A couple of months ago I published a post entitled "Riding Under the Weather", a reference to both atmospheric conditions as well as to feeling less than terrific. The feeling less than terrific part of that has become worse recently, and I felt that was worth another post. The primary manifestation of the current "feeling less than terrific" is a severe lack of energy such that I find it difficult to do much of anything. As a result of that, my cycling has been drastically reduced and I wanted to use this post to explain how that happened.
To what do I attribute this lack of energy? In the first place, periods of low energy are something I have experienced on and off for most of my life, but I must say the current one seems like more than just that. A recent change in my life is that my lower back problems (including sciatica), which started about ten years ago, recently got much worse to the point I contacted my doctor for help. So far, I have done two things to help with my back pain and sciatica, a daily medication to help control the pain and weekly sessions with a physical therapist. These seem to have helped, reducing the pain from intolerable to annoying. However, I wonder if some combination of the problem and the cures might be contributing to my lack of energy. One possibility is that low energy might be a side effect of the pain medication. A second possibility is that the pain itself creates fatigue. A third, the one I am going to concentrate on in this post, is that the exercises I am doing at the behest of my physical therapist might be using up some of the energy that I had formerly been able to devote to cycling.
The picture at the top of the post is of the physical therapy office that I have been going to once a week. This is my first time doing physical therapy so when I started back in February I had no idea what to expect. It turns out the core of the program is exercise. The staff evaluated me, worked with me to develop a set of exercises that are consistent with my needs and capabilities, taught me to do the exercises using proper form, got me started doing those exercises at home, and when that was all done, I graduated: I stopped coming into the office, instead doing the exercises at home on my own. I admit that I was skeptical that this would work, but while physical therapy hasn't cured my back, it has definitely made it better to the point I may be able to live with it. But guess what, the exercises responsible for that benefit, like all exercise, generates fatigue.
My physical therapy didn't affect my cycling at first, and I'm guessing there are two reasons for that. The first is that my physical therapists, as part of the process of assessing me and developing a plan, started out slow and worked their way up in terms of volume and intensity of exercise. Eventually we reached a point where we decided that I couldn't easily do much more, and that is where I have been for a couple of months now. Thus, the exercise I was doing at the beginning of my physical therapy was relatively modest such that it didn't noticeably affect my cycling. The second reason that it was only recently that my physical therapy interfered with my cycling is that fatigue builds up over time. An experience I have had several times since I restarted cycling fifteen years ago is that if I increase my training, it is only six weeks or so later that I realize if I have increased it to a level beyond that which I can sustain. I think that is what happened with my physical therapy exercise. While I was developing my program, I was focused on its difficulty only in the context how much of that exercise I could do by itself, not thinking about any impact it might have on my overall exercise, e.g. the combination of physical therapy and cycling. It was only after my body started telling me that I could not sustain that combination of exercises that I realized what was going on.
How badly did this affect my cycling? The effect was devastating; it has been more than four weeks since I have done an outdoor bike ride. I still ride, but my rides are thirty minutes on my indoor trainer. I have been trying to do them six days a week in Zone 2 (moderate difficulty), but even that has been too much. I am supposed to do my physical therapy exercises seven days a week. I have been doing a trainer ride just before to warm up. But some days, I am so tired I can do neither of these. Some days, I hop on the trainer and find that a Zone 2 ride is more than I can handle, settling for a Zone 1 (easy) ride instead. All of this supports the idea that my fatigue is real.
What can I do about this unfortunate situation? At my last office session before "graduation", I spoke with my senior therapist and between us we came up with a plan. He divided my therapy exercises into two groups, flexibility and mobility exercises and strength building exercises. He suggested I do my flexibility and mobility exercises seven days a week as before, but that I reduce my strength building exercises to four days a week, doing them on days where I do not have a physically difficult day. I have little control over some things that can make a day physically difficult, things like babysitting, family activities, and the like. However, it has occurred to me that, absent any of these, I could make up to three days a week "hard" by going back to doing longer, outdoor rides on those days. In addition to adjusting my physical therapy, I have upcoming doctors appointments about my back, and working with my doctors could open up other options. Will these approaches work, or is this the end of my second cycling career? Stay tuned to find out.
