Ironman, low-T, and Me

A few weeks ago, I'd returned from a particularly difficult bike ride, angry, tired, and upset that things had once again not gone well on a long workout in my leadup to Ironman California.  I followed that the next day with a run that I wound up wobbly legged at mile 15 and wound up walking home, and made the determination that I would go to my doctor and figure out if I had some lingering COVID issue following my bout with it back in July.  I fully expected to be told that I had signs of heart inflammation, and would need to rest in order to allow it to recover.  There was nothing else I was aware of that would cause this new thing to me, where I would suddenly fall apart in these long workouts.  My mood has been in the crapper recently, and I've been irritable and cranky, and I've had more difficulty sleeping than is normal, even for me.

Of course I bruised from the 
bloodraw for this!

The days that followed my doctor's appointment were annoying--the lab took a while to get any of the bloodwork back, and as it came in, everything looked normal.  It was both a relief and a little frustrating, since I didn't know what was causing this issue.  It was entirely possible this was just an effect of aging, and one that I was not prepared for.  My testosterone levels were the one test that took longer to get the results from, but once everything else had come back, I presumed there was no way there could be an issue with that--I'm not dealing with any of the typical male sexual side effects, and my body hair growth is such that, if you see me with my shirt off, you start to wonder how many generations ago it was that my ancestors learned to walk upright.

So, I took an honest assessment of where I'm at.  I'd started down the path of training and competing at the Ironman distance again primarily to help my mental state--exercise has always been a source of good feelings for me.  I also set up a long term goal to qualify for the Ironman World Championships, which is a stretch for me, but something that over the course of several years, might be reasonable.  My first task was to finish an Ironman for the first time in over a decade, and I thought, if things went really well, I might be in striking distance of my best time in the event.  After all, I'd lost 15 pounds over the pandemic, and running at any given speed felt easier than it did before...well, at least until I got to the long workouts.

I lost 15 pounds over the pandemic--this is not a detail I could ignore. I talked with my tri coach about all this, and we came to the conclusion that it was possibly due to a long term calorie deficit that I've been carrying.  For a while over the pandemic, I was on pyschotropic drugs that supressed my appetite, and I'd previously blamed the weight loss on that.  I've stopped taking adderall, but I remain on Wellbutrin, and it's possible that it's still contributing to a lack of appetite, so I sat down and made as realistic an assessment of my calorie intake compared to expenditure as I could.  I wrote down my typical meals, and chose some that looked representative of what I was actually consuming daily and weekly, and compared that to the amount that I was burning on a weekly basis.  I was roughly an average of 600-700 calories short per day.

In the middle of this reckoning, I got my testosterone level back, and it was low--specifically, free testosterone was below normal, and serum testosterone was near the border of being out of the normal range, but dangerously close to being low--it was 30% lower than my test from 2019.  My doctor's assessment was that it was low, and we would retest, and if it remained low, we could treat it.  He wasn't aware that supplemental testosterone is banned at every level of competition, even in this scenario--I wasn't even aware that, even in the case that you show a medical justification for supplementing testosterone, it is still prohibited.  Having gone through the process of Therapeutic Use Exemption for adderall in the past, I presumed there would be something similar in this case.  Let's scrape that right off the table--there isn't, and the only conditions that a TUE might be granted for basically amount to something that caused the complete destruction or removal of the testes.  The details are at:

https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/tue_physician_guidelines_male_hypogonadism_final_november_2021.pdf

When you sit back and think about this, it does make sense.  Low-T can be directly caused by extensive endurance training, and testosterone levels diminish naturally with age.  There really is no way to establish a fair level of testosterone to supplement to, in particular when doing so could provide ergogenic aid in training.  Essentially, if you can't keep the level up naturally and your competitors can, that's one of the things that sport and competition are about.  

I searched the topic of low testosterone on slowtwitch.com, and there were good things to understand, and some rather disturbing things that were there.  There was more than one example of justifying this banned supplementation...ie, "You're not going to get caught," or "So many other people are doing it."  Both of those statements might be true, but the reality is that supplemental testosterone amounts to cheating, and if I were to use it, any achievement that I might make would always be shrouded in the fact that I had cheated to do it--I'm not a cheater, and I never will be. We all know our sport isn't 100% clean, but that doesn't give anybody the right to do it.

My triathlon coach proposed the theory that I'm dealing with a syndrome known as RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport)--I am always amazed at how well she figures these things out, and how often she's right about them.  She has a lot of experience, and has also seen these things happen in athletes over the years.  Low-T is a symptom of RED-S, and the whole thing amounts to not being able to supply your body with enough energy (food and nutrition) to support the demands of training and competition.  I called this overtraining, which isn't quite right, since Overtraining Syndrome is another very specific condition, that I believe is more severe, and has different causes.

Eat Lots!

