Friends have often called me ‘The King of Wing’ for my extemporaneous propensity to ‘wing’ it during a motivational presentation—speaking to a group of students or addressing a locker-room full of athletes. As a Level 2 USA Cycling Coach who has spent countless hours diving deep into exercise physiology, I fully appreciate the value of a thoughtfully developed training plan; and as an age-group and self-coached endurance athlete living with chronic migraine, ankylosing spondylitis, a crazy rare clotting disorder and a long history of enduring tendinopathies, I learned long ago the importance of training intuitively and the art of listening to my body. It’s been a process of growth and maturity, one that has taken decades, but it’s led to some impressive gains as far as training volume goes.
This often means going big when I’m not feeling flat and fatigued and turning things down when I’m navigating the migraine maze, fighting chronic fatigue or battling an achilles flare (or any other over-use injury) that I’ve been so prone to over the years. In my second book and in countless presentations, I speak about the importance of exercise, movement and training on a personal level. I’ve been an athlete since I was a little one. In book number two I say, “I’m the guru of go and when I can’t go, I get low;” meaning when I can’t train (bike, swim, lift) I more often than not get depressed. In fact, every serious bout of depression I’ve navigated in my life has always aligned with an injury.
Since the publication of Be Audacious: Inspiring Your Legacy and Living a Life That Matters, I’ve learned to slow down (I suppose this is a deeply personal thing, slowing down). The chronicles of 2012/2013 forced me to adapt and get out of “Guru of go” mode, at least more often than not. It was during a particularly bad ankylosing spondylitis flare a decade ago where my training led to a wicked case of achilles tendinitis and a bike-related wrist injury. I spent 18 of 24 months during this dark time on crutches or in a walking boot cast. Over the course of six months, I had a wrist surgery, hip surgery, and spent a week in the hospital following a brush with eternity, in the form of bi-lateral pulmonary embolisms, an infarct (a part of my right lung was dying) and a massive DVT (deep vein thrombosis).
Through Endurance We Conquer
This all occurred within ten months of a divorce, ending my marriage of eleven years with a woman I had been with since high school. To call this time a period riddled with depression, fear and angst would be an understatement. But through it all, I had the highest calling I’ve ever known, providing love, goodness and stability to my then five-year-old daughter, as a single dad. I can’t even begin to share how important movement and exercise (primarily the pool at this point) was in allowing me to show up each day for my daughter.
The prelude to this part of my life was a six-month window that brought me to my knees—literally. My counselor called it burnout, but to me, it was a total mental breakdown. Within weeks of strapping on the walking boot cast for the fourth time in eight years (the beginning of those 18 of 24 months in the boot or on sticks), I had my biggest speaking tour to date, taking me from Montana to Virginia, Seattle to the Bay Area. I vividly remember walking campuses around Virginia and then limping my way through a week of presentations in San Francisco, San Jose, Berkley and Santa Rosa.
I’ve spoken at the California Academy of Sciences multiple times since, but this was my first trip there, and walking through that impressively large facility, a month into my speaking tour, nearly ruptured my achilles (or so it seemed, mentally and emotionally). A wrist injury was limiting my ability to lift heavy in the weight room and an achilles injury was keeping me from hitting it on the bike. The stress of it all, without my outlets (I’ve worked out, trained and exercised almost daily since I was 11 years old), marked the beginning of a six+ month bout of insomnia. And once the sleeplessness started, things snowballed, leading to the saga described above.
It always feels self-indulgent to rehash this challenging time for my readers, but I recognize that not everyone who explores this blog has read Be Audacious or Grizzlies On My Mind, and if you’re still with me, I assume that you, too, may have managed or be in the middle of navigating injury, depression, anxiety or fear. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a voice for the voiceless. This inspired my work as a ranger naturalist in Yellowstone, my fire to form an NGO/501c3 aimed at inspiring young people to become guardians of a wild Yellowstone, and my rabble-rousing history as a wilderness advocate.
During one of my last two summers working the waters of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as a fly-fishing guide, I met the great Joyce Bender. Joyce is a powerhouse from Pittsburgh, who is one of the main players in the field of disability advocacy. I connected with Joyce as her fishing guide for several summers before she invited me to be on her show, Disability Matters. Something about this conversation made me realize that while I remained deeply passionate about wild places, wild waters and wildlife, my mission was no longer solely about connecting people to wilderness in hopes of inspiring advocates of our wild world. My mission to inspire people to pursue their passion and live a life that matters—elevating and uplifting others to become their strongest and truest self—has its roots in my personal challenges and struggles (both physical and mental).
Mental Health
Before Be Audacious went to publication and before I performed my TED talk, I sat down with my counselor to discuss how vulnerable I was willing to be, how much of my story I was willing to share. I really wanted to be a part of a wave of people working to de-stigmatize the depression, disability and mental health challenges associated with being dealt a difficult deck-of-life cards. He warned me that I would set myself up for ridicule, personal attacks and people who question my credibility if I openly shared my challenges, and while he wasn’t wrong (I don’t read reviews on Amazon or pay attention to podcast comments, as their often cruel and pointless), he supported and continues to support my desire to purposefully pursue my passion of shedding light on personal struggle.
