Or in one single step how to:-
- Train harder.
- Recover well.
- Manage heart arrhythmia.
- Repair calf muscle strain.
- Improve overall performance.
- Sleep better at night.
It’s funny how one can sometimes grapple with a seemingly complex and unresolvable issue only to discover one day that the solution is quite simple really.
For long now I have been most concerned about my leaking heart valves and ever increasing moments (never noticed any in the beginning) of wildly fluctuating arrhythmias between 30 and 240 beats per minute during training and competition (and those are just the recording limits of the heart rate monitor)!
It’s only after I read an article describing one of the reasons why the Russian athletes were at one time so far superior to their American counterparts, that the penny finally dropped.
You see the Russians where monitoring their athletes heart rate variances overnight which would then determine their state of recovery and therefore the intensity of the next day’s training for each individual.
You can only train as hard as the degree to which your body has recovered, and exceeding this is what leads to the dreaded over-training syndrome which includes in my case, aggravated heart arrhythmia!
And so it also dawned on me that the reason I was struggling to recover properly was because of my having to get up every hour at night to go to the loo as a result of prostate enlargement that restricted my bladder from being completely emptied. Tests now show that I carry a permanent reservoir of at least 500ml in my bladder (more than the average persons total capacity), and only void the overflow each time!
So there you have it! Just have to fix the prostate (one stone) to sleep well, recover better, control arrhythmia, train harder and improve performance. Simple really.
Ah you say, but what about the calf strain?
Yes I know, seem to have pulled it quite badly last Sunday at the EC Tri Champs, and it’s going to need some good rest to heal. This Monday noon I’m checking into the St. Georges hospital for five days to have this long overdue prostate op done at 2pm, and so the subsequent 2 weeks forced rest will kill the sixth bird too!
And don’t be surprised to see me into some heavy cycling and swimming sessions this weekend, in fact right up to that hospital check in time – I intend to be so “poegaai” by then that I probably won’t need any anesthetic! Ha ha ha!!!