You don’t always see it coming.
The warm-up was fine—I felt normal. The intervals hurt, but intervals always hurt. It was hot, but it was August in Colorado—and?
An hour later, I felt gassed. After spending three weeks on the road, it was my first effort back at altitude. Of course, I felt gassed. Training at sea level is cheating. There’s like three times the oxygen and a 1/3 of the gravity. You can murder yourself for hours and wake up the next day like you’re on HGH.
Altitude though? It’s No Country for Old Men, brutal, relentless, penetrating.
I hit the sheets, surprisingly broken, and drifted off, hoping to awake refreshed.
When the clock blared, I drew in my first breath and started hacking. Something was in my lungs. My tidal volume was choked off, blocked by a deep, webbed stickiness reverberating through my chest.
The fuck?
I descended a flight of stairs, made coffee, and then had to go back up the stairs for some reason. As I righted the banister and shot up the final few steps, something strange hit me—a burning.
My lungs were on fire. I felt flushed, and my breath was audible. I felt the initial rush of heat when my systems came online and my cells start calling for more oxygen, but all I had done was walk up the stairs.
As the day progressed, fatigue built. I struggled to sit at my screen, and no matter how much black bean water I drank, my lids dropped.
So much for today’s workout.
Or, it turned out, the tomorrow’s workout. Or the day after that. Or the day after that. Or the day after that, until the days stretched into great, yawning, interminable weeks of no physical exertion, mounting fatigue, and lungs locked in the vice grip of some illness that had hardened into molasses.
Standing in the doctor’s office, they listened to my lungs. After a few breaths, the doctor frowned and said, “Your lungs sound like the dying breaths of a hooka enthusiast. Let’s get an X-ray.”
He had me stand in front of an X-ray machine.
“OH DAMN,” the tech said.
PSA – if you get an x-ray and the technician yells, ‘OH DAMN,’ it’s not good.
My lungs were pissed. The delicate filigree of bronchioles had inflamed into a distended, pissed mass that wasn’t really interested in delivering oxygen.
“So it’s not COVID?” I’d had COVID weeks before.
“Nah, I mean, maybe that’s contributing, but this might have just hit you right after you recovered from that.”
He handed me a slip to get some steroids to ease the inflammation and sent me on my way.
A secret goal I’ve always had but never articulated is that I never wanted to be the sort of person who talked about being ‘winded.’ I never wanted to let myself stop a group and say, “I need to catch my wind.”
I despise that because I’m arrogant, because I’ve made a good part of my life about being really good at breathing hard for a long time, and I could never imagine letting myself get to the point where walking up a flight of stairs or pedaling at party pace up a modest climb would melt my internal organs.
But here I was, weeks later, riding idly toward a Mexican restaurant on a double date, summiting a brief 1% climb, wheezing like I lived on menthols and whiskey.
Fuck.
I have training data in TrainingPeaks back to 2012, and in 12 years, I’ve only had a stretch of two weeks where I didn’t train – not once.
I’ve always been healthy. I’ve always sledgehammered my way through anything the world throws at me. My guts were iron even if my head was a brick, and I was sure the cure for Ebola might be hiding in my veins.
It turns out I’m as wrong as I am deluded. I’m like anybody else, a bit of flesh wrapped around a few pieces of calcium, aging imperceptibly, robust and yet fantastically vulnerable, capable of collapsing suddenly under the onslaught of a few miserable pieces of RNA looking to leech off anything that comes its way.
I’ve been a delight to be around.
At one point, my wife asked me how I was, and I said, “Fucking terrible. I can’t do ANYTHING. ANYTHING! Literally everything I try to do I can’t. I’m bad at everything. I couldn’t open a ziplock bag if my life depended on it.”
“Can you say more?” my wife said.
“No, Mama,” my daughter said. “He can’t tell you more because he’s bad at everything.”
And there’s the upshot there – my kids, my family. My lungs may be in shreds, my CTL may have tanked 50 points, and I get winded getting groceries, but without the constant demands of physical torture and unsuccessful starvation filling my days, a space has opened up, and they have filled it.
It’s good to see them fully, without the nagging anxiety of knowing what other assholes are going to upload to Strava that day. When I literally can’t train, I can’t be tortured by inaction.
But, I miss it.
What do I miss?
The brutality, the harshness, the wild, feral physical insanity. The screaming back, distended stomach, disappointing limits, brief highs, grinding averages, and ruthless, unyielding minutes ticking slowly under the beating sun while a potential only I can see or care about is waiting just over the next hill.
Life is showing up on time, remembering the details, being courteous, thoughtful, measured, anticipatory, caring, funny, and forgiving – if you have any sense.
But I’m also an animal, a low beast. I don’t want to make sense all the time. I don’t want to be contained, chained to an endless procession of responsibilities and demands that I have to hold back from my snarl.
I want to be left alone. I want silence. I want to want pain, and I want to channel my frustrations and insufficiency into violence, into bent cranks and glassy eyes.
Then, I’ll come back with nothing to say, nothing to explain, and resume being what I need to be for everyone I care about.
But right now, I can’t.