Beyond-Training-Audiobook-Chapter.mp3

Welcome to Beyond Training Part 1 the Beginning How I went from overtraining and eating bags of 39 cent hamburgers to detoxing my body and doing sub 10 hour Ironman triathlons with less than 10 hours of training per week. And yes, I thought twice about the title of this chapter. 4 hamburgers, 2 cheeseburgers 6 hamburgers 4 cheeseburgers piled into the backseat of the family suburban. My two brothers and I shouted orders to our mom as we idled at the drive thru window of McDonald's. 39 cent hamburger 49 cent cheeseburger day only rolled around once a week and when it did, boy were we ever prepared. We'd typically drive away with not just a meal for the evening, but 8 to 10 extra grease stained bags of burgers that we could keep in the fridge and dig into during the remainder of the week when hunger struck. Of course, we never skipped the vegetables as we devoured our burgers at the kitchen table. There would always be a salad bowl, vat of iceberg lettuce and shrimp shredded carrots drenched in salty creamy oceans of ranch dressing. Mmm veggies. When we weren't devouring our burgers, the three of us boys plowed through take and bake pizzas, giant sub sandwiches and bathtub sized bowls of peanut butter, Captain Crunch cereal. And milk of course. Lots and lots of healthy cow's milk for our growing bodies. As a matter of fact, by the time I was 13 years old, I was guzzling nearly a gallon of 2% milk every day from a big plastic supermarket jug. After all, I support my newfound joy of hoisting ten pound dumbbells and swinging at tennis balls for several hours a day and milk seemed to do the trick. And when I drink that final glass of milk, go to bed every night with gas and bloating, wake up every morning with more new oily acne spots and have painful bouts of stomach upset several times each month. I simply chalked it up to the fact that these were normal growing pains and not the fact that I was dumping undigestible dairy sludge into my body every day. Things didn't change much from high school to university where I walked onto the collegiate tennis team nearly every day before our three hour afternoon practices, I'd pull into that same familiar McDonald's drive thru window and order my pre practice ritual Big Mac fries, root beer, supersize me. I was fast. I was strong. I was about to go punish my body for three hours on the tennis courts and this food was high octane fuel for my active lifestyle. Sure, I'd get a sprain or a strain every few weeks, have frequent bouts of brain fog during tennis matches, lose focus or take naps during classes, and still had weird gut issues. But this was all normal stuff, right? I mean, all my teammates seem to struggle with the same kind of things. Aside from the pre practice fast food bouts, which I really didn't feel guilty at all about since I was exercising like a fiend afterwards, the rest of my college diet was by my measure pretty healthy, including peanut butter slathered on bananas, especially after tennis practice, sauteed steak or chicken and vegetables, a nearly nightly ritual, big sandwiches with deli meat and lettuce served on whole wheat or whole grain, of course, yogurt with the fruit on the bottom and crunchy cereal. Although at this point I'd graduated from peanut butter Captain Crunch to Kashi go lean and lots and lots of trail mix or in a pinch, handfuls of peanuts and Craisins. Since I was an exercise science major, I I'd already started launching into my physiology and nutrition classes and this was the kind of stuff we were taught to use for fueling performance. But I'd only tapped the surface of diet science because I was about to take a deep dive into one of the most geeked out training and eating sports on the face of the planet. Bodybuilding. When I began bodybuilding, I switched to a high protein diet combined with two hours of daily very hard weight training. No day was considered complete unless it included significant soreness and masochistic like fatigue. And my my diet consisted of three to four canned protein shakes a day along with low fat low carb meals like three cans of tuna over mixed greens, fistfuls of 400-calorie high protein bars, eight to 10 egg omelets with sausage, gallons of more cow's milk, bags of beef jerky. And with this diet, I measured my food on scales, I counted my calories with laser like precision, and I molded my body into an impressive 210 pounds of muscle at 33% body fat. Granted, most days I had zero sex drive, felt like I was crapping out of a straw, had frequent bouts of sickness and sore joints, and experienced many signs and symptoms of protein toxicity. Something you'll learn about later in this book. But I sure looked darn good. I also learned early on in that process that you can buy energy. As a bodybuilder who practically lived at the gym, it made sense for me to get a moonlight college job as a personal trainer. And during my rigorous 5am to 9pm jam packed with studying classes and putting myself and my clients through workouts, I could easily guzzle three to four Red Bull, Monster or Rockstar energy drinks. Jam packed with amino acids like taurine, vitamin B, mega doses, and of course, ample amounts of caffeine. My energy was flying high and low and high and low, but I figured energy roller coasters are normal when you're training hard. As if my body wasn't getting thrown enough fastballs, I also began to inject cardio into the weight training mix. For an extra challenge. I bought a mountain bike and started riding my bike to school, picked up teaching several spin classes per week, taught myself how to swim so I could join the water polo team, and even started running the football stadium stairs. I was an exercise machine. And better yet, at this point, with the added cardio, I could easily