Written by Christopher Kelly
May 12, 2015
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly and I'm joined today by my wife and food scientist, Julie Kelly.
Julie: Hello.
Christopher: Today, we wanted to talk to you about exercise addiction. And to know what I'm talking about, I thought it might be good to highlight the story that happened to me a couple of years ago. And the reason I'm thinking about it now is because we just got back from an eight-hour bike race at a place called Boggs in California. And not long before I did that race the last time, so not this time, I'd been training for another bike race also in Northern California in Marin.
And I crashed my bike and I hit my leg on a rock. I was actually crossing a creek at that time and I couldn't see a hidden submerged rock underneath the water. And I sort of ended into it and cracked my leg on a rock. And I broke it. And the first crazy thing I did was I rode out. I completed half a lap probably five to ten miles on this thing. And then I drove home in an Audi TT with a race heavy clutch and it was my left leg that I'd broken just then.
At least I did something sane. I went to the sports medicine place in Walnut Creek. At that time I got really good PPO health insurance. So I went to this sports medicine place and they x-rayed it and said, "You've broken it. And here it is. It's your fibula on the outside." Which is a very thin but non-weight bearing bone. So you can walk around on it. It doesn't really hurt. It's a dangerous injury in that way. I got some advice from my coach that maybe wasn't best advice. He talked about how osteoblast, which are bone cells, need stimulation in order to deal. And I was like, "Well, if a little stimulation is good, then a lot of stimulation must be better."
So I decided that I could keep on training and I was planning on going to the BC Bike Rice, which is this huge seven-day stage race in Canada at that time. And I thought, "I really got to get the volume in now." Now was May and the bike race was in June. "This is the time to really be going for it. I'm going to stick to the plan. I'm going to keep doing my exercise. I'm going to meet these goals. And I'm going to get great results."
Julie: Meanwhile?
Christopher: Meanwhile, yeah.
Julie: Your significant other?
Christopher: Yeah. That time, Julie was racing mountain bikes too and so there was this eight hour race bugs and we both went there. I was originally supposed to be racing and, of course, I couldn't really ride the mountain bike because it was just too rough. It was too painful. But, of course, I thought, "That will be all right. I will just go to the bike race with Julie and she can do the bike race and I'll just go off and ride by road bike." The roads were really nice around that area. So that's what I did. And, I guess, my point here is to try and make people understand just how addicted to exercise I was. I rode 100 miles with a broken leg.
Julie: You were 200 miles with a broken leg because you rode 100 miles that day and then the next day I was exhausted and wanted to go home and we were all ready to go and you were like, "You know, I think I'm going to ride home." So you rode all the way home. It was another 100 miles. You did two centuries in a row with a broken leg. And it was nuts because all the rest of us were looking at him like, "You shouldn't be doing this."
And it just didn't register. It didn't even seem like it was something you should think about. You just thought it was totally normal and that it was fine. So we all just shook our heads and said, "Okay. Well, you're grown up so make your own choices."
Christopher: To give you an idea, I didn't have my leg in a cast. I didn't ride with a boot on or anything like that. You've probably seen these boots that have like a pump up inflatable insert and so you can make them really stiff and rigid. And I just took the boot off in order to be able to ride my bike. And I rode 100 miles.
Julie: It's totally insane.
Christopher: I came back to the bike race. I nearly died by that time as well. I was so not fat-adapted like now. I was consuming ridiculous amounts or sugar. These were like one gel every 40 minute days. It was pretty bad.
Julie: This was kind of the breaking point because you did Kalish probably a month after this, I think we found Kalish.
Christopher: Yeah.
Julie: Yeah.
Christopher: This was kind of the tipping point almost. But, yes, so we slept in the car that night. It was possibly the worst night of sleep I've ever had in my life. It was awful. You can imagine sleeping in the back of a Subaru with a broken leg.
Julie: Our air mattress deflated.
Christopher: I know, our air mattress had a hole in it and it was freezing.
Julie: I can't believe we're still together.
Christopher: Yeah. We didn't have any way to even heat water. So got up in the morning, rode my bike 100 miles back to Oakland with a broken leg. And then the next day, still faithfully sticking to my training plan, the one that my coach laid out a month before without ever knowing what would happen in a month's time, which is kind of wacky when you think about it.
[0:05:09]
But anyway, I went to go out again on my road bike and I went to hop like a one-inch curve and it was just on a bike path that I happened to be riding along. And there was just kind of a weird popping noise and then excruciating pain. And it was worse than any of the pain I'd experienced with that injury up until that point. Like I couldn't do anything. I just wanted to lie down on my back and just kind of--
Julie: Cry?
Christopher: It was bad. It was some of the most pain I've ever experienced. It was really bad. I did a one-legged pedal back to the sports medicine place. I just left the office and that's also in Walnut Creek. And so they did another x-ray and they said, "Yeah, you've really broken it now. I can see gaps in between."
Julie: Are you happy now?
Christopher: "I can see gaps in between the bones now." So at that point, it was time for surgery. Mentally, emotionally, I just completely freaking lost it, didn't I?
Julie: Yeah.
Christopher: You came and picked me up.
Julie: Yeah, it was bad news. I came from San Francisco so I took the train and got my car and I came and picked you up. You were just out of sorts. But you kind of were the whole time. The first round of this break, you were definitely in denial and definitely kind of detached and I would say kind of in shock. And then at this point, when the real break happened, the bigger break happened, you were still like now you were really in shock and kind of just reeling. You didn't know what you were going to do.