I have an appointment with a Sports Medicine doctor this week, and I'll see what he says.  Since getting my low-T result, I've taken a week off training, and then started up again at both a lower level of effort and shorter training loads, and I've bumped up how much I'm eating--similar to when I swam in high school and college, and I would eat until it hurt.  I'll start ramping up my training this week, since I'm sitting at this crossroads of "Do I compete at Ironman California in 5 weeks?"

I've predetermined that I will not do this race if it amounts to causing damage to my body--but what that means is a little debatable, since Ironman is hell.  In the best of circumstances, it takes a month to recover from one of these races.  I just need to know if it's going to be that normal level of hell, or if I'll be digging a hole that I can't climb out of.

I'm a work in progress--the future may include Ironman, or it may not.  At one extreme, I would continue as I have been and accept the low testosterone, and at the other, I would go back to my days as a sprint swimmer, and reestablish a substantial weightlifting routine.  I'm hoping to land somewhere in the middle--I haven't written off my goal of qualifying for the Ironman World Championships years down the road, but this is a wake-up call that I need to change some things to get there.  I see supplemental testosterone as an option of last resort, and if I can't raise my levels naturally and I have to bring the levels back up, I will stop competing entirely.  It's at that point that it would be a medical issue that has to be fixed as I grow older.  I really like competing though, so I know I'm going to find a way to do it naturally.

Coping with life during the pandemic

I ran across an article this past weekend that resonated with me, significantly. Disturbingly. It could have been me.

It begins with a discussion about a kid who was identified as gifted and talented at an early age, who would often correct his teachers when they wrong, and was an outsider among his peers, eventually leading him to struggles with mental health that ultimately resulted in his killing himself at the age of 21.

This past weekend, as I sat in the backyard with my pod, I tried to explain to my husband exactly how much of a nerd and geek I was as a kid, sitting at the freaks and geeks table at lunch, hair parted down the middle in junior high with braces and the worst acne I think I’ve ever seen on a child. It goes without saying that I was identified as gifted and talented very young, and was shuttled off (quite literally, in a short, yellow school bus) to a school that I wasn’t zoned for that actually had one of those programs, where I was further isolated from the general student body by being pulled out of class to attend regular classes for the gifted.  I would go on to achieve high standardized test scores, scoring a 720 on the math SAT when I was 12 years old, blasting past standard coursework in high school to the point that my parents were told I should skip the last 2 years of high school and go straight to college. Instead, I went to a boarding school with my lifelong friend who was going there for the swimming program.  As academically gifted as I was, she was equally as gifted in the water. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but doing this, which I definitely wanted to do, was the most important gift my parents ever gave me—they gave me two more years of being a kid.  More than that though, is that they likely saved my life in the process.

In therapy today, I was talking about this article, and wondering what it was that made me different than this kid who committed suicide at 21.  My path changed when I went away to finish high school.  I was suddenly in a mix of students that were at my level, and on a swim team where, while I was more like an outsider, I was accepted and there was very definitely camaraderie among myself and my teammates.  With 5 hours a day in the water, my therapist pointed out that this echoed the lifestyle of the hunter/gatherer phase of humanity—exposure to sunlight, time with my friends even if we were all face-down in the water for most of that time, and constant movement and exercise.  There really wasn’t depression in the hunter/gatherer days, and all of those things likely helped to cause that.

Swimming, in all likelihood, saved my life back then, just as being in a school with others like me saved my life.  It has been a common theme across time—I would quit swimming in college, come back to it, and quit again, never really achieving anything great in the sport—technically, I was a high school All American.  I qualified on a relay and, individually, barely missed cuts for junior nationals, by tenths of a second. I worked my ass off to get there, and it was likely the farthest my very limited talent in swimming could have taken me, but that wasn’t the real benefit of the sport.  The real benefit was all about how it calmed my mind.

This sort of thing happened time and time again over my life—I would get engrossed in my studies or in my career and eventually it would all fall apart, creating what seemed like the end of the world for me.  Eventually, I would find my way back to swimming, or now to triathlon, and it would help to calm my mind again.

That has come to a head during the pandemic.  I can’t swim—at least not the way I need to in order to calm my mind.  I could theoretically bike or run for the durations I need to in order to get there, but the big problem I have with that is the fact that training outdoors now comes with a constant focus of staying away from people. It’s the opposite of camaraderie.  It’s the opposite of calming your mind. Recalculating your path while on a run to avoid the possibility somebody might kill you by breathing to close to you does not calm your mind.

So, I’m on drugs.  A lot of them.  My previous psychiatrist didn’t know what the hell to do with me.  My current one seems to be better—I hope it stays that way.  I’ve already had the test of a drug I had a bad reaction to a couple of weeks ago, and I started a different one yesterday…she’s taking it in stride, and searching for the thing that gets my depression induced anxiety knocked down to the point that I can sleep again.  I slept well last night which I’m hoping is not an anomaly.

But I digress.  

