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?

It's Okay not to be Okay--but private disability insurance is not okay. It needs help.

We all have our ups and downs. We have our difficulties dealing with the challenges of today. We wonder what it is that we might be doing wrong.  I think that's all normal, and it's something that we need to accept as the way that life is. There is, of course, the Hollywood fairytale, that elusive unicorn that is perpetuated by the idea that there are people out there that everything comes easily to, and they are just happy and running through their lives exactly how they want to all the time.  Maybe that person exists, or maybe that's just one of the archetypes that each of us might have some part buried in our souls.

I think the big issue is that this sets up a system where people who can't "keep on keeping on" for whatever amount of time are blamed for these problems when, in fact, these problems are the result of a conglomeration of issues, pulling in from their genetic inheritances, to their upbringing, to their random luck of the draw on any series of events that led them to where they are.

Until I went out on leave 2 months ago, I had been a consistent and contributing member of the industry that I entered out of college somewhere around 22 years ago. Some might call this a midlife crisis.  I might have called this me being too weak to handle my own problems. I might have told myself that if I just kept on working hard, I would get over this hump and my life would be better again.  I might have actually recognized the symptoms leading up to this mess, and addressed this with my managers (who were actually very concerned and very much willing to help me make things work).  I might have, with the help of my therapist and psychiatrist tried to implement some changes that would help me cope better but I was already past the event horizon. Those fixes will likely be the things that help me from having a recurrence in the future, but the changes were a classic case of too-little-too-late, and my brain simply broke that one horrible day.

What I have determined in the time since that day is that the systematic bias against mental health issues is alive and well in many aspects of the way the United States runs.  When I was out on a disability years ago following my appendectomy and then 2 successive hernias (I had to lie on the couch for a month to let my abdomen heal after tearing it twice), all it took was my surgeon's note to the insurance company and it was done.  When I was out for 4 weeks last year with that very odd recurrence of mono (reactivated Epstein-Barr), all that took was my doctor's form indicating the diagnosis and the blood test showing the blood markers of the acute phase of EBV. When I originally went out on this leave, the state of California treated this no differently than the physical disabilities I've previously had. It was the private insurance that proved difficult.  A six to eight page long form was included to establish "behavioral health markers," and my cognitive capabilites. I laughed hysterically when one of those methods was to have me count backwards from 100 by 7's.  What I couldn't do at the time was recall how to write an algorithm to compute a Jacobian for a multidimensional optimization problem I was working on, and how to maintain the multiple lines of simultaneous thought I needed to rapidly debug the code I had written to do it.  It's just possible that the idea that someone can capture 'cognitive incapacity' in the form of a questionnaire is fucking ludicrous.  I could always rise momentarily, when it was needed.  I just could not be me--I could not be my normal--highly goal aggressive, solution-finding, problem-solving self.  The physical symptoms peaked on that awful day. Low back pain (of a non-physical source), an inability to sleep, and problems with controlling my obsessive thought processes preceded that day for weeks, if not months, or even a year if I look back on how 2018 evolved for me.

Adding to the ridiculousness of this, the private insurer has required reinvestigation and renewal every 4 weeks through this period.  It was determined early on that my psychiatrist should be the one to submit the paperwork to put me on leave, which presented a unique set of problems.  She is a psychiatrist that accepts insurance in the Los Angeles area, which makes getting an appointment difficult at best.  She met with me on her lunch hour to accommodate these problems, but we have both remarked about how backwards this policy is.  The very people who need to be out lack the abilities that they need in order to navigate the horribly complex system.  My latest renewal was complicated by a miswording on the form that was submitted.  My psychiatrist determined that I am 30% recovered and "within the normal range."  The insurer interpreted "within the normal range" as me being able to go back to work because I was normal, setting off two weeks of confusing phone calls that eventually resulted in the approval of the next 4 week period.  This occurred while I was racing at IGLA, and put my mind back into the mess of corporate America when I should have been decompressing from it the most.  My compensation will lag due to this delay, but that's not a huge deal.  What is a huge deal is the fact that people in a similar position might simply give up, all because their provider meant "within the normal range of being recovered 30%" as opposed to "with the normal range" of fully functional.  She was incredibly apologetic, but it's not her fault--it's the way the system is set up.

You can see the giant disconnect here.  The process for the publicly funded state disability system is at odds with the private (I believe 'for-profit') disability insurance that covers my salary beyond the state upper bound.  I actually have no idea how that cost structure is created and the relationship between my company and that insurer--and I shouldn't have to.  The system is set up in a way that results in a significantly higher set of hurdles for the privatized industry than for the public industry.

