than me - businesses they’ve worked hard for years to build up wiped out in a matter of months, jobs lost, severe impacts to their health and wellbeing as a result of this virus, or more tragically, the loss of friends and loved ones along the way. We have ALL struggled, and I will not dishonour or diminish the experiences of others here. Suffice it to say that it has been a challenging 14 months, and will continue to be so for a while yet.
One new development for me recently has been that I’ve had to apply for government assistance (specifically the CEWS - Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy) to see me / the business through this most recent period of difficulty. It’s a big hit to my ego as an entrepreneur and as a provider for my family that I’m having a lot of trouble getting my head around. It’s hard not to see myself as a failure right now, but I’m trying to not let my bruised ego get the better of me and instead look at the situation objectively.
Injuries / Issues
As I worked towards my planned 50K attempt (scheduled for the end of this month), some small issues started to crop up. It started late last fall with a strange pins and needles sensation in a particular area of my left foot that would appear near the beginning of each trail run, but would seem to ease off after the first 15 minutes or so.
This sensation then progressed in January or February to a buzzy, electric shock sort of sensation mixed with a feeling of the bones in my foot kind of sliding against each other with each stride. Again, this only seemed to happen for the first 30 minutes or so of each trail run, and would then fade away. I kind of just ignored it, figuring it was just something that needed to loosen up each time, since it wasn’t really hindering me from increasing my mileage as a built up in preparation for my 50K.
Then, things took a turn for the worse. About 10K into a planned 30K day in late March, I started to get a strange pain in the front of my ankle, along with that electric shock feel not easing off as it normally would have. I had to cut that day’s run short, and the issue persisted for a couple of weeks despite resting it (I.E. not running). When I thought it had eased off a couple of weeks later, I tried a short run again, but it immediately resurfaced.
Give it more time, I thought. So, I waited a couple more weeks, which brought me to May 1, when I had planned to attempt a 40K effort as part of the Run For Water / Envision Upstream Challenge fundraiser, completing 8 trips up and down the main access road at Ledgeview (McKee Peak). Despite having not run for the better part of 4 weeks, I decided to just give it a go and see what happened.
I turned up that morning with little expectation that I’d be able to complete the planned distance due to the ankle and foot issue, but to my surprise, it “wasn’t too bad”. I felt that familiar electric shock sensation for most of the first two hours, but the ankle pain wasn’t there, and the electric shock thing seemed to dissipate, with that specific line through my foot instead going completely numb. “At least it’s not hurting,” I foolishly said to myself and pushed on.
The rest of that day’s effort progressed pretty much as I expected, and the last few hours were a total sufferfest. EVERYTHING hurt, from my neck to my toes. My left foot definitely felt more beat up than my right, but in the grand symphony of pain I was experiencing as I pushed through those last few summits of McKee, it didn’t really stand out.
After the first couple of days of recovery, as the muscle soreness started to ease off, I realized something was really wrong with my foot. While I could bear weight on it OK, there was a very focused area of pain midfoot that got quite a bit worse the more I stood on it, and any amount of walking caused it to really ache and throb badly. I began to suspect a stress fracture in the region of the cuboid bone in my foot.
Foot issues aside, I’ve also had some nagging hip / SI joint / low back pain since the 40K, suffered periodic tension headaches (likely due to stress), and periodic digestive issues (again, most likely due to stress).
As more time has progressed and things haven’t gotten better, my headspace has continued to get worse and worse. The fact that there is still a lot of uncertainty whether my planned Spartan Trifecta Weekend in mid-July is going ahead hasn’t helped either.
With the injuries meaning that I haven’t been able to do the things that I enjoy when it comes to training, I have ended up also really struggling to stay on track when it comes to THIS journey, and my eating over the last week in particular has been really inconsistent.
All these things combined have made me feel like a bit of a failure as a leader for our community of members at The BTG, but I have to remind myself (as I always say to my coaching clients) that shit happens, and it’s not about perfection or outcomes, but how you approach the process and the journey that matters.
Where I’m At Now - What’s It All For?
I’ve made the difficult decision to indefinitely postpone my 50K attempt rather than risk exacerbating my current injuries. That, combined with the likelihood that my 2021 Spartan Race season will be going the way of my 2020 season (I.E. I may not be racing at all), has gotten me to a point where I’m questioning the purpose of my training and my current fitness journey, generally.
Everything has kind of come to a head, and now I need to find a way forward.
I can’t rely on the stress relief I was getting from my time on the trails, the energy boost I would usually get from the normal small group / semi-private training vibe at The BTG (since we’re currently limited to one-on-one training), or the driving motivators of prepping for either my 50K attempt or the Spartan Race season.
I’ve really tried to resist my age-old pattern of using food and alcohol to make me feel better, and I’ve kind of half succeeded with that. The fact that my stomach is really rebelling when I indulge in some “off-plan” things is actually working in my favour at least!
My body just feels better when I’m eating the things I should be eating, so I’m going to really try to get back there over this next week. I’m going to be a bit less regimented about it, and just focus on lots of lean proteins and veggies, with small amounts of starchy carbs and healthy fats to round things out. I’m also re-committing to no alcohol or other calorie-containing beverages from now until my 47th birthday in August, with the exception of my 19th wedding anniversary next month.
I’m going to make a real effort to spend some time on meditation and gratitude over the next while to try and help put things in perspective. I’m the classic “Fidgety Skeptic” that Dan Harris talks about in his excellent books “10% Happier” and “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics”, so this will be a real stretch for me, but it’s time I do SOMETHING on this end of things instead of trying to just brute force my way through with intense workouts and testing myself physically as a way of avoiding the introspection.
I have some great resources available to me as a PN coach, and some that have been shared by some members of The BTG community that I’m going to make use of to help with my mindset as well.
On the training side of things, I literally have no choice right now but to focus on the things I kind of suck at and on mobility/rehab stuff to deal with my foot and back issues, because I am not capable of doing the things I enjoy / am good at without pain in my current state, and my body has signaled me in not-so-subtle ways that it will no longer put up with me just pushing through it or ignoring the underlying issues.
If my Spartan Races end up going ahead, I’ll get myself and the team through them, but I have no illusions that I will be as well-prepared as I would like anymore. As a coach, I need to find a way to get my team back on track despite my current limitations, so I’m working on how I can re-spark that motivation and drive in them as well.
What it comes down to, ultimately, is that I need to start looking more at the big picture, and doing the things that will make me a better in the long term instead of just focusing on a series of shorter-term goals. I need to be a better husband, father, coach and just an all-around better human.
So, that’s where I’m at.
My intention is to resume journaling daily, but things may be a bit different. Rather than the pretty sterile body weight and food log it has predominantly been, it’s going to be more about how I’m dealing with the day-to-day stresses, and my journey on that side of things.