Revenge of the Vegi

I picked up a nasty stowaway on the vegan train. Not quite full blown food poisoning, but enough to make me lose 2 days of work the past 5 days and feel like a shrinking Hollywood starlet. It seems to have set up camp and is taking great humor in watching me suffer. I haven't been able to even look at a vegetable and the thought of a salad makes my stomach curdle. My happy cows never inflicted such GI chaos no matter how deliciously rare they were. Hell may be heating up again. Sorry Denny. :)

Hell hath frozen over

I'm going vegan.

As in: No bacon. No happy cow (because as Peter @ Counterbalance sez "Jill, cows are only happy when they aren't SLAUGHTERED."). No tasty chicken and avocado. But more than brown rice. More than a salad once or twice a week. The House Where Veggies Come To Rot will now become a veggie sanctuary.

A few comets collided the past few weeks to come to this decision. I haven't been able to eat much variety the past 3 months since I've been on such a restricted diet to heal my belly. My blood test last week showed that I'm anemic in the Bs and folate, plus my Hashimoto's thyroid fun is back. I've been on a host of supplements and digestive enzymes to try and boost nutrient absorption, but as my head's been telling me....there must be a better way. My coworker's husband is vegan and she suggested looking into some of that cooking as a way to put some variety into my meals so I picked up a book that turned out to be a revelation.

It's called "Thrive" and is written by a former Ironman PRO who's been vegan almost 15 years. The background of his book talks all about stress and its impact on immunity and general health, whether sports or work-induced, plus the nutritional stress that we put on our body from not giving it exactly what it needs to function and recover. This book was showing me that the veggies would come with their own enzymes for my belly and the seeds and pseudograins would charge through with their own mini-booster rockets, all of it allergy-free and gut-happy, ready for my body to soak up. Hearing this from one athlete to another, after just one chapter it...all....made....sense. The author has a 12 week menu plan that I'm going to follow with all kinds of recipes that are actually quite amazing. I'm treating this like a coaching plan, except it all revolves around FOOD! So this weekend I headed down to PCC with Kermit and we loaded up our bag with 45# of vegan goodness (ok 7# of that was a bike lock) including......KALE!!. I spent the next 6 hours playing in the kitchen doing all sorts of cooking and soaking and whirring and dish washing that I'd never in my life done before. It was so fun! And through it all sat little Momo next to his dish wondering why Mom was in the kitchen but not prepping his own dinner.



My other big life epiphany: I've come to accept that getting healthy is my focus for the year, whether it means racing or not. The only way I raced last year was from vitamin doping and this year I've pledged to heal up au natural. It's been a huge process for me to accept this, but once I came to peace with it a huge burden was lifted from my shoulders. I was nearly suffocating from the fact that I may never get healthy enough to feel the adrenaline in the pack again or the power that can emerge from within. It's the high that ragged junkies look for on dark city streets, but under the guise of colorful kits and fine-tuned race machines. Instead, I'm working to broaden my empire and to enjoy living even when it's not cloaked in adrenaline. To live slower yet still keep my mind entertained and creative. I start my first art class in 3 weeks. It's on Tuesday nights so while everyone else is at Fast Track training I'll be sitting in front of my drawing paper training a whole new part of me.

The infinite sadness

The oracle I've been seeing told me today that this is a tumultuous month for energy. The change of seasons from winter to spring is like a riptide, with the cold winter forces pushing and struggling against the emerging newness of spring. Seattle has had a more brutal than normal winter, which has made this riptide even stronger and unpredictable. For those of us intimately tied to the ebbs and flows of the earth's energy this has meant an even harder struggle as we wait for spring's influx of energy like cherry blossoms waiting for their own signs to emerge. Our emotions are more vulnerable, our energy waning as winter's grip seems to tighten further. It's not as simple a clinical definition as SAD, but more about how our body's energy is entwined with the seasons and as they struggle to unfold so do we. My oracle said that I may have to accept that I'm not an early season energy person and may have to shift my energy schedule to later in the year. That's hard to accept when I see healthy squid nymphs racing hard on the weekends already.

I've had a winter of supreme highs and supreme lows. In December we figured out the primary reason for my chronic fatigue: an unhealthy gut riddled with damaging bacteria and yeast, antibodies to gluten, egg, soy, and dairy, and a gut lining so inflamed that nutrients would leak right through it into my bloodstream and overtax my liver. In a nutshell, I have an unhappy belly that won't absorb anything. The extent of the damage is so high that it's shocked my doctor and others and must have been ongoing for years. It's a wonder I've been able to get out of bed (although there have been days). The immediate solution was to put me on an extremely strict diet eliminating all sugar, fruit, booze, vinegar, gluten, soy, egg, and dairy, leaving me with an extensive diet of meat, salads, whatever vegetables I innately tolerate, and rice. There have also been lots of probiotics and toxic herbs to kill the bad yeast and bacteria and glutamine to heal the belly. Within a week I had immediate relief and boundless energy. By the end of December my teammates didn't recognize me as I had lost almost 10# and could keep up with the most fit Cat 3s without even trying. I was bionic and overjoyed at having found this holy grail.

Setback #1: Mid-January my doctor's office couldn't get hold of the toxic herbs I'd been taking so I went without for 2 weeks. Energy nosedived, panic ensued, pounds came back. Even after taking them again I didn't manage to regain my new form, but it was still a great deal better than any time before.

Setback #2: Mid-February caught some of the crud going around, but was fighting it well. Then work became overwhelmingly stressful and the Epstein-Barr knocked on my door and stepped back in. Energy nosedived, more panic ensued, more pounds came back. The diet and medicine is all the same, but nothing is making me better. This compounded by the self-initiated pressure of trying to keep up with those training and racing circles around me threw me into a deep, dark cave that I am struggling to crawl out of. My doctor gave me some new tinctures, but they may have been too toxic and taxed me too much so now I wait to heal....again.

I'm tired of being tired, tired of fighting, tired of being well for 3 weeks then having it stripped away, tired of seeing healthy happy people take for granted what I cry myself to sleep wishing I could have, tired of co-pays, tired of drugs, tired of not being able to enjoy what's around me, tired of looking like I age 3 years for every 1, tired of seeing what's supposed to be left of my younger years spent like I'm 70. Tired of people telling me that my head can change it all. I want to whack them with a Thompson seatpost and ask them what their head feels like telling me now.

Somehow while I was high on being healthy in December I ordered a custom Indy Fab Ti Crown Jewel and Campy Record 10. It's my absolute dream bike and a worthy successor to my steel bike and Fat Chance history. At this point I hope it's delayed a few months until the seasons change and my belly heals and I have the energy to put it through its paces. It's meant to be a race machine, not a tool on the Burke. Or maybe until I'm really ready to come out of my cave it will keep me company in bed.

Yo Dan O

Thanks for the old skool inspiration. You've earned one (1) band-aid.