eat every calorie in sight, maintain incredibly low body fat, and shrug off those random episodes of moodiness, constant urges to sleep, rapid heart rate fluctuations, and legs that seemed to instantly burn even when I climbed a flight of stairs. It was just the necessary price to pay for looking good, right? And of course the logical next step was the most exercise crazed sport I could find. Triathlon. My switch from explosive bodybuilding like sports to endurance sports began with the local university sprint triathlon on the back roads of Moscow, Idaho. And I began drinking the endurance athlete Kool Aid almost immediately after crossing that finish line. By this time I'd married Jessa, my girlfriend of two years and a lean, fast 1500 meter runner from the University of Idaho. I had my undergraduate degree in exercise science and was pursuing a master's degree in exercise physiology and biomechanics. I was on the University triathlon club. I'd gone from a 210 pound, 3% body fat bodybuilder and was well on my way to a 175 pound skinny triathlete. By the way, I'll throw in a link at the end of this recording about how I pulled off that amount of catabolism. Anyways, as a newly baptized endurance zealot, I was now eating up every piece of endurance training and nutrition literature I could find. For example, I learned that carbs are the lifeblood of any good endurance athlete and I already knew that with my level of activity I could eat as many carbs as I wanted. So I switched to a traditional triathlete diet of 55 to 75% carbohydrate intake, primarily comprised of staples like sports drinks, energy gel, energy chews, recovery shakes, recovery bars, huge bowls of morning oatmeal and whole grain cereal drenched in my newfound healthy milk alternatives. Soy milk and rice milk, whole wheat sandwiches, whole wheat wraps, whole wheat pasta and any whole wheat derivative. I could hunt down any low fat whole grain type baked good like biscotti, scones, muffins, cookies, cakes. I loved those coffee shops, copious amounts of fruit, fruity yogurt, fruit roll ups, fruit smoothies and fruit juice. While this was a near complete 180 degree shift from my low carb bodybuilding diet, I was now heading out the door for daily hour long runs, spending weekend mornings on an indoor bike trainer and swimming until I was blue in the face. I'd committed to my first Ironman triathlon by this point and I was completely convinced that I needed as much starch, sugar and carbs as I could get to fuel my long bouts of cardio and mildly insane amounts of exercise. And that first Ironman triathlon was an apparent success. Without really knowing what I was getting into, I crossed the finish line in nine hours and 59 minutes. And just like my first sprint triathlon, I was immediately hooked on this new version of the sport. So over the next few years I became a true long distance triathlon junkie. Between Ironman training, local sprint, Olympic and half Ironman triathlons, 5Ks, 10Ks and half marathons, and my new job as an exercise physiologist for a local sports medicine facility, I spent nearly every weekend of the spring, summer and fall training hard or traveling to races. I completed three more Ironman triathlons and training was my life. And then, in the throes of training for my Ironman World Championships in Hawaii, my wife and I had twin baby boys and suddenly life changed. Time became a precious commodity. I began to experience a deep urge not only to provide for my growing family, but to advance my career and to spend time with my children. My I simultaneously, however, had the pressure to be ready for the Ironman World Championships. And as I knew from reading triathlon magazines and websites like ironman.com, quote triathletes train an average of seven months for the Ford Ironman World Championship. The average hours per week devoted to training for the World Championships generally fall between 18 and 22. Average training distances for the three events are miles per week swimming seven miles per week, biking, 232 miles per week, running 48. Well, things got tough at that point. I was feeling physically and emotionally drained from feeling like I had to sit in a bike saddle for five hours and running for three hours each weekend, swimming 20,000 meters every week and still desperately trying to carve out time for my wife, my babies, my career and my hobbies while still having some semblance of a social life. To make matters worse, my body just felt run down. Chalk it up to years of physical use, 12 hour work days followed by marathon esque training sessions, or the stress of a new family and a busy career. But it seemed like every few months some new health or injury issue would rear its ugly head. It band friction syndrome on the side of my knee, rotator cuff, pain on the front of my shoulder, low back pain on the bike, sniffles, sore throat, low libido. I was only 27 years old but was already feeling like an old man. There had to be a better way. So I delved into the dozens of exercise physiology manuals littering the floor of my office and home, reams of training literature and research on things like periodization, exercise intensity and volume, and thick, heavy textbooks on the biochemistry of muscular and cardiovascular adaptations. I slowly began to make some pretty serious changes as I realized that things like anaerobic training and interval training were methods of training that the human body could still respond to with significant aerobic and endurance adaptations. I'd always been aware of these kind of benefits of interval training, but had simply been enamored with the traditional endurance athlete approach for so long that I had to personally make a pretty significant paradigm shift. I quit riding my bike for four to six hours on the