I don’t think I’m special.  I don’t think that being identified as having high intelligence as a child makes me better than anyone else.  If anything, I think the opposite.  

I think that, at any given moment, there’s probably one of me in every grade in every high school in the country, and I think that as those kids become adults, there are thousands of them trying to navigate the world in ways that a lot of people take for granted. People don’t know what causes these issues—I would have to guess there’s some genetic abnormality that causes the cluster of symptoms including high intelligence, social awkwardness, an inability to process emotions correctly, hypersensitivity to sound…I’m sure there are more to add to that list.

I’m not a loner, though I wind up alone a lot of times.  During the pandemic, I’m cut off from my friends, as we all are.  I’m not doing well, like a lot of people.  I’d say that my specific personality issues make me uniquely incapable of coping with the pandemic, except that I don’t think I’m unique.  I think that talking on the phone is exhausting for me, and I think that Zoom and Facetime are only marginally better.  I don’t interpret social cues correctly unless they’re visual, and being physically cut off from people only makes that worse.  My therapist said something about investigations related to human-horse heart coupling where horses are able to detect the heart rhythms of humans, as a demonstration of the effect of physical closeness in connection with other people.  I don’t really understand what that is except on a very basic level, but being physically close to people is gone, so that benefit is gone for me too.

I think that parents probably know that their smart children may not be doing well emotionally, but I think it goes way deeper than just getting them back into class together.  I hope we all make it, to whatever this new normal is going to be, and I hope we’ll all discard our preconceived notions of what it means to be…well, anything, really.  But I hope we’ll all shed our tendency to categorize people by whatever we perceive their traits to be.

My triathlon coach, well before we had any idea how long this would last, told us that our only goal should be to get through this pandemic alive. If there’s one piece of advice I’ve been given that’s the most apropos, that’s it. I’ve been barely succeeding at achieving that goal, but all I need to do is to keep barely succeeding until we get past it.

Link to the article I mentioned: 

https://calgaryherald.com/life/swerve/gifted-children-are-frequently-misunderstood

The new normal

Sunday was the first day in a very long time that I didn't have an overwhelming desire to end my life. I'm not feeling quite as good today, but that's ok. I'm improving, at least I hope, in a long term sense.

I'm not looking for sympathy, and I'm not looking for anything in the way of giving me your thoughts and prayers. In reality, if anyone says anything to me in the genre of their "most heartfelt thoughts and prayers," I'm much more likely to tell them to go fuck themselves than to express gratitude. As it turns out, they're not the reason I'm depressed, and they're not the reason that I have felt like there is no point to life anymore. It's better to saying nothing to a depressed person than to recite an empty platitude. That's not to say that people who express true concern aren't welcome, as well as incredibly important. A friend of mine called me on Friday as I was dealing with a lot of this stuff--she's amazing. I lost touch with her at one point many years ago, but we reconnected a while back, and I hope I never lose touch with her again--she helped me to feel a little bit better and I'm very thankful for that.

The simple fact, though, is that none of any of what has been going on this year is normal, and it does a disservice to the whole world to pretend it is. I've sat through meetings at work with people in management spouting off how it's going to be so much better when we're back together in our physical offices (a return was said to be in October in this one specific instance), and I've rolled my eyes so far into the back of my head, I'm not entirely sure how they came back. I started working from home full time when everyone else did in March. We were so naive at that point. We all thought this would be a thing that would be a couple of weeks, or maybe a month, and then it would pass and we'd be back to normal lives. We worked in suboptimal conditions--perhaps my setup was better than most since I'd already been working remotely once or twice a week, but it wasn't ideal. I threw my back out from sitting too much. I ordered a fully motorized sit/stand desk, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, damaged, but usable. The replacement is supposed to get here this week. I started working on actually creating a usable office space, and all of those parts and pieces of furniture will probably arrive before the end of the month. If we had known better at the start of the pandemic, I would have set these things in motion sooner, but we kept living in the belief that there would be a miracle, that social distancing and masking would arrest the spread of COVID-19, and that we would go back to normal. There was talk of a new normal...there seems to always be talk of a new normal. Maybe there would have been a new normal if the United States had actually locked down, masked, and socially distanced, but that's an argument for countless threads on Facebook.

At what would turn out to be my last appointment with the psychiatrist I've had for the last few years, she suggested the possibility of electroconvulsive therapy, which might be warranted, or it might not be--I don't really know. What that conversation did do is it was the proverbial straw that broke my back. I've been dealing with a series of issues at work that made my daily life hell, and all of that was wearing on me. It was all eerily similar, though not identical, to the same set of issues that caused my crash a year and a half ago. In the few days that followed that, you could say I spiralled downward, you could say I crashed, you could say I snapped. The only clear thing that came out of it was that my mental health issues had become so severe that I decided I would be better off unemployed and broke than wired up to a machine that would literally fry my brain with electricity in the hopes that it would reset the processes responsible for mood and maybe not cause too many side effects. The procedure for ECT has evolved quite substantially over the years, and the incidence of severe side effects are much lower than they once were, but that doesn't change the fact that by doing something like this, you're entering into an unknown and it's an unknown that can't really be undone.

