Times online raised an interesting topic a few days ago. And as I am surrounded by triathletes almost all day long, I think it may be of interest to reflect some of the problems of exercise addiction. The endurance movement is increasing steadily. More and more amateurs perform the most extreme endurance races one can imagine. Charity has become one of the major motivations to do so beside beauty and body shape.

Times quotes Dan Martin, 28. He soon is going to embark on an awe-inspiring 18-month global triathlon — swimming, cycling and running round the world. On May 8 he will wade into the sea off Nova Scotia, eastern Canada, and swim 3,500 miles to Brest, northwestern France. From there he will cycle by way of Siberia to Uelen, the most easterly settlement in Russia. By the end of 2011 he hopes to have completed the equivalent of a marathon a day, running from Russia to New York.

The £200,000 cost of his trip is being funded by corporate sponsorship, although any donations will go to his charity, the Dan Martin Foundation. This is only one of many examples. My friend Gregor Komescher is venturing out for the race across America, a similar breath-taking challenge. He is training almost day and night, he trains to cope with fatigue and tiredness, sometimes he suffers, but he fulfills himself a dream that makes him ready to suffer more.

So why do these people do it?

By the way, studies say that 1% of endurance athletes are exercise dependent or even addicted.

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Sports are dominated by all kinds of machinery that measure body parameters to improve and control performance. More and more devices are construed to give more and more detailed information about our body’s condition. Nevertheless body sense is a term that in the end always comes into the game if parameters are not conclusive, and in many ways they are not.
I found an article in the Psychology Today Blog that underlines the importance of the body sense and the ability to assess the condition of well-being. It goes very much along with an article I myself wrote about this topic, and may encourage you to a less structured training program that takes the body sense more into consideration.

One of the sentences that athletes and coaches love to say is: “The most important thing you can do to recover quickly is to listen to your body. If you are feeling tired, sore or notice decreased performance you may need more recovery time or a break from training altogether. If you are feeling strong the day after a hard workout, you don’t have to force yourself to go slow. If you pay attention, in most cases, your body will let you know what it needs, when it needs it.”

The problem for many of us is that we don’t listen to the warnings of overreaching or over-training as there are general malaise, fatigue, mood instability, lack of motivation, loss of appetite, fragmented sleep, delayed muscle soreness, disturbed body temperature regulation etc… or that we are misinterpreting body signs.

The good thing about this post is that it brings body sense into the loop of understanding exercise physiology. Body sense herewith is accepted as a biological and not only psychological phenomenon. We know a lot about metabolism and muscle during and after exercise but less focus is placed on how exercise feels in our bodies. Learning to feel the body during any type of activity enhances the body’s ability to most effectively marshal its resources to enhance health and well being.

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When most of the triathletes have arrived on Big Island for competing the Ironman race next Saturday, 2 or 3 days after their arrival many of them, especially the European guys, start to complain about symptoms that are related to an impaired immunity. Undefined sickness is so common among the athletes and endangers their participation in the race. Just today, when we have been at Captain Cook’s with Hannes’ group, we heard people complaining about common colds, sore throats, stomach problems etc.

Here an excerpt from an article I wrote for tri2b.com

Since I have been speaking to many athletes through Biestmilch about their health problems, it was alarming to find out how common it is that athletes suffer from various symptoms that point towards incompetence of and strain on the immune system. Many of the symptoms increase during the strain of intensive training or competitions, with the result that even athletes between the ages of 15 and 20 suffer from unclarified symptoms of pain or after having hardly moved out of the area of basic endurance, they develop some infection or another.
In many cases, they have consulted doctors of various specialist doctors without success. Here is a short list of the problems that indicate that one is just about to fall off the narrow ridge of balance and alarm signals are cropping up, which should prompt oneself to be careful not to fall into the valley, out of which it is difficult to get out: severe respiratory infections and infections of the sinuses, herpes infections, gastrointestinal disorders or irritable bowel disorders, sudden injuries, pains typically in the groin, knee, back or Achilles tendon that bear no relation to what the x-ray shows, for example, stress-induced asthma, spreading of an existing allergy to other organs (hay fever suddenly accompanies asthma), springing up of neurodermatitis….. the list could go on and on. (more…)