You could not fathom how you could not ride your bike for the next six weeks. How was life supposed to, how was the world supposed to keep spinning if the bike wasn't spinning? And you were already devising a plan when the soonest you can get on the trainer. And I could tell the sports medicine lady didn't want to say anything because she was like, "If I give this guy even a little, like the smallest inch of hope for riding, he's going to be on his trainer tomorrow."
Christopher: I think, yeah, the kind of knowing a little bit of anatomy wasn't useful in this situation because the fibula can actually -- I heard from a surgeon that you could actually remove it and the person would still be able to walk because it's a non-weight bearing bone. But I'm not sure that's the best advice, right? Really, you just have to take it easy. But, I guess, my point with telling you this story is to make you understand that people really do become addicted to exercise in the same way as they get addicted to narcotics or sex or stealing things or anything else. I think it's a sign and a symptom of something else going on.
Julie: Yeah, I think that's the point. I think it's asking yourself at what point does it cross the line and what's really truly driving me to do this? Is it my love of the sport or is it because if I stop doing it I experience something I don't want to experience?
Christopher: So that's what I want you to think about is why are you doing your training plan? Is it to get the results? So say you have some specific goals. In this case, I wanted to do really well at this BC Bike Race thing in Canada. But you and I both know that riding mounts with a broken leg is not the way to achieve that goal. And just because you say that that's what you're doing, it doesn't make it so. That doesn't mean it's necessarily true.
I think what's really going on here is you're using or I was using exercise as a crutch to support my state of mental health, which was pretty poor at that time. I was addicted to exercise. And the reason I wanted to do it so badly was because it made me feel normal. When I was riding my bike, it wasn't like I was getting a high. It was just it brought me back to a baseline. And I had so much stuff going on at that time. My gut was a mess. My hormones were just--
Julie: You were completely and totally anemic. I mean, you were completely iron deficient. You had pinworm. You had--
Christopher: I was like a walking corpse, just waiting to die basically.
Julie: You're still not even fully recovering from celiac.
Christopher: Right. So there's still stuff I'm working on. But, I mean, it's just night and day compared to how I was. We've just opened up my organic acids test result from that time. This is 2013. It's not really that long ago. It was a couple of years ago. The organic acids test is cool because it shows everything that's going on inside basically. It's a huge test. But there's a whole section on neurotransmitters, which I think is interesting, looking back at that at this time. When I first saw this test, I was like, "Wow, look at this. This is like a huge computer science problem. All these variables mean something. And I could go and found out what they all mean. This is fun."
[0:10:04]
And that's how I got started being really interested in the testing and all of this stuff. And now, when I look at my organics profile, the first thing I think is, "Wow, this guy had a lot going on." It's like will you just count the number of markers on the summary page? It's busy, really busy. But the neurotransmitter turnover section is interesting because this organic acid vanilmandelate, which is a breakdown product of epinephrine and norepinephrine. So this is adrenaline. And mine was like almost un-measurable, like really, really low.
So this is adrenal fatigue. This is just like your adrenal glands have so given up and just on more catecholamines. There's no more adrenaline for you. This is something that's designed to save the day when you get chased by a tiger or there's a road accident or something and you've had your lot, like you've just overdone it and now there's nothing left. And, of course, when I did the salivary cortisol test, it told the same story, super low cortisol, low DHEA, non-existent testosterone, really bad news.
And then there's homovanillate. I love the names of these organic acids. Maybe I should just use the numbers. But homovanillate is the breakdown product of dopamine. And dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter that's involved in reward. So when you're addicted to something, dopamine is the excitatory neurotransmitter that motivates you to go get that thing. It's a bit different from the straightforward reward. It's not like you ate some Haagen-Dazs ice cream and then you got a big squirt of dopamine.
It's the dopamine that gets you off your bum to get the Haagen-Dazs ice cream from the gas station down the road before you even eat it. Do you see what I mean? I mean, it's like kind of this is addiction. When you look at lots of different substances that people get addicted to, they really only vary in the amount of dopamine that they cause the release of. So when I look at this super high turnover of dopamine, I look like someone that's ether super stressed out or addicted or something is going on.
I know I need to give a talking to to this person like, "You need to discover Headspace," which is what happened for me and that changed everything. I think that's about it. I'm hoping that by saying, telling you all this stuff that maybe you can recognize some of the signs and symptoms that maybe you're being affected by some of this stuff and that maybe you need to start digging into the testing and seeing what else is going on for you if you are--
Julie: Ask your friends. Ask your significant other.
Christopher: Yeah. Is this reasonable behavior? Especially as we all know -- So at this time, I was doing a training plan that probably was between 20 -- Average week for me was between 20 and 30 hours of cycling. And then I did strength training on top of that. And that's just not reasonable for even a cat one cyclist that's doing pretty well. You don't need to do that much training in order to be competitive as an amateur. You really don't.
Julie: You shouldn't. You shouldn't have to do that.
Christopher: You shouldn't.
Julie: And if you do, then we need to have a conversation about why.
Christopher: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm sure people that listen to this podcast, they also listen to Ben Greenfield and Mark Sisson and other people like that, that had been talking about the low volume high intensity type workout plans that get just as good if not better results with less than half, in some cases, the amount of time. And so what was I thinking? And that's what I do now, like half the amount of volume and still get the results. So ask yourself, are my goals aligned with what I'm doing in the gym? Or am I going to gym just because I'm addicted to it, because I've got something else going on?
Hopefully, this was helpful. Let me know, get in touch, how are you addicted to exercise. I really want to know. Yeah, cheers.
Julie: Bye.
[0:14:26] End of Audio
© 2013-2024 nourishbalancethrive