I had an appointment with my therapist, and he suggested that I should go out of work on leave for a couple of months, to give me time to recover. He also suggested that my psychiatrist be the one to actually put me on leave, presumably because that might be more prudent than to have a psychologist do the same thing. I'm not really sure about that, but she took me out of work last year, so it made sense to me. I called her, left a message with her office and dropped off the paperwork to start the leave process, but what happened next was utterly and completely unexpected.

She called, and was angry. She spent what might have been twenty minutes scolding me over the phone. She made it evident that she didn't remember the details of the alterations to what she had prescribed me over the past year, which isn't too surprising since she probably has more patients than it would be feasible to remember. The bigger problem was that she also made it obvious that she hadn't reviewed her notes prior to calling me, and as she dug through them while I was on the phone with her, that she hadn't even recorded my history correctly. I'm not at the top of my game right now--my thought process is clearly running slower than normal. I tried to respond. I tried to figure out what she wanted to do to treat me better, to fix this problem. She got it in her head that I was against psychotropic drugs, and she was not going to let me change that opinion of hers. I haven't had any bad side effects to adderall, and I've remained on that, but she made it very clear that increasing that drug would not help my depression, and then went off on this tangent that she apparently believed that I demanded to get off of my antidepressant against her advice. The reality is that she supported my gradual taper off of wellbutrin earlier this year, and also when I stopped it entirely. In retrospect, that phone conversation should have begun and ended with a statement something like "It was a mistake to get off Wellbutrin, let's put you back on that." Instead, she spouted off that I should double my dose of adderall, taking me up to the daily maximum, and wouldn't respond about why that was directly contradictory to what she just said. She seemed to have forgotten that she said I should be on antidepressant, so I asked about that. She hesitated. She was angry. I still don't understand why, but eventually told me to resume a low dose of wellbutrin. I hung up the phone and didn't know what to make of all of this.

The next day, it settled in how fucked up that encounter actually was. Wildly inappropriate? Yes. Unethical? Perhaps. Rude and unsettling? Without a doubt. The only thing that made sense to me was that she no longer wants to treat me as a patient, and instead of just saying that, she concocted this story of me being a non-compliant patient. Going forward, her attitude basically said that she wasn't going to try anymore, and I came to the conclusion that any treatment I got from her would never again be what is best for me as a patient. It would never be her expertise in the field that she works in guiding her decisions with information provided to her by me about how I'm doing to help her make those decisions. She actually screamed at me "What do you want to do?" at one point on the phone, in relation to trying to determine what drugs are working and what drugs are not.

I effectively fired her. I asked her office to pair me with another psychiatrist, and I don't yet have a new doctor as a result of that, but having a bad psychiatrist is often worse than having no psychiatrist at all. In the meantime, I've tried to piece together this whole mess, and I've decided that I won't bump up the adderall--she contradicted herself, and anything that came out of that phone call has to be treated as suspicious. I happen to know that adderall in high doses can actually exacerbate or even cause depression, which is not a risk I want to take. I will have to work that out with my new psychiatrist, whoever that is and whenever I can get in to see them, which is weeks away, if not months. Hopefully, I will find a way to bridge that gap, however long it may be due to increasing demand in the field of mental health these days.

None of this is a "new normal" and nobody should be in the position that I'm in. This isn't about accepting the reality of the pandemic--this is about not being able to cope with my life in the context of the pandemic. The idea that we can all suddenly start working from home and be locked down with minimal interaction with others and not have it impact the quality of our work, the timeliness of our work, or the severity of difficulty we have in dealing with opposition is laughable. The idea that society can somehow go on normally without normal support structures in place, and without normal activities is preposterous. We all need to admit that this is just fucking abnormal.

Your kids may be unhappy about having to learn remotely, and I'm sorry. I know it sucks. They may hate it, and they may start crying, or they may have a temper tantrum about it. Let them. They need to express their emotions, and so do you. No one wants to be where I'm at right now, so talk about it, and learn what the signs are for a more serious problem, and please get professional help if needed. If it does get bad, earlier treatment is better than allowing whatever those issues are to pile up--you don't want to snap, and you don't want to be on a downward spiral.

My marriage, my work, and my friendships are all suffering now, and I'm sorry. I can only hope that people can find a way to forgive me.

My life as a scientist

We're at a rather strange place in American society--I don't need to belabor recent current events, but the idea that any of us can be in the kind of physical shape we have been in the past has fallen by the wayside in the midst of this pandemic, as it should.  The primary goal everyone should have at this point is getting through the pandemic as safe and as healthy as they possibly can.  So, my blog post today isn't about triathlon or exercise--I'm out of shape, but I'm doing what I can to limit how out of shape I am.  Today, however, I'm writing about the pandemic.