Today, right out of the gate, I start each episode of The Bounce Forward Podcast with a nod to my counselor, again, in hopes of normalizing mental health challenges and the importance of seeking support. In book number three, Deep Roots, a character inspired by him gracefully guides a young man struggling with disability and depression while determined to make a positive impact on the people and place around him.
Adapt, adjust, reload
That’s a lot of backstory, I know, but hopefully it sets the stage for what was for me a massive, if not monumental, eleven day training block. I just wrapped up a 22-hour, seven-day training week, within a 30+ hour, eleven-day training block. While I’m sure most coaches would question the validity of such a big jump in training, without specificity and a map to validate such a big block of training, for me it was a simple act of listening to my body (and in this case, even more so, my mind).
Throughout the long winter months here in Montana, my training weeks are more planned out and generally average between 8 and 12 total hours, though still require adaptability from one week to the next. After six months of training in the weight room, a dungeon of a pool and an indoor trainer, things become less structured once I can get outside. Come summer, when we can finally start hitting the dirt roads and trails consistently, the training weeks are less about rigidity (I chart a lot of JR’s/Just Rides in the training log) and more about feel, fatigue, intuition, weather and migraine.
When you’ve lived with chronic migraine since you were 8 years old, you learn to master the art of living in adapt, adjust, reload mode. For someone that averages two migraine days per week, it makes mapping out a training plan impractical. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have goals or objectives for the week. Generally speaking, I aim for two days of higher end work (usually one big day of tempo/sweet spot riding with long 20–60-minute repeats) and the other day is more all-out, typically in the form of a 20+ minute time trial on my favorite piece of local single track, or in the form of more V02 max efforts with 4-5 minute hill repeats.
Never knowing when a migraine day will come or when I’ll be navigating a flurry of migraine days, otherwise known at our house as “navigating the migraine maze,” I’m not stringent about my schedule. Instead, I remain adaptable to spondy (ankylosing spondylitis) related fatigue or migraine fallout. The one rule I try to follow is taking two to three days between any hard efforts (ideally looking something like, Tuesday/Friday, or Wednesday/Saturday), giving me plenty of time to recover. The rest of my work is done in Zone 2, at a relatively easy pace. While I love the weight room most of the year, during the summer months I drop it to two 60-minute sessions per week—and if it’s a big racing block, or there’s a particularly crushing race like the Crusher in the Tushar on the calendar—I’ll drop it to once per week, so I can maximize my saddle and pool time.
With poorly shaped hips, a 180-labrum tear in my right hip and ankylosing spondylitis-related arthritis in both hips, I’ve given up running or anything else that causes pounding, and nothing crushes my hips like long periods of standing at a basketball camp, so I try to limit—if not fully avoid—those inflammation causers during my summer training window. As far as events go, there’s always a couple (if not a handful) of open water swims on the calendar that I race in with my daughter and another handful of gravel and mountain bike events. But I’ve been training on the bike and in the water for far longer than I’ve been racing and since I’m not getting paid to race, nor am I vying for podium finishes, I put a higher priority on training than I do racing. In fact, there was a long period where I avoided racing, because I didn’t like the idea of needing to take breaks mid-summer to recover—and that’s still something I struggle with after a big event that requires some recovery time out of the saddle.
Ultimately, the bike is my wheelchair. It takes me deep into the backcountry, allowing me to explore the wilds of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, early and often.
Polarized Training
My training now looks very different than it did all through my 20’s and 30’s, when every ride was a hard ride. I have fond memories of my nightly time trials up the hill from Gardiner to Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park during my decade + working as a ranger and fly-fishing guide on the world’s first national park’s doorstep. Every night I climbed that 1,000 foot + five-mile hill, all out, flat out. I sure loved it at the time, but as I continued this pace through my thirties, I found myself dealing with overuse injuries (tendinopathies) more often than not. And this is when I began my deep dive into exercise science and when I really started closely following the work of exercise physiologists like Dr. Stephen Seiler, Dr. Inigo San Millan and legendary coaches like Joe Friel, all of whom endorse high volumes of relatively easy work in Zone 2 and all who in some form or another, place a premium on polarized training.
I didn’t set out with the intention of training 32 hours in eleven days, or 22 hours in seven days, but it’s simply how things shook out. It all started following the decision not to chase a fool’s errand by driving 18 hours in less than 48 hours to participate in a gravel race in Nebraska (a ‘King of Wing’ decision made days before the race that turned out to be a really good call considering we would have been driving late into the night in order to make it to the start line and the race was ultimately cancelled after four tornadoes touched down overnight, knocking down powerlines and bringing a deluge of rain that trashed the dirt roads we were scheduled to race on), so we pivoted to a long four-day weekend of local rides, swims and lifts, pulling two-a-days multiple times that weekend. Once my wife was back to work I was hitting the pool early after dropping my daughter at swim practice and then finding windows throughout the day/early evening to get some longer rides in. I capped off the 11-day block and seven-day training week with a big 4 ½ hour, 63 mile dirt ride on my go to local dirt roads, at tempo/sweet spot, a strong and steady effort, putting an exclamation mark on my biggest block of training to date.
