In one of my recent posts I talked a bit about exercise in relation to the Primary Foods concept and a bit about how I slowly got back in shape as I healed up from SIBO. I thought this topic deserved a bit more discussion since it is an important part of my life and I know many people who are currently struggling with how to get back in shape after being ill for a year or longer.
Before SIBO I was in the best shape of my life. I had come off a solid year with a personal trainer, I had run several trail marathons and an ultra marathon and was pretty much doing 13+ mile trail run every Saturday. When I got sick all that fitness went out the door. I lost a lot of weight, down a total of 35-40 lbs and with that weight went a lot of muscle mass. With Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV)( coursing through my system I was exhausted and seriously unable to get up and do much of anything so all my cardio conditioning went out the door too. After a year of this I went from being in great shape to being in the worst shape I’d probably been in for most of my adult life.
Something had to be done and so as soon as the EBV was knocked down and the SIBO levels went down to the point where I could function again I started working to get some conditioning back. This had to begin very slowly because I knew that if I pushed myself too hard I was just going to get sick again so I began with the simplest form of exercise possible – walking. As crazy as it sounds at first I couldn’t even walk a mile without having to stop and sit down to rest a bit, I tried on the 4th of July with the family on a flat, paved walk and had to just stop for 5-10 minutes before being able to keep going on. The walking really started just going down the little trail in back of my house, walking along the river for maybe 1/4 mile at a time. When I could finally do that without feeling wiped out I increased the distance slowly while staying on flat terrain. I finally could walk the half mile to “downtown” and back after maybe a 5-6 weeks of building up my endurance.
About this time I decided to start biking again. I went out and bought a casual bike, not a road racing bike, one that was comfortable and easy to just go for a slow ride on. Catherine and I began taking short rides around town and after a month or so I got to where I could do the 5-mile trip to get our CSA box and actually make the 5-mile ride back home. I kept increasing my biking on the roads and the rails-to-trail system around our house to where I could do a 20 mile round-trip to go fish a small river close by. While biking I kept up walking too, never doing both in the same day but trying to get out 4-5 days a week. As my walking distance got to where I could do 4 miles on the paved, flat trail I started adding hills and getting back on trails.
Finally I was able to do an easy 5-6 mile hike on trails and that is when I decided it was time to start running again. This started out really slow, I would trot for about 30 seconds then walk for 10 minutes, trot for 30 seconds and walk, repeat. I would do a 4-5 mile walk and maybe ‘run’ about 4 minutes of it but it was a start. I slowly increased the amount of time I would trot and decreased the amount of time I walked until I could finally do 3 minutes of light jogging and 2 minutes of walking. At this point I started doing short trail runs of 1.5-2.5 miles and would walk any steep sections but otherwise run at a slow speed. When I got to the point I could do a 5k run and run it all I then began to increase my speed and distance. I think the first 5k I did was the slowest 5k I had ever ‘run’ but I finished it.
All of this took a year basically, to go from not being able to walk a mile to being able to actually finish a 5k fun run. After that I got seriously back into running again and used some of the runs last summer and this Winter Trail Series to increase my distance from 5k to 10-miles and work on my speed. Since I had lost so much weight I suddenly found myself being fast and actually finishing some events near the top. I set a PR in the 5k in the mid-summer last year, a PR in the 5-mile a month later and finally PRs in 10k and 10-mile distances during the fall. I used the Winter Series this year to build up my base from 30 miles or so a month to now 60 miles per month and I finished in the top 10 overall in the Winter Series. Now I’m going to be running a Half Marathon Trail Series and several 25k events this spring and summer so I seem to be mostly back in the running arena though I doubt I’ll get myself back up to marathon and ultra distances since those are hard on the body and I’m not sure I can eat and run at the same time after dealing with all the digestive stress I had.
The other thing I had to do was get my muscles back everywhere in my body, not just my legs. Weights are the only way to do this and so I started lifting again. I started out with just a Bowflex adjustable dumbbell set and a pull-up bar and again, slowly, very slowly worked into it. Instead of doing long weight workouts and many reps I used very heavy weights so that I could only do 8-10 reps before I failed on an exercise, this is the best way to build up muscle, not pumping 3 sets of 15 with lighter weights. I recently heard a great podcast by Ben Greenfield on getting fit again after a chronic illness and this changed the way I workout completely. Now I aim for 4-6 reps with a moderate weight level but move ever so slowly through the exercise. Doing a bench press, take 30 seconds to lift those weights and another 30 seconds to bring them back down breathing evenly throughout the process. It is amazing that after just 2-3 reps the muscles are on fire. This idea came from Body by Science by Doug McGuff, MD. McGuff argues you can do a complete workout in about 12 minutes a week by focusing on 5 movements and doing them very slowly. This puts no excess stress on the body yet works the muscles to the point of exhaustion and gets quick results. His ‘Big Five’ workout consists of:
- Bent-Over Rows
- Standing Overhead Press
- Dead Lift
- Bench Press
- Squat
I’ve been able to do all of this with my dumbbell set either at home or at the gym, no need for fancy machines.
I had been going to Gold’s Gym to do weight work for a while with machines but got bored on them and after finding out about the Body by Science workout changed my mind about that. I left that gym and instead joined a rock climbing gym where I could get back into climbing and be moving in ways that are natural and not contrived on a machine. I now go bouldering at the gym at least once a week and it feels much more in line with the Paleo lifestyle I’m trying to lead than a standard gym. Amazingly I hadn’t climbed in over a decade but within a month am back up to the level I used to climb at, just like riding a bike.
Overall it has taken me about 18 months to get from horrible shape to being for the most part back to really good shape and faster than I’ve ever been in my life which is pretty amazing even to me. We will see how the increase in distance to 13.1 and 15.5 miles goes over the coming weeks and months, it could be that is too much still and I need to scale back but I’m willing to push a bit to see where my limits actually are again.