I watch what's happening and live through what's happening with my own unique perspective of this time, out of what must be countless unique perspectives from everyone else in the world.  I think we all have something valuable to add to this discussion. I'm a scientist. I live almost exactly on the border between a very liberally-biased LA County and a very conservatively-biased Orange County, in the middle of what is one of several hot spots of this pandemic in our nation.

I had a discussion this week that centered around the concept that the ideals that precipitated the birth of our nation are potentially going to be the things that cause the unraveling of our nation.  We were born a nation of people that fled from an oppressive government.  Our constitution contains wording that is meant to keep that kind of oppression in check, even if it is imperfect in preventing it entirely. We are a nation of citizens that is taught to question authority, in particular when that authority creates a situation that puts our freedoms at risk.

When looked at it in this context, it's fairly easy to see how a story that COVID-19 is a hoax gained a foothold, and the way our local and state governments are reacting to it is rooted in oppression and governmental overreach, and that became an accepted storyline for people to advance.  They were trained to question heavy handed edicts from government.  They were trained to stand up and voice their opinions when their freedoms were being taken away.  They were trained to scream bloody murder when what went along with the government's actions resulted in taking away their livelihoods. They were trained to think for themselves, and that is not a bad thing.

From when I was very young, I gravitated towards math and science, and ultimately spent my formal education in aerospace engineering, and went on to spend 20+ years (and counting) of my career working as an astrodynamicist.  I spent my younger years learning about the scientific method, studying what giants who had come before me had discovered, and enthralled by the knowledge of the universe.  While my degrees are not in virology, or public health, or any form of medicine for that matter, one of the things that binds the scientific community together is a deep respect for how the process works across all of our fields.

We all learned early on that nothing is certain.  The great truths are things that are theories, and those theories evolve over time, when more evidence is discovered that either bolsters the theory or casts doubt on it.  That great story that we all learned about Sir Isaac Newton sitting under the apple tree and discovering gravity led to an entire branch of science referred to as Newtonian Physics.  Years later when we got a little older in school, we learned about Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, and how that theory actually pokes holes in Newton's work, but only for specific scenarios.  The great revelation you're supposed to have when learning this is not about the details of either Newton's work on gravity or Einstein's work on relativity, but how even theories that are well accepted and assumed to be facts of the universe may have to evolve.  There's no shame in that.  Nobody discredits Newton for not discovering what Einstein did.  It was simply more information.  We know that modifications to Newtonian physics have to be made when objects approach the speed of light, but Newton's equations are still very much in use for everyday scenarios.  If you need to predict the path of Mercury around the sun, relativity matters because Mercury is going really damn fast.  If you want to predict the path of Earth around the Sun, it doesn't really, so Newton's laws apply.  It's just a modification to a really robust theory.

I grabbed a few texts for reference while
working from home during lockdown.  They
really don't have any relevance to this post, but
 the book by Prussing and Conway has a really
cool word in it:  syzygy.  Look it up, use it at
brunch, if we can ever go to brunch again.

In this process of becoming a scientist, you read...a lot.  Over time, you become comfortable with never knowing for sure.  You learn that the most important thing you can do is to never have a preconceived conclusion that you're looking for evidence to support.  You learn to treat all of the evidence equally.  You learn to revise your conclusions based on the evidence, and you learn to accept it if you thought you were right but you weren't, because it isn't about who's right and who's wrong. It's about finding the solution, and there is no greater impediment to a solution than an arrogant scientist who can never be wrong.

Over the course of a lifetime, you also become skilled at reading and understanding work you are unfamiliar with, and applying what you do know to the context of those topics. My topic-specific knowledge of what's important about the Earth's geopotential for determining the path of satellites really doesn't apply to the pandemic, just as my doctor's topic-specific knowledge of how my kidneys function doesn't apply to me writing software for my job.  But members of either of those professions would certainly be adept at determining what's important in studying a problem.  They can certainly tell when things are flawed, when scientists created a study with an invalid set of assumptions, or when ideas are just ideas, and they are not bolstered by evidence.

As scientists, we're all comfortable with the idea that things have to change as you learn more about them.  Perhaps that's why the evolving guidance on face coverings for limiting disease transmission doesn't seem at all shocking to us.  Scientists sometimes get things wrong, and sometimes they get things just not quite right, which is what is happening with these face coverings. At the start of the pandemic, the general public believed that if you didn't wear a face covering at all times, you would most certainly encounter the virus that causes COVID-19 and be infected by it.  But the guidelines that were issued were that masks were not effective at preventing you from getting infected, unless the mask has a highly effective filter (an N95).  As time went on, this guidance altered to reflect the situation at the time and the growing body of knowledge on the topic, which is that in geographic regions that face coverings were required to be worn at all times had lower incidences of viral spread, and were more successful at arresting their outbreaks.  The guidelines in the United States changed from no recommendation for a mask to a recommendation to wear one.  However, with a cloth face mask, air leaks out of the edges toward your ears and toward your eyes and nose.  Anyone who puts one on knows immediately that all of the air they're breathing outward does not pass through this mask.  They also know that all of the air they're breathing in doesn't pass through it.  "Mask Deniers" latch on to these things as "proof" that masks don't work.