I was feeling cooked, but not shattered. Despite three days of cluster migraine, I was able to participate in a big open water swim with my daughter at the Big Sky State Games over the weekend and while I’m not in a full-on mid-season break (my guy Dylan Johnson is a big proponent of this and we discuss it at length in his recent episode on the podcast), I’m dialing it back this week both in terms of intensity and duration, a proper recovery week, just to keep the wheels from coming off.
So, if this block of training wasn’t planned, why did I go so big? I’d say it really came down to mental health. I’ve long advocated for exercise being the most potent anti-depressant I know. If you take a trip through the decade worth of writings on this blog, you’ll find dozens of posts dedicated to this topic (essays/posts like Autumn Funk, Sometimes It Really Is About the Bike, Storm Weathering 101, Keep Pushing Pedals, Pain Matters, My Migraine Story).
A Leap of Faith
When I first started seeing a counselor, my freshman year at North Idaho College, in the midst of a total identity crisis, as my entire sense of self and self-worth was at the time wrapped up in being an athlete and I was reeling from an early diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis that shattered my hoop dreams. She theorized that I had long medicated myself with exercise. I didn’t agree with her at the time and I’m still not sure that this is entirely accurate as most of my counselors over the years have categorized my depression as situational, but regardless of whether or not my depression is baked in or triggered by situations that exceed my coping toolkit, the one thing I know is that when I’m able to train, regardless of circumstances, I’m able to meet the challenges with far more courage, character, compassion and grace than when I’m forced to deal without my almost four-decade long coping mechanism—endurance efforts.
I recently made a big, bold, audacious move. I chose to step away from a part-time gig that has provided much stability and security for me and my family and has also allowed me to pursue my passions of parenting, writing, speaking, coaching, training, and consulting. I chose to go all-in on my Be Audacious slashes, all of which I like to see as spokes, coming out of my center—my purpose, my main hub of inspiring and elevating others. Since the “day job” didn’t support that mission directly, I, with the support and encouragement of my family (my wife is my biggest fan and believer), took a big leap of faith. I left the job. And when you take a big leap of faith and jump into the waters of the unknown, waters teeming with uncertainty, riptides and heavy, crashing waves, it’s easy to get highjacked by insecurity, fear, angst and depression. It’s easy for that POS-itis to get loud and it takes groundedness, mindfulness, intentionality and some seriously heavy lifting (mentally) to navigate those parts. And sometimes we need help.
I was in that place for eleven days, where I needed to lean heavily on something that I knew could help me to more gracefully swim with the sharks, if you will, treading water, instead of fighting the current. And that just so happened to mean time in the pool and long saddle sessions to simplify and soothe that which needed soothing.
Training Intuitively
Was it the smartest training block? I don’t know. It was a big jump from the 12-hour weeks preceding, no doubt, but whether it was smart or not, it was intuitive—and it sure felt right. There’s no doubt that the 63 miler, with a migraine, and after a long swim, required a lot of fight, digging deep, leaning in and staying true (yes, that’s a mantra I repeated over and over to get through that ride). And I have no doubt that there were some big fitness gains made over the course of eleven days that will benefit me moving forward, as long as I have the wisdom and mental fortitude to reign things in, to facilitate the recovery necessary from such a big (big, much like pain, is relative and a matter of perspective) training block.
For me, the bike, the water, the weight room, are less about performance (where I care most about performing is working as a performance coach to my clients, speaking to an auditorium full of people, sharing a reading from a book), and more about staying strong, building biological durability and giving myself the space necessary to show up for my family and for my work. There’s a reason for over two decades that I’ve prioritized three things over all else in my life: family, work and fitness. When I’m strong in the water, on the bike and in the weight room, I tend to be strongest as a father, husband, son, brother and friend. When I’m strong in the saddle, I tend to show up present, grounded, focused and intentional for my clients as a coach or presenter. When I’m forty minutes into a long swim or hours into a long ride, that’s when ideas for the next book, the next project, the next creative endeavor tend to come.
So, for me, like so many others, it’s not about a result, a time, a number, or an event. It’s truly about the process. It’s about keeping my body moving, building biological durability physically, so I can keep my mind sharp and build resilience, perseverance and endurance mentally. And if I can inspire, elevate and uplift others through any one of my slashes—while honoring my highest calling of being a dad and loving hard on my daughter and wife—then perhaps I’m living my truest, most conscious and strongest self.
That was a long one, and that’s a wrap. I sure hope it was worth the read and adds value as you bounce forward, strong and steady.
Until next time, head up, eyes forward, feet moving.
With nothin’ but love, mwl