Stronger, Fitter, Faster

Stronger

Twelve years behind a desk does things to your body. For the first time in ten years I've started hitting a gym 3x a week but that doesn't mean I can muster too many pushups just yet.

Fitter

Lose a serious amount of weight. This is definitely key to making everything else work, so I'll be focusing on dropping pounds to get not only into a healthy range of BMI, but to also increase my endurance and fitness.

« September 2009 | Main

1 posts from December 2009

A post mortem

I've been meaning to post here more often all summer -- I wanted to say how coaching was going, I wanted to mention how my first races of the summer went, and I wanted to describe my new cross bike and how my very short (1 race) cross season went, but all of that sort of fell by the wayside when I found out I have a large brain tumor last month.

You can read the whole entry if you'd like details, but the long story short is the tumor explains a lot of my frustrations and struggles to be a better cyclist over the last couple years.

Two years ago I rolled off the couch, thought my 20 years of BMX skills would make me a good cyclocrosser and promptly rode myself into exhaustion on a muddy course in Hillsboro, where I placed three up from dead last in the beginner class (the other two DNF'd).

For 2008, I rode all spring and summer and even a bit of the fall, on the order of several thousand miles, and I was mid-pack beginner at best. That's when I decided to get really serious, hire a bike coach, and promptly started doing serious miles beginning in December of 2008.

I rode a lot of hard miles all winter and early spring, going from a measly 225 watt average for 20min of all out sprinting to 300 watts over 20min. I kept riding hard until about April, when real life intervened and by the time I raced in June at PIR's short track mtb series, I knew something had to be up. I came in something like 53rd out of 75 people in June 2009, and a year earlier my results were exactly the same. Internally I thought about this for weeks, why didn't I improve, why was I exhausted soon after the start?

Along with the non-improvement despite training, I was also on a weight loss crusade this year. Ever since I moved to Oregon in 2003, I've steadily gained 5-10lbs a year with no real explanation, and this year, as I lost ten, then twenty more pounds, to say it was a struggle was an understatement. Every night for four months I went to bed starving. I would spend my days eating half of what I normally eat, and then go out and ride 150 miles a week on top of that, and lose about a pound per week.

I couldn't tell if something was wrong with me or if this was just the new reality of being over 35 and getting old.

I've also been going to the gym steadily (2-3 hours per week with a trainer) for over a year and have shown almost no growth in muscle mass despite steadily increasing weights. Ten years ago I went to a gym 1-2 times a week for four months and had noticeably larger arms.

So in a way, the tumor was a blessing in disguise. From my first few rounds of blood testing I saw that my hormone levels were near zero across the board. Typical testosterone levels in men my age range from a low to high of 175-781 ng/dl. My first measurement was 37 ng/dl, or about 20% of the lowest end, and less than 5% of the high end of normal. All my other growth hormones are similarly low, to the point I've been diagnosed with Panhypopituitarism, or a lack of human growth hormones.

Since my diagnosis, I've begun a course of medication and my metabolism and sparked back up again (I lost ten lbs in the hospital as well, but I've gained a few back, still well below 200). I feel like I can control my weight with much less effort than before. I'm still feeling low energy but we haven't started a course of testosterone treatment yet. Another upside is that I'll basically be using every banned performance-enhancing substance in the coming months, though it will be just to take me up to normal, not to make me some superhuman cyclist.

Finally, as I've gotten this diagnosis, I've realized it's not about getting Stronger, Fitter, or Faster anymore, it's really about getting healthy again, spending time with my family, and riding for fun (and hopefully racing next summer). I'm facing more medication and testing over the next few months and possibly some brain surgery, then some recovery.

So with this post, I'm going to shelter this blog for now, as I've moved almost all my cycling-related posts to our bike team site at BuyLocalCycling.com. Thanks for reading.

Posted on December 7, 2009 in stories | Permalink | Comments (0)