Your bodies number one job is to keep itself alive. (this is where you yell, “Thank you Captain Obvious!”)
As an athlete you ride the fine line between pushing your body to adapt and get stronger and pushing your body to freak out and get over protective. This happens often times when athletes get sick, injured, or are under-recovered while trying to maintain their ‘normal’ training habits.
I’ve been feeling flat for over a month now. Lack of concentration, increased fatigue (wait you’re passing out at 9pm again?)… I feel lazy and have a hard time motivating to train. This isn’t normal for me. I generally struggle with the opposite! Frustrated, I brought out all the old training logs, combed through numbers, data, how have you been feeling? blahblah. But nothing was different. I wasn’t training more than normal. I was left scratching my head, and teetering on terrified. How did I mess this up!?!?!
Panic was setting in. “Am I setting myself up for another horrible season?” “I can’t go through that again!” ”Body why do you hate me!?” It’s funny how the mind forgets the months of injury and sickness and dwells on the general disappointment. “Snap out of it crazy!”
…Then I got my blood results back. Anemic.
I suppose I shouldn’t be excited to hear the news. But Yes. I am excited that something is wrong. And yes. I am excited to get better. Because somehow knowing that I can do something (even if that something is taking those nasty dirty penny flavored pills every day) feels like good news.
So it might be September. And I might be in salvage mode already… but every day I’m going to get a little better. My crazy anemic gasping for air will stop. I won’t bonk every 20 minutes. Everything will stop feeling like resistance training.
It won’t be tomorrow. Or next week. ….I just guess it’s a good thing I like going up hill.