The counterpoint is that some people abuse the system, requiring this sort of ongoing review.  The classic example is that someone wants to move out of their job and take a long break to "recover" before starting up again. It's a matter of time before that person finds a doctor willing to sign off on it, but the reality is that if that doctor is willing to sign off on the initial application, he/she is very likely to have no issue continuing with the 4 week review cycles. It appears the system is really in place to dissuade the people who need it most from using it--sometimes it is simply too hard to fight back.

Disability insurance policies vary. Mine puts a limit on long term coverage at 2 years for any mental health issue, unless the patient is confined to a hospital and unable to be in the real world.  All other disabilities may be covered to 65 years old, when public support becomes available (I think social security, medicare, and medicaid).  Therapists and psychiatrists do not want their patients in a mental facility, unless they are at risk of harm to themselves or others, and there are a number of ways they determine if that's the case. There were a number of times I was directly or indirectly asked about this.  There are likely exceptions to this philosophy--there may be times when immersion into a mental health facility is beneficial, but not in anything resembling my case.

This type of insurance policy is common, and is included as a "mental health limitation rider" in policies (https://www.policygenius.com/disability-insurance/disability-insurance-and-mental-illness/).  The very existence of such a rider carries an implication of bias against mental health issues.  Imagining the scenario where the condition that took me out of work this year continued for an extended period of time, I would be incapable of doing my current job, or anything similar to that level of intellectual capacity, but would only be able to be insured for a maximum of 2 years, at which point, I would be largely unemployable, and 47 years old.  It's possible I might find some other job requiring more physical labor, but at the deficit I was operating at a month ago, I'm not sure I would have ever come to that conclusion.

That's largely the problem with the way our society is set up with regard to these things.  A member of my extended family is out on a more permanent mental health disability.  From what I understand, there is some limited amount of public assistance for him, but let's face it, this type of assistance is more along the lines of barely surviving on welfare than coming anywhere near the standard of living required to live well in a place like the Los Angeles area.

I'm going to be ok.  But even so, It's okay not to be okay.  Stay strong, and ask for help.  I'll be there for you, as others have been for me.

IGLA 2019 and My Recovery

IGLA 2019 has wrapped up, and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and Gay Pride was celebrated yesterday. I loved spending time with old friends, meeting new friends, and getting back together with my swimming community. Hanging with the teams all united in a Team New York/IGLA pride parade group was so much fun (so much glitter, but so much fun).

The week before I left for New York, I had appointments with both my therapist and psychiatrist. I'm doing much better, though they both said that if I were to go back to work now, there's a very high likelihood that I would relapse, and it's just not a path I want to go down. The dark times spent dealing with both the physical effects of my breakdown and the time trapped alone in my thoughts are not my happiest memories of any time I have spent away from work.

I don't know if the physical recovery came first, or if the beginnings of the mental side of it did, but I have most of my faculties back. I can't really multitask yet, at least not in the way that I'm used to. I find myself often telling Brian that I'm not listening to him and to give me a minute. I'm sure that the technical side of my brain will pick that back up quickly enough.

I swam faster than I have in a very long time--not across the board. The 200 fly was an exercise in pain tolerance, and I swapped to survival fly at the 100. I was within a minute of my best long course time...I have so far to go! But that's not what it's about. It's about getting up and enjoying the challenge of the day, or the week, or the current season. The meet started with the 200IM for me, and I swam faster than I have in over a decade, pulling in my highest individual place for the meet with a 2nd place age group. The 200 fly is, well, it's always a crapshoot, but I had good improvement from my previous couple of times I swam it, holding my stroke together for the the first hundred. I swam the 400IM, which is a race I'm growing to love. Based on the technicality that I never swam short course meters in high school or college, it was a lifetime best performance--we will just forget about the fact that my previous best long course time was way faster than that.

The race was amazing and fun--I was in a race for 3rd during the last hundred, and my teammate, Dean, managed to pull ahead and grab that, outswimming both myself and Chad (who was actually gunning for a 50 fly record split at the beginning of this race). I gave it all I had, but simply could not power through hard enough to get ahead of either of them, but I loved it. The final day of racing at the pool brought me to the 800 free and the 400 free relay. The 800 falls in the same level of performance as my 400IM, though I was clearly showing signs of fatigue. I cruised through the first 400 with the intention of negative splitting, and then picked up the pace. By the time I reached the 600, it hurt too much to maintain the pace, but I did manage to hang on to out-touch the next guy in my age group.

