039 ☼ A visit from Captain Obvious

Keeping track of everything

Welcome to my email newsletter 'Never not [thinking about] running' - a weekly newsletter about running and mental health. If you haven't subscribed yet and you're not sure whether you really want to receive an e-mail from me on every Tuesday, have a look at the archive. Todays newsletter is about the impact of everyday stress on your health and how I want to keep track of it.

In 2016 I was at a race in the danish national triathlon series. During the swim, I suddenly could not breathe, I felt my heart rate go way up and I thought that I was going to pass out. [..] Later I had a talk with my trainer and he asked me about my allostatic load. Completely confused, I asked him what the heck allostatic load was? My trainer told me, that just like we have a physical capacity of what we are capable off, we also have a mental load of what we are capable off. And just like if we push ourselves to the max in training every day we will end up over trained, if we push ourselves too much mentally over time we will experience burnout. And what I just experienced at the race was a panic attack, which was probably caused by too long of a period with too high allostatic load. So I started tracking my daily capacity on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being right up at that allostatic load limit and 1 being the other end of the spectrum. This simple tracking reveals when you are near your limits signaling the need to dial it back just a bit in advance so you can stay in the game and keep on pushing rather than getting kicked out by burnout. So if you're getting up to a 4 or 5 on a regular basis you likely want to dial it back just a bit. Objective markers like heart rate variability can also help you asses capacity and is something that is worth looking into.

Nicklas Rossner (Youtube)

This is an unusually long quote that I stumbled across on YouTube recently and which I found quite interesting. It deals with an approach that I have actually wanted to incorporate into my daily training routine for quite a long time, but haven't implemented to this day. Namely, documenting not only sporting stress, but also everyday stress. Because, as everyone knows, everyday stress also has an impact on my/your training, but my smart ring/smartwatch mainly registers the influence of sporting stress on your “readiness”.

And this is where the concept of Allostatic Load comes into play, which deals with the influence of stress on health. The concept is still relatively new and was only first researched at the beginning of the 90s and since then the number of studies has remained at a manageable level, but there are already various results that are quite interesting. If you use Google, you'll find a lot.

Allostatic load represents the ‘wear and tear’ of chronic stress on the brain and body that may differ between men and women. A small but growing number of studies are assessing allostatic load in relation to mental health.

Philippe Kerr et al. (2020) - Allostatic load and women’s brain health: A systematic review

The findings indicate that allostatic load and overload are associated with poorer health outcomes. Assessment of allostatic load provides support to the understanding of psychosocial determinants of health and lifestyle medicine. An integrated approach that includes both biological markers and clinimetric criteria is recommended.

Jenni Guidi et al. (2020) - Allostatic Load and Its Impact on Health: A Systematic Review

I don't want to make this too long today. Of course, I also have the impression that stress is also affecting my sport. Spring was once again extremely demanding in terms of family life, which of course also had an impact on my training. How often was I ill and how well did my running training go? The answers to these questions are very often and very bad.

But of course that's just a gut feeling and that's why I would really like to collect the daily stress value described by Nicklas Rossner to see how the perceived stress level changes over the year and how it affects training if necessary. Do you keep a record? What are your experiences? Please let me know in the comments!

Running update

Last week was pretty fast. After the race last Friday I did an easy run on Sunday, but then went into the new week with two pretty fast sessions. One with intervals and one tempo run. After an another easy run, I had a long run on Saturday in the summer heat, which was pretty demanding. Decided to start this week very slow with no running and just resting a few days. Despite the fact, that I’m tired, my thigh still hurts from time to time. On Thursday my physiotherapist will have a look at it.

Mental health update

Being tired always means more mess in my head. I’m fine, but the family-vacation is getting closer, which is demanding for me (the journey, leaving my safe-space), but on the other hand I’m really looking forward to a change of scenery, no work and some mountains. Besides that, I have to keep my shit together for three weeks, because there is no therapy during this time.

The end

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