It would be really easy to say that:  "Masks don't work. I breathed in air and it didn't go through the mask.  Next."  But that's not at all where this story ends.

The problem is that what it takes to be infected by a virus is much more complicated than having to inhale one copy of that virus. Because of the way the human body works (because of things that are way the fuck over my head), it takes a certain amount of virus to infect someone, and that amount of virus has to enter the individual within a certain amount of time for it to accumulate enough to infect a single cell, and then enough to cause a person to be infected.  Mask wearing doesn't prevent all the virus from reaching you.  It reduces it, and based on the science and the observations, it reduces it enough to prevent a lot of infections. 

Masks reduce the amount of virus reaching a healthy individual by a number of mechanisms starting with a very straightforward, "This spitty-talking person no longer has a path that his saliva can directly enter my mouth when he's talking to me."  Additionally, masks on infected people reduce the amount of droplets they project when exhaling, causing them to either be caught by the mask, or simply drop to the ground more quickly because their velocity is reduced by the mask. Most significantly, it is now believed that the primary mechanism of transmission for COVID is through inhaled aerosolized particles, which are simply smaller droplets that float in the air longer.  When an infected person wears a mask, the barrier causes the air to collect at their face for a longer period of time and more of those droplets fall out of the air rather than being spewed into the air an uninfected person might breathe.  Aerosolized particles still happen--they just happen less.  Masks on uninfected people reduce their chances of becoming infected, but they are far from perfect.  Because of aerosolized virus, and the fact that the masks are not effective at removing aerosolized virus as you breath it in, spending time in an enclosed room with an infected person may result in an infection, regardless of whether those peoples are using masks.  Give it enough time, with two people breathing the same air, and eventually the uninfected person is going to inhale enough of the aerosolized partices that were not trapped in the infected persons mask.  This is why being outdoors is preferable--the aerosolized virus can't build up, but inside, there isn't ventilation to change out this air, at least not anything near the ventilation that occurs from being outdoors with even the slightest breeze.

Wear a mask.  Have fun with it.
Make a statement.

I've gotten used to modifying my understanding over time, and adapting it to new information.  I can completely understand how people might get really pissed off over the changing mask recommendations from the government and simply declare that this is a bullshit governmental overreach that's forcing them to do something that doesn't work.

However, it does work, and you should do it.  It's just that the science about masks evolved based on the fact that countries like China, Germany, and many other nations that required them early on successfully reversed their outbreaks.  Scientists didn't blindly accept these things and push them forward.  They understood the mechanisms that leaky cloth masks actually do remove virus from the air, and the real world results in those countries back up the understanding of those mechanisms.

I'd like to understand why people are so against this simple step, but at the same time, I get it that when people scream at me, "The virus is a hoax," that they're saying something much larger than calling a disease a hoax--they're saying they're fed up to the point that they won't entertain the possiility of a modification to their belief.

That's the real problem that we have.  People need to seek to understand.  I do it every day.  I believe our experts--our virologists, our epidemiologists, our frontline health care workers.  I'm sorry, but I do not believe the mask-denying guy the other day who said "The virus faithful are strong in their conviction" and "Throw away your mask and live life."  These are the words that immediately put you into the bucket of "conspiracy theorist" and "science denier."  Don't be that person.

Though, if you can back those words up with facts and data, as well as a valid theory, my ears and eyes are wide open.

Hugs

It's now been over 12 weeks since I spiked a fever and then spent 2 weeks laid up in bed hacking up all sorts of crap until my lungs finally cleared. I returned to work for 3 hours before I got sent home to work from there until the danger of this pandemic subsided.

I'm not dealing with it well.

There is no doubt in my mind that I've lost all sense of what it means to be human, and what it means to live your life.  We all knew that this was going to be inconvenient.  We knew that there were going to be sacrifices that would make life more difficult for a period of time.

What we didn't know was exactly how nebulous that timeframe would be.  Let's face it--after a couple of weeks of writhing in agony while dealing with a fever, working from home for a couple of weeks, or even a month or two was a welcome change.  Now, that time has turned into an eternity with no firm end date in sight.  That's probably the hardest part of this to deal with.

The other hard part is that there is no joy.

My days have turned into a series of chores that bring me no joy.  I wake up.  I eat, not because I enjoy eating, but because I know that if I don't eat, I'm going to be distracted and tired, and even more run down than if I do eat.  I've tried working out in the morning before work.  I've tried working out at lunch.  I've tried working out in the evening.

I just don't fucking care anymore.

