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Old 03-11-13, 04:14 AM
  #26  
joshnc
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: charlotte nc
Posts: 173

Bikes: Bigshot, Airbourne,2006 QR Caliente, bianchi, Gt grade.

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What changed for me was the nutrition part. I stopped all drinking beer/wine. Cut out fast food. Went to more organic foods. I have never felt better in my life and able to train harder. I am 37 years old.

Originally Posted by rousseau
I don't know how to read my body's signals. Or maybe I'm no spring chicken anymore. Is that it?

Sigh...

My particulars:
43 years old, 6-foot, 225 pounds, recent myriad of exhaustive tests show that I'm incredibly healthy, if still somewhat overweight (I'm big-boned. Don't laugh, it's true).

I played basketball in high school and university, then did no regular exercise from the age of 22 to 39 (oh wait, I commuted on a bicycle in Taiwan for one year at the age of 27 before getting a motorycle). At 39 I took up cycling, and became addicted.

In the last three years or so I've done between 8 and 12 hours per week on the bike. I started out trying to get stronger and faster, but did it stupidly; I merely tried my damndest to go faster each ride, without any plan at all. I became a slave to my statistics. So I started to burn out now and then, maybe needing a few days off the bike here and there due to fatigue.

Then last year in August it got scary. I got lightheaded for the first few days, then weak and tired, and had to stay off the bike for a whole month. The docs didn't find anything. Then suddenly I got an attack of appendicitus, requiring a further month of recovery in September, so by October I was feeling pretty good and figured maybe the appendicitus had something to do with it. Which was dumb of me, and even the surgeon told me in no uncertain terms that my two conditions were completely unrelated.

My riding time decreased somewhat through winter, and I made a point of not pushing myself too hard. As the weather got better in March I continued to be "good," not pushing myself much at all. Near the end of April I did a couple of longer rides with some increased intensity, and around that time work became a bit frantic and stressful, and then boom...back on the ropes.

It's now the same as last August: lightheaded for a few days, then weak and tired. It's been two weeks into this "episode," and the doc says that the tests say that I just don't have anything wrong with me; the best guess at this point is overtraining. So I've booked an appointment with a physiotherapist/trainer that he recommended. But I'd like to get some ideas and feedback from some people here, if I may.

What to do? How do I approach this? Should I consider getting a heartrate monitor and train using that? Has anyone had a similar experience to mine? Am I really just getting old? Were there too many years of sedentary life in between my youth and now?

I should note that I never had anything like this happen to me before, so I think it's fairly safe to say that there is probably a correlation between these episodes and my cycling.

Thanks very much to anyone who has read this far!
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