It's always so much fun swimming the relays with my teammates. My earlier days as a sprinter stick with me to let me still perform ok there--I had the privilege of anchoring our age group's winning 400 free relay, and simply maintained a solid lead that everyone built up for me. It was so large of a lead that I made the snap decision to make sure Mike hit the wall before I took off--there was no reason to risk a false start. I managed a 3rd place in my age group in the open water swim on Saturday morning, waking up at 4:30 to have sufficient time to get there for check in. Coney Island is a long subway ride from Manhattan! But I had a couple Nathan's hot dogs (thanks, Kevin!) after the swim was over to get me a classic New York experience.




I leave IGLA with some great memories of my swimming family. There were certainly the bittersweet goodbyes, especially with people that you meet that you know you just click with. As I was reminded though, it is not goodbye, but "see you later."

A place called home

A shot from my 10k postal swim last year

For a very long portion of my life, I spent time finding solace in the water, chasing a little black line…up the pool…and down the pool.  It was peaceful, and gave me a sense of calm that I haven’t experienced from any other activity.

The occasional case of runner’s high has cropped up.  I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything similar while on a bike ride.  But the focus, the calm, the passage of time, when the rhythm of my stroke or the beating of my legs was the only real noise I could hear was always that the thing that separated me from myself.

There have been times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because everything else has gone to crap, and times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because it was a fun activity and the camaraderie around the sport was a win all in itself.  I cherish those times.  Some of the best friends I’ve had and still have are swimmers, whether they’re still in the water or not.  They’re still swimmers.

My life has fallen apart, a handful of times, perhaps just two or three over the course of my 45 years, on a level that it is at now.  This is the worst of the 2 or 3, my mind having betrayed me to the point where I can’t work, where I know that even though I have these momentary points in the day that I can put a few thoughts together, the idea of going an entire workday is preposterous.

I withdrew from school one semester when this happened, what would have been the semester I originally would have graduated.  I overloaded myself with all of the hours I needed to finish my degree during a summer session.  I would go on to return to school in the fall to limp my way to the finish line, taking a nearly perfect GPA, and knocking that down almost a tenth of a point, but still enough to graduate with honors. Truth be told, I walked across the stage at my graduation ceremony and was announced “with high honors,” but when my diploma arrived, it was the next echelon down.

I started working.  I broke up with the guy I moved to LA with, and I joined the West Hollywood masters team, to try to find a place in life.  I was lost. I was working what would be the job that I came back to, and am employed doing now, and I met some very nice people and I still see some of them these days—sometimes at a swim meet, sometimes at a training camp.  I was very guarded back then, and wouldn’t really let people become my close friends.

Me swimming with the Grunions one weekend earlier this year
(Thanks, Kenny Brisbin for taking this photo)

So I moved. I told myself I didn’t like the city of West Hollywood—it was too cruisy, not my scene and I couldn’t deal with having to look like I was “on” to go to the grocery store.  After I moved, I continued to try find solace in the masters team I swam with as I went from one apartment to the next on the west side of LA for the next couple of years. I didn’t. I didn’t let myself. I told myself I didn’t like SCAQ because it was so spread out, too much like Corporate America meets masters swimming. But the truth is that I didn’t get to know anyone. I don’t even think any of them knew I was gay. So I moved, and moved again, eventually landing in Long Beach, and eventually finding the Long Beach Grunions, who were just starting up at the time, and who I found friends with and where I found my happy place in the pool.

The Grunions have ebbed and flowed for me. Some wonder why a place like Long Beach needs a gay swim team because being gay in Long Beach is just accepted.  To be frank, a former collegiate swimmer who happens to be gay shows up in Long Beach, and there aren’t enough fast swimmers to keep him or her interested in it, and they wind up swimming somewhere else, maybe with the team I swim with during the week now, maybe not. They push me to levels that I don’t get with the Grunions, but the Grunions have given me so much over the years, and my weekday team is never going to travel to a meet like IGLA New York during the 50th anniversary of Gay Pride and the Stonewall Riots, so there’ s a feeling on the Grunions that I just don’t get from the other team.

But now, after I’ve fallen apart, I don’t know what to do, really, to put myself back together.  Sometimes I need to stare at that black line for meters upon meters upon meters, and sometimes I just need to hear the rhythm of my stroke. My brain needs to sort itself back out. It needs to find its way back home.

I'm just gonna need a minute

...and it might be a really long minute.  I might just need a whole bunch of minutes.