It brings me no joy.  With the city pools closed down, I've tried swimming in open water.  It is not the same, even once I got past the fact that I can't see my fingers in the murky water here.  It simply doesn't bring the same feelings of solace that a well done workout in a pool does.  Maybe it's the constant fear of death.  Maybe it's the constant fear of sewage in the water, or the fish, or just drowning for no good reason.  Maybe it's the constant fear that I'm not far enough away from whoever is next to me, or in front or behind me.  Maybe it's the fear that I'm going to die and nobody's going to give a crap.

Maybe it's my job.

I can't really talk about my job here.  Whatever.  You probably don't need those details to conclude that it's my job.

I miss hugs.

Maybe it's the lack of hugs.  It's the lack of close contact.  Zoom calls are frustrating, but necessary.  I'm uncomfortable staring at people on a screen, so I look away a lot.  I miss out on any of the body language that might be present there.  It's just gone.  Zoom calls are to friendships what porn is to romantic relationships.

I am simply empty, in need of a hug.

IGLA 2020 in Melbourne is here!

Just my travel companion reminding me to pack my swim stuff

I haven’t been writing very much. On some level, the heavy dosages of drugs I was on to fix myself following last year’s breakdown and deal with the stresses of returning to work when I hadn’t quite recovered, seemed to have killed off any sort of creative capability I might have had, and anytime I sat down to write would turn into this horrible, mechanically dry, SAT-passage-like event. Would you like a multiple choice question following this paragraph, complete with answers that make you wonder what the hell you just read?

Bondi Beach and the path are beautful.  Go there.

I’m off on an amazing vacation now, coupled with a swim meet in Melbourne. IGLA is here in February for a summer down under, and I’m looking forward to getting up and competing again, and having a little fun doing some races. It’s a hard time of year to be in shape, since it comes on the heels of the holiday break, in the middle of an upturn in work at my job, and at a time when I felt like I needed a little change from the long distance work I’d been doing, and I will be doing (a lot of) in preparation for multi-sport worlds in September this year.

So I entered the sprints, which is a bit of a double-edged sword for me. Previously in my life as a masters swimmer, I have steered away from any and all things having to do with the events I’m swimming this weekend. The risk of comparison to my former self as a swimmer in high school and college was too great, but I think I’ve gotten past that. It’s too easy to think about what my best times were back then, and be disappointed about the large chasm of difference between that and what I’m capable of now, but the reward for getting past that bit of “stuck-in-my-headness” is so much more important. I can’t swim a hundred fly for crap anymore, and that’s ok. Maybe it’s because of the multiple abdominal surgeries I had a decade ago—maybe it’s because the focus on my training has been about very long events, taking hours instead of minutes—maybe it’s because I just don’t have the time to put the hours in the pool that I once did—or maybe none of that matters.

Loved the Opera House salt and pepper shakers!

I’ve joked about how, since I’m not in very good shape right now, I entered the sprints because “If things are going badly, at least they’re only going to go badly for a short period of time.” I suppose that’s not even what it’s about. It’s about separating performance from satisfaction. I can get up, swim hard and have fun, and it doesn’t matter what the clock says, or what the place says, as long as I can enjoy the day.

I often wish I were better at doing this, at soaking in the moments of life for what they are, as opposed to what the preprogrammed agenda says they should be. It doesn’t stop here. It doesn’t stop when I get done with this meet that I’m now swimming off events that were previously best events. It’s the same thing when I get in to the 6 hour bike rides I will be doing to get ready for worlds in the fall. It’s the same thing when I’m buried in a quagmire of engineering hell to fix one problem after another at work. It’s all about letting myself love what I’m doing just because. It’s about letting myself love myself.

My Next Journey

It was really early when I had to get to the race-site Sunday morning

It's been not quite 8 years since the last time I did an Ironman triathlon, and I find myself sitting on a plane right now, flying across the country having done what I intended to do last year, which was to compete at USAT nationals in the Aquabike Half Iron distance event, and hopefully qualify for what would have been this year's world championships. This year, I did just that, and I'm now left in the position of deciding what I want to do about it.

There's a lot of reasons behind my quest here, but we all know what it comes down to.  If you qualify, you get to represent Team USA, and get to buy (yes, buy...nothing is provided for you at this level) one of those cool as hell triathlon kits for Team USA with your last name printed across it.

Just kidding. It may be a little bit about that, but it's about so much more.

I've had a difficult year--anyone who knows me is aware of that. A year ago, I wound up coming down with a rare reactivation of Epstein Barr virus (that thing that's responsible for mono in most teenagers and young adults). Yep, I was one of the lucky ones--I got to experience that twice. But I won't belabor the point--it was easier the second time around, and I already blogged all about that mess.  I withdrew from last year's nationals and entered the race for this year, feeling that it was too much of a risk to put my body through a 56 mile ride in the condition I was in.