weekend. I started doing short interval based sessions on the indoor bike trainer and I found that my power on the bike began to skyrocket. I realized that running more than three times a week didn't make me any faster and long runs kept getting me injured. So I cut my running to two short weekly sessions and one relatively short 60 to 90 minute weekend run and began setting PRs in my distance triathlon run splits. I discovered that swimming long and slow makes you a time crunched slow swimmer. So I began doing short but frequent swim sessions of 20 to 30 minutes and I suddenly had way more time on my hands. I found that my traditional make it burn old school bodybuilding style of weightlifting didn't make me as fast or as strong as simply lifting heavy weights for just a few reps with good form and that just a few short lifts like this made me incredibly stronger and more injury proof. Boy oh boy did I discover that nutrition makes a big difference. For the first time in my life I seriously attempted to discover the root cause of my long history of things like gas bloating stomach aches, diarrhea, infrequent bouts of cold, flu and a seemingly susceptible immune system. I subscribed to every diet, nutrition, health and longevity journal and website I could find, and I began to devour half a dozen books every month while roaming the blogosphere and reading about ancestral health, natural living, and a more primal approach to fueling and to life. I did blood tests, poop tests, urine tests, saliva tests, and every form of natural and alternative medicine, poking, prodding and self quantification I could find. And I discovered some pretty serious issues with my body and my diet. For example, I had low testosterone, hormone imbalances and bad cholesterol from my high carb, low fat diet. I was 100% lactose intolerant with a leaky gut and an immunoglobulin allergic reaction to most dairy proteins. I'd never known about this. The gluten from my bread, pasta and baked goods was literally tearing holes in my already aggravated intestinal wall. My fasting blood sugar was skyrocketing, putting me at a huge risk for developing type 2 diabetes. My amino acids, fatty acids and neurotransmitters were depleted from overtraining and a poor diet which was severely afflicting my focus, my sleep, my productivity and my mood. The list went on and on and as I continued to dig on myself and the clients I was working with, I slowly began to change my diet and my approach. I got rid of digestive irritants and enzyme inhibitors. I cut out rancid vegetable oil and low fat foods. I started paying attention to the origin of my food. I drastically lowered my sugary carbohydrate intake and learned not only how to cook properly, but how to soak, how to sprout, how to ferment, how to make my food digestible, and how to eat real recognizable fuel that was not always coming out of a wrapper, a package, a bottle or a tub. All of these training and nutrition switches were brand new concepts for me, but my body quickly began to morph as I formed my understanding of the crucial link between health performance and longevity. The real light bulb moment for me came in 2011 when I crossed the Ironman finish line once again at the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii in 9 hours and 36 minutes. After incorporating my newfound health, exercise and nutrition tactics while training just eight to ten hours a week, I realized that it turns out the human body is naturally quite good at going long and at endurance and amazing feats of physical performance. If you you can just keep it healthy and it's capable of these enormous feats that don't eat up your precious time or require you to feel like a training rat on a wheel every day. After all, for thousands of years, humans have hunted, gathered and roamed the fields and the plains, and in the process, we have indeed developed an innate ability to engage in long periods of sustained movement as long as we don't hold ourselves back from our natural talents. With copious amounts of overtraining, sitting sugar, fake foods, stress, lack of sleep, and a hectic lifestyle, our natural endurance can shine through in a surprisingly strong way. It took me years of destroying my body to realize that you can't just eat 39 cent hamburgers and train yourself fit. Instead, you have to leave behind the exhausting pursuit of exercise for the sake of exercise and instead discover the beautiful balance between health and performance. When you do, life becomes magically simple. I wish this crucial information had existed within the pages of one single book when I first began my journey. And I'm overjoyed to be able to bring that to you now so that you don't need to repeat my mistakes or the mistakes of many other athletes and exercising individuals who want to achieve amazing feats of physical performance, but need to be able to do it without destroying their body, their metabolism, or their minds. You're about to delve into everything that you need to know to train right, eat right, and unlock your true fitness potential. You're going to get exact training protocols, nutrition blueprints, supplementation details, detoxing instructions, blood testing, walkthroughs, lifestyle travel and time management strategies, self quantification knowledge, practical anti aging secrets, and more. You're going to find that mastering fitness and mastering endurance goes way beyond just training. It involves your health and your life too. So are you ready to discover all of this? Well, let's begin with a tale of two triathletes coming in the next chapter. In the meantime, a full list of additional chapter resources, helpful links, scientific references, and surprise bonuses for this section are now available over at BeyondTrainingBook.com/Beginning Enjoy.