Trauma and Training: Go Hard or Take it Easy?
Trauma.
It’s a word we’ve all heard and an experience many have had.
I consider myself fortunate in that I’ve never had any sort of trauma, at least none deep enough that I can remember.
Happy childhood, a loving mom, dad and brother, no incidents or accidents to speak of.
It wasn’t until weeks after our house burned down in the Palisades Fire that I even realized that experience would be considered a trauma.
And it wasn’t until months later that I realized that trauma affects not only the mind, but the body, even though in this case is was not a physical trauma such as one might endure in a car accident.
It came to pass that I began wondering how being a Fire Person as I like to call myself (neither a fire victim nor a fire survivor) might be affecting me on a cellular level.
It all started with reflecting upon how my exercise (calling it exercise in this instance rather than training as what I’ve been doing these past six months is just moving, typically going long and aerobic but little to no workouts having to do with speed or high intensity. Literally – just getting a good sweat) has been such a life saver, not surprisingly.
The first week or so after the fire, I moved like a zombie. Walking around in a stupor, dumfounded..,. shocked. Just walking along the beach near the hotel we evacuated to, driving a coffee and walking south down the strand and then back up North, day in and day out.
No desire to run, no appetite- just stunned.
I did my first run about a week later, without any regard to pace, and my goodness did that feel good! Over the next few weeks, I began to pick up the pace a little until I found myself running close to 1/2 marathon pace every time I could get access to a treadmill.
I chalked it up to running on adrenaline and started considering doing a 1/2 marathon because… why not?
It’s a distance far more easily accomplished compared to marathon or ironman.
We moved into our rental about six weeks post fire. Very close to the beach, which quickly became the place of my daily run.
Then, something shifted. I found myself running at what I would call a turtle’s pace.
No idea why; there was no injury, I was certainly not overtraining, but, for the first time in my life, I didn’t care.
Since I was only running (hadn’t found a place yet to swim and I still haven’t replaced my bike), which is my most meditative thing to possibly do, I just welcomed the chance to run every single day.
( Some days were even slower than turtle’s pace; it’s hard to run while your vision is blurred from tears and you cannot breathe properly from sobbing!
But still, I was just so grateful to be able to run. )
I began to wonder what was underneath this slow pace feeling and whether or not I should be doing even a little bit of speed work, if only to prevent creating a big gap for when I plan to begin training again.
Turns out my body was giving me just the signals I needed.
Why?
Because trauma actually affects mitochondria! Even emotional trauma.
Traumatic stress can lead to mitochondrial dysfunction, which contributes to various symptoms of the disorder. This dysfunction is often manifested through impaired energy production, increased oxidative stress, and altered cellular metabolism (1).
We’ve all heard the buzzwords; we’re likely all somewhat familiar with the concept of oxidation, and also with the theory that we can simply ‘take antioxidants’ in order to combat oxidation.
Oxidative stress is an imbalance of free radicals and antioxidants in your body that leads to cell damage. It plays a role in many conditions like cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease (2) as well as mental illnesses including bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety (3, 4, 5) and cognitive decline (6).
Once I was up to speed, any ego that remained about trying to pick up the pace, let alone consider racing this season vanished.
Similar in some ways to how I approached my exercise while pregnant and for several months after my son was born, it is quite clear to me now that this is the time for me to be moving aerobically, leaning as much into the parasympathetic (rest + digest) nervous system as much as I can, leaving the sympathetic on the back burner for now (which, admittedly ) is a daily practice.
So… just how long will it take for this trauma to leave my body? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a place to look that up!
All I can say is is now more than ever, I trust the process and trust this body to tell me exactly what I need to know.
I’ll be out there going for Kona again.. just not this season, and that is just fine with me.
(1) https://newsletter.brainenergy.com/ptsd-and-mitochondria/
(2) https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/oxidative-stress
(3) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4052827/
(4) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9951986/
(5) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2763246/
(6) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9357995/