That was followed by the usual holiday stress--you know how it never seems to be the panacea for weariness that you'd like time off work to be, by leaving you fresh and recharged for the coming year? Well, it was as expected.

The beginning of this year saw my work life becoming increasing stressful. I was training for a century ride in Palm Springs, and then I wound up with a case of cellulitis that we never really figured out what the cause was, although I joked about how I'd been bitten by a tarantula. In retrospect, I shouldn't have joked about being bitten by a spider. That leg infection took a couple of weeks to recover from, and I wound up riding a 50 miler with a couple of friends at the event I was going to instead of the century.

Bike reassembled and ready to race

A series of complications in both my work and my personal life led to what I've casually called my nervous breakdown (blogged about ad nauseam), which took me 4 months to get back to work. I recovered physically first, and eventually grew back into all of my normal mental faculties--I'm pretty much just left with the scars of "I am not putting myself in a position for that to happen again."

I'm still a mess--I'm always a mess--but I've always been a mess.  I'm not worried about being a mess.

I threw my back out somewhere around the 6 week mark of being back at work, knocking me out for a few days until I could be mobile again, and shortly thereafter really got bitten by a spider. That thing left a hole in my arm during the first week, but has since healed up very nicely.

Through all of this, I've managed to maintain enough fitness that I still have the occasional workout that makes me think I can actually ride a bike, and that I can actually swim.  I haven't been running much, so let's just not talk about running.

I was talking with a friend last weekend, and talking about how I have difficulty sleeping, and how during the month of September, my psychiatrist switched up one of my drugs on me and caused a month long period of massive sleep deprivation.  I really wanted to believe I could switch off this drug.  I still want to do that, but it needs to happen in a more controlled fashion.  My psychiatrist very rightfully lectured me for not getting a hold of her sooner.  Anyway, I was telling my friend how I've always had difficulty sleeping, except for periods in my life when I've been in some sort of heavy training, and I joked about how nobody pays you to train for 5 hours a day.  It's possible that my formative years spent face down in a pool twice a day set my body up to the point where it needs that level of activity to balance itself. It's also possible that extreme exercise is just my form of self medication.

The race in Miami went well, though it was far from perfect.  The water was hot, and the swim was overcrowded.  I went my slowest half iron swim split, probably, in all of my time competing.  The official measurement was 83 degrees, though it felt like swimming in a bathtub.  I don't do well in warm water, and every stroke felt like effort.  Multiple times I swam around people, sometimes being surprised by a sudden run into someone, and multiple times, as I swam around people, I was climbed on, as if the person I was passing sought to gain something by stroking repeatedly on top of me. It screwed up my body position, and couldn't have helped them. I only had to kick forcefully once to let someone know that if he/she was going to draft, to just stay the hell off my legs.

The bike course was flat, and had a number of sharp 90 degree turns.  I think there was a bridge with a minor 5 foot climb at some point, but this race is the race by which flat courses should be defined.  The wind was dead in the morning, for about the first two hours or so of the ride.  I was averaging wattage at what my best half iron split was and figured I'd be coming in around the 2:38 mark for my bike split, as I passed the 30 and 40 mile marks. Then the wind hit, and it hit with a vengeance. It was as if Mother Nature swooped in and said, "Ha! Triathletes...I'm gonna knock you all back by 5 minutes over the last ten miles."  Oh--did I mention the humidity?  I put down 5 bottles of fluid during that ride and never needed to take a piss. The temperature may have cooled off that morning, but without evaporative cooling, a SoCal boy is going to have issues.

Emotional Support Bicycle ready for return trip home

I did what I set out to do, which was to grab one of the available slots for age group worlds next year.  I also beat the hell out of myself in the process of doing it--to say the least, my year of personal issues left me less than optimally trained, and I think I was at or slightly better than my best half iron bike split.  I'm paying for that today, with just general soreness, and specifically soreness in my spinal extensors (just think 'old man sore back' and that's about it.)

I'm left to wonder--am I doing this?  Do I want to do this?  Is it that I just was enamored with wanting to qualify for this team, or am I really interested in getting back into this sport in the way that I was when I set my best time in an Ironman?

I'm of two minds. I know that the stressors of work and my career will be at odds with the training schedule I will need to be on. I've been doing both my job and this sport for long enough to know what each of them take, so there is going to be conflict. On the other side, my four months of being out of work proved to me that the balance that I've been trying to maintain for some time isn't balanced correctly, and life is more important than work.  I need to find a way to strike a different balance, and find the door that lets me have that balance.

When it comes down to it, I qualified for a USA National Team, even if it is a masters-level age group team, and next year's race in Almere is exactly the sort of thing that quenches my soul.  Pursuing that may be more than a goal about a race.  It may be the thing that puts my mind back at peace, as it was before the breakdown, and before all the psychoactive drugs.

This was my view, lying on the ground after the bike was over, wondering if I'd be able to get back up again.  Pretty, huh?