Asthma = Allergies

I've been undergoing allergy testing lately and it's a real eye-opener.  I break out into a rash after long bike rides and my eyes get itchy on occasion, but that was OK. 

It's when my lungs tried to shut down when doing sprints on the bike that I figured I needed to get checked out.  After some Googling about "exercise induced asthma" I found out something interesting - Asthma is often just allergies, showing up in the lungs. Now I'm no doctor and there's also asthma being a result of the shock of cold air, so don't go diagnosing yourself on what I write here.  Go talk to your own doctor.

I went in for tests and I'm essentially a walking allergy bomb.  I'm severely allergic to lots of stuff, mostly grass and trees.  I finally got an opportunity to ask the doctor the real question: "But is this what's causing my asthma attacks on the bike?"

The answer is yes.  Just like your skin breaks out in a rash, your lungs react as well.  Asthma is an allergic reaction to what's in the air.

So, I'm on some meds to help with the asthma and now on shots to try to kill off the allergies for good.  We'll see how things progress over the next few years and I'll run some self-tests to see if I'm cured.  Good times!  It's always nice to know what is going on in your own body.

Podcast - Power Squash

Click HERE to Play/Download

Join the ZenTri Cult as we continue our Oregon trip and go to Astoria, interview an Astorian runner, play live folk music, talk about portion control, and get in some great voicemails.

Shownotes!

• Interview with Claire, that chick that runs all over Astoria, all the time.  :)
• Live music played by Candice (and Chris) that was submitted for a Portland beer commercial.
• Holistic Guru tells us eight ways to keep on top of our portion control.
• Voicemails!

Click HERE to Play/Download

Up, Over, or Down?

WARNING - This post is not triathlon related.  Scary, I know, but I bet you can deal with it.

Living in Tex-ass, I usually tell foreigners people in other places to "come down" when they visit.  This is because they are usually above me on a north-oriented map.  I was just emailing a guy in San Antonio about coming down and realized he actually lives slightly below and to the west of me, lattitudenally.  To be geographically correct, I went back and changed my wording to "come over" instead.  Yes, I'm a geogeek.

Do you take the other person's planetary position in account when asking them to come over, down, or up?  What do you say?

Twitter is the New Google

Did you know Google isn't really a search engine?  It's an advertising agency that uses a search engine to pull you in.  I'm not knocking it - Google works great.  But there's another cool way to get answers: Twitter.

Once you get more than a few dozen followers on Twitter.com, you can get some great answers out of them.  I can post, "How do you run with your iPhone?" and get back a lot of responses from people who actually run with one.

The key is knowing how to phrase the question and also to have a large enough audience.  You can ask a bunch of runners how to upgrade SQL Server while juggling monkeys and you might not get a response.  Lots of runners are into tech stuff, so you never know.

Asking questions is a fun way to start up conversations and make new friends, too.  Enjoy it!

Training by Time Instead of Distance

I wrote the following to a coaching client recently and thought it would make a great blog post.  I also store goodies like this in my "coach's tips" section of my coaching softwares that clients get access to. (Workoutlog.com)

He asked if his workout should be by time or distance.  This is what I told him:

Time vs. distance is one of the most important things to know about in training. Here goes -

You want to almost always workout by time. You do a workout by time and effort level, distance being a result - like a side-effect.

You can nearly kill yourself trying to go X miles in hills or wind one day, then cover the same distance another day or in another location with almost no effort. You cannot reliably compare workouts going by distance.

Pros rarely workout by distance. This is something that separates them from the amateurs. They say "I'm going on a 3 hour run... bye!" However far they run, that's how far they run.

Going by time greatly simplifies and improves your workouts. It also makes them portable. When the workout says "hard for 1 hour", go hard for an hour. What you want is a few hours of hard and a lot of hours of easy by the end of the week. It really doesn't matter how far you went. If you trained for a week in hills, that's going to be a lot shorter distance than if you did it on flats. But the hills were harder! So unless you go by time and effort level, your workouts will get all screwed up because of hills and wind.

Another thing to remember is when a workout says to go easy, go easy no matter what the conditions are. If you're in hills or riding into the wind, just gear down and take it easy. You have to develop the guts and self-confidence to not go hard when some chump is passing you on an easy workout. That is probably the most difficult thing and will wreck your training. You are the better athlete for holding back, saving your hard workout for your hard workout.

The distance in those workouts is mostly for me to get an idea of how much load I'm giving you if all things were equal, which they aren't in the real world.