Elite Weightlifter with Celiac

The Boston Globe reported a story about a weightlifting athlete with Celiac. I had a couple of thoughts about this interesting article. She keeps three meals prepared at all times. That really surprised me as an potentially effective way to keep thoughts about hunger at bay.

Another was that her parents pushed her into weightlifting at the age of 12, to help with her swimming. I don't recommend that. I think the chances that kids can overdo it and wreck some part of their body for good is just too high.

Finally, she mentioned that on a road trip she bought bottled water and gained a small amount of weight because there was too much sodium in it. Weightlifters hate extra weight because of their weight classes. That's a real "thinker," because sodium can be pretty useful preventing cramps - but weight can be a problem for athletes such as myself. I guess perhaps we just file this under "interesting, potentially useful."

Starving to Death

I had a couple of conversations this week that took me right back to where I was five years ago -- the week of my diagnosis with Celiac.

The first conversation was at Weight Watchers. I signed up for the core plan and was going through the whole spiel with the instructor. She was pointing to a continuum of hunger and saying "you need to stop eating before you are stuffed and not get so hungry that you get desperate."

In a flash - I remembered back to that desperate hunger when I came home for the first time and realized whole swaths of the pantry were off limits. I recall being determined I was never going to put that poison gluten back into my system. Hunger is powerful and I remember being confused and at a loss, hour after hour, meal after meal, about what was next and safe. I remember filling those gaps with marshmallows, nuts and coke -- just buying myself time so I could think straight until I could plan the next meal. The experience drained me then and just going back there drained me again. I was surprised at how powerful the effect of that memory on me was. After all - it was nearly five years ago.

Since then, over time I "got healthy" - but my weight drifted up. I think I have a lot of positive emotion associated with that weight gain. To me - the gain has coincided with my improvements in health. So the extra pounds represented being more muscular, healthier, recovering quicker, even a "safety margin" of fat in case I needed it.

Which brings me to my second conversation. I was talking to a person from my cycling class about Celiac. I told him how, pre-diagnosis, I would drink four cokes with my Beligan waffle w/ ice cream dinner, go for a run, then go out with my girlfriend for Texas pecan fudge pie a la mode and not gain weight. He asked me how that was possible, and I explained that my intestines were so destroyed by my autoimmune reaction to gluten that the food just passed through without being absorbed. Even though I was eating, I was literally starving to death.

And when I said that -- starving to death -- I received one of those lightning-flashes of clarity. It struck me that my self-preservation instinct really drove some powerful thoughts and emotions for me around food. It's absolutely silly to think that someone with my means could starve in an country with such ready access to food, but in that twisty, emotional world, not everything makes sense and not everything is logical. These feelings around food, driven by my self-preservation instinct, are some of the strongest emotions I cope with. At (blessedly infrequent) times they've made me snap, be less of a person than I should be and driven me to tears. I realized that it's taken me five years to get the emotional space to want to do something about it.

When I finished an Ironman, half Ironman and marathon in the space of four months, it exploded any idea or emotion I had in my mind that Celiac could hold me back physically any more. With nothing left to prove physically, I've been thinking that the next step in my training is to finally drop the weight. Based on the conversations this past week, I've found that this next step in my journey may be much more about my emotions and mindset than anything else.

Two days a week

I'm working out two days a week with a little stretching here and there - Wednesdays with the tri team at Bicycle World and Fitness and Saturdays with the training series. I'll just see how that goes. I've felt like adding some more cycling in-between, so I'm sure that's a good indicator that I'm getting over my workout burnout.

I've decided I'm going to start losing weight, too. I'm not sure how yet (or how much of that I want on my blog).

Training on track, weight stable

I "hit" all of my workouts this past week, although I must admit to a little skimping on Friday and Sunday (shorted my runs by about 10 minutes each). The thing I have to be the most excited about is the swimming. I've been adding about 100 meters of swimming every workout, taking it easy, and making sure I don't overstress anything. Last Thursday I hopped in the water, swam a thousand crawl stroke, and hopped out of the pool. Feeling pretty good on the way home, I reflected that it was probably one of the first times I swam crawl stroke that far, without mixing in some easy breast stroke yardage.

I did manage to skip the weight rebound problem, so I'm calling those seven pounds history. I've realized one of the ways to get faster is to just lose weight. I'm not sure how much of my energy level is correlated with eating sufficient calories to maintain my weight. Right now I'm thinking that if I lose a reasonable pound or two a week, I'm happy with the weight loss more than I'm sad about the loss of training efficiency.

My mood has been pretty good lately, too. Although, physically, I have to say all I really wanted to do yesterday evening was sit and watch the world go by. Of course, the cure for that is a good night's sleep, which I had.