I'm recovering from what would have probably been previously diagnosed as a nervous breakdown, but that diagnosis doesn't actually exist in medicine anymore.  So, officially, it's major depression with generalized anxiety disorder.  Unlike what you might think of something like this from how these events are depicted in Hollywood, there was no dramatic moment when I was drooling on myself in a corner and then saved by an incredibly handsome hunk of a man who swept me off to somewhere that they seemingly fixed me overnight.  There was no magic pill that suddenly turned me from being at a diminished capacity right back to my former self, and there was no self help group that made me realize that my problems are nothing compared to some of the people that are there and that I'm totally fine.

There was, however, stigma.  I am thankful for the people who reached out to wish me well--many of them had no idea what I was going through, and so many of them are just concerned and want me to feel better.  They're all rock stars.  I never felt stigma about this from the people who know me personally, so I consider myself lucky.  The stigma is about how society treats these things in general, and I got hammered with that in the week or so following this just in dealing with getting the paperwork filed to get me out of work on disability.

I'm a proponent of being open about mental health issues in general to help decrease the stigma around them, so thank you, Allison Schmitt for advancing the credo "It's okay to not be okay."

My psychiatrist immediately got the paperwork out to California for state disability, and that's going slowly, as expected.  Her office does this on paper, rather than using the online system.  Her office also wrote up a one paragraph letter to my work that I looked at and laughed a little internally, knowing full well that a 40-plus page set of documents would be coming that I'd need to sort through and figure out what needed to be filled out by whom, and then get those things done.  What I didn't know was that there would also be a 4 page long behavioral health assessment that would be used to determine my eligibility for my company's short term disability insurance.  There was nothing like this needed when I was out previously for a recurrence of Epstein-Barr/mono.  In that case, it was my doctor's opinion that my physical symptoms made it such that I needed to be out of work to recover, and that was good enough.  My psychiatrist's opinion that I'm not capable of working and need to be out of work to recover does not seem to be good enough, even when coupled with the fact that I had three appointments with her inside of a week (mostly to deal with paperwork, because her appointments are 15 minutes long, and she won't do any of this paperwork without me being present), and I'm seeing a clinical psychologist weekly now. Somehow, a 4 page form that assesses my capabilities based on 'ridiculously-complex' details like "Count backwards from 100 by sevens" is deemed to be the critical factor in this process.

I'm just going to postulate that this set of forms does not accurately depict any individual's decline in mental capacity accurately--in particular when you're dealing with someone who nearly had to go to college 3 years early, and only avoided that due to his parents' overwhelming generosity and desire to keep him a kid as long as he could be--and paid a ridiculous amount of tuition to send him away to a private boarding school to make that happen. I'm forever indebted to them for that--I got to experience my final years in high school that I might not have ever had without their foresight.

The problems I'm having are things like not being able to maintain a train of thought long enough to write an algorithm to calculate a matrix of partial derivatives for an optimization problem I was working on.  And for some reason, it's more important that a four page form be filled out that attempts to assess mental issues than it is that my psychiatrist and psychologist have concluded that I need to be out to recover.  And to further complicate these issues, this form has to be reassessed every 4 weeks, potentially because there is apparently distrust in my doctors' trained and professional capabilities in determining when I will be ready to return to normal life.  I want to get back to work--I just want to do it in a way that minimizes my chances of relapse.

My therapist told me that there was noticeable 'motor retardation' at my last visit, but it was improving.  I'm having issues with insomnia still, but that's improving.  I'm on increased dosages of drugs to help with these things, and my psychiatrist wants to leave them where they're at to see how I stabilize over the next few weeks.  It takes me significantly longer to do things than it used to.  Like all day long to pay the bills rather than the hour or so it used to take me.

My therapist told me that writing will help me--I just looked at my blog and noticed I haven't posted anything for a very long time.  He also told me that going out and being social is critical. That working out will help--I'm doing well at getting in one workout a day, but not so well at the remainder of training I would like to be doing.  I'm trying to feed myself enough, and I managed to make a banana cream pie for my husband's birthday, though it took longer than I expected and barely set up before we dug into it at the end of the day.

I don't respond to conversation at a normal cadence and find myself searching for words I can't quite seem to remember, so sometimes, I just need a pause to keep going.  You know, like when I wanted to have lunch at that brothy, noodle place down the street...what was it...oh yeah...Pho. 

So sometimes, I just need an extra minute to keep going.  I'm eventually going to be okay, but for now it's okay to not be okay.