Three years ago I felt great. My lactate threshold was at a reasonable 340 watts. Reasonable for an early 40's weekend warrior road cyclist who dabbled in mountain biking.
I get colds once every few years and very rarely get the flu or feel ill. I've had maybe three (guessing) headaches in my whole life. I guess I've been lucky.
Then three years ago I became extremely fatigued. I couldn't even do push ups. I had to sleep most days and constantly felt like I just finished an 8 hour enduro, which for me is a lot. I knew I hadn't overtrained and my nutrition was good.
So off to the sports med doc I went. Blood test results were concerning so I was sent to a haematologist.
Two bone marrow biopsies later and many, many blood tests, an ultra sound, and a colonoscopy and the diagnosis is.. pancytopenia.
It's a sort of non-diagnosis diagnosis. We were able to repeatedly measure below normal levels of all three blood cell production; red, white, and platelets.
The docs found a problem but so far have not been able to find a cause. For the past three years every three months I go back for testing, and every time the results are pretty much the same; all blood cell values are below normal.
Great.
I gradually recovered from the initial acute and fairly severe fatigue symptoms and returned to regular exercise.
Well.. not quite regular exercise. I had lost significant strength and muscle size from being inactive and my cardio sucked.
Eventually weight training brought my strength and muscle mass back to normal but my cardio hasn't changed in three years.
Perhaps somewhat of a blessing in disguise the loss of cardiovascular fitness due to reduced red blood cells (and therefore ability to deliver oxygen to muscles), caused me to get on the mountain bike exclusively .. no road bike.
Why? My warm up pace had become my race pace- literally. VO2 max testing showed a drop from 71 ml/kg down to 54 ml/kg. I hadn't seen a VO2 max value below 66 ml/kg ever since I started having VO2 tested decades ago.
To translate this to useful info; 30 km/h used to be a mere warm up pace. I'd have to get to 26 km/h to get my heart rate to break 100 bpm. Now I struggle to maintain 30 km/h for more than 20 minutes.
I simply would not be able to keep up even at a category 5 road racing level.
Hello sport category mountain biking.
I'de always raced sport because my technical ability was terrible. Uphill? Passed everyone. Perhaps even unfairly as my fitness was at a top expert, bottom elite level. Technically I sucked so bad I would simply get off my bike and walk. Lot's of walking. That cut me to the bottom of sport category pretty quick.
I have always loved mountain biking, more than road biking. But road is where is where I started and I have so many fond memories of epic 4 to 8 hour rides in BC like riding from Vancouver to Hope and back, or riding out to Whistler staying the night and hammering back to Vancouver the next day.
I loved climbing Mt. Seymour and hitting 96 km/h on the decent. I never broke 96k, but managed to hit that nearly every time unless there was a bit of wind coming up the hill.
There's something about being in a full suicide tuck on skinny tires traveling at highway speeds.. total rush.
I had a long tradition of road cycling and loved road racing. I would occasionally race an MTB race and would love being in the forrest, but I never really practiced riding the MTB since moving to WInnipeg in '94. In fact my MTB stayed in box for years when I moved here.
I did miss the near daily North Shore MTB rides though. No, no.. not that part of the famous Shore.. I stuck to the trails without the huge drops. Although "severed dick" was still a pretty sketchy decent. Only made that a couple times.. I would usually avoid the super technical stuff.
I asked my sports med doc if I would be ok to train and race with my condition. He said absolutely. There is no harm, can only do you good, but, he said.. you will never ride like you used to; your reduced red blood cells will limit you and there isn't anything you can do about it. You may have some local muscle adaptation and make some small gains, but your ceiling is limited.
Impossible to get more fit. Nice. Turned out to be true. I trained very diligently, did several VO2 max tests at the U of M, and over three years.. no change at all. The exact same training done previously would always show the known predictable response to training.
Nevertheless I have had more fun and personal successes riding my mountain bike in the past three years than I've had in decades of riding.
I've gone from not being able to ride over rocks that would scare the bejesus out me, to rolling over them with very guttural "I beat you" feeling. I'll add that I'm still pretty slow in burms and twisties, and although I can ride most rocks now, I am definitely at a sport level of technical handling ability.
That said I'm pretty stoked about improving. Feels good to have worked on the basics so much the last couple years.. hours and hours at Falcon Trails. Now I have something to build on and the technical ability should kick up a couple notches by the end of this season.
I'll get back on the road at some point but for right now I love being in the bush on a mountain bike.
I love the trails, the wilderness, NO CARS, and a feeling of bliss I get that isn't quite the same as what I got on the road bike. It's not that road bike bliss worse, it's just not the same.
With a new full suspension 29er (Giant Anthem X) I'm more excited about the 2012 race season than I've been in a long time. I feel like I'm starting over again and that feels great!
No comments:
Post a Comment