For about 5 years now I’ve suffered with an intolerance to gluten. It first arose shortly after I went through a very intense 6 or so months, where I basically stretched my body beyond its limits and something “gave in”. As an endurance athlete, I was rightly subscribing to the school of thought that I needed to “fuel the engine” and this meant loads of carbs. In our western diet this tends to equal, bread, pasta, cereal etc etc. When my body began to give in to the demands I was placing on it, the excess of carbs and in particular wheat based carbs, resulted in my body beginning to reject things. Some people are born with this, which is known as Coeliac’s disease; others like me develop intolerance to it. We (the latter group) can grow out of it, but it takes a lot of time and isn’t always possible.
Fast forward to last week and I’m now what I would consider a fairly well educated (in coeliac terms at least) a gluten-free savvy chap. Gluten is a protein found in certain grains (most commonly known being, wheat, rye and barley(malt), though there are many others too. It is basically the thing which makes bread and cakes hold together in a nice squidgy, soft and elasticated way. To those of us [sufferers] who an eat it, the damage caused by gluten to our bodies is in the simplest terms focussed on the intestinal lining. Back to biology now… stick with me… The intestines (small and large) have a folded structure all along the inside to maximise the surface area and consequently the ability to absorb all the good stuff from what we chuck in our mouths (hopefully this food actually contains good stuff – Christmas pudding sadly doesn’t fall into this category!). When gluten does its damage, it basically erodes these folds in the intestines and increasingly damages the body and its ability to absorb anything from food. Over time, with continued exposure, this damage can be substantial and incredibly dangerous to people’s physical health (and as you’ll see, mental health too).
What this all means in real terms is that the body isn’t getting the fuel… or anything it needs to keep itself operating properly. Now where an added complication comes in, is the wider, more external and internal symptoms that sufferers experience. Coeliac’s disease is often referred to as the chameleon disease, because it can have many different and changing symptoms and different people suffer some different ones. Often confused with IBS, eczema, fatigue, depression, vitamin deficiencies and more, sufferers can spend a long time treating those issues without realising the real cause.
My landlady (who is also gluten intolerant) will get severe stomach cramps and start throwing up if she gets gluten in her and will feel ill for 2-3 days. For me personally, it's longer lasting and in what I do (the whole triathlon malarkey) very damaging. Some of the symptoms will be itchy rashes (oddly only on certain parts of my body like my face, feet and knees), poor hair and nail condition, bloating and extreme fatigue!
You see, it's not only the calories from food that I’m not absorbing, but the vitamins and minerals too. So all the things I need to actually do anything, like create energy (remember the Krebs cycle from biology???) create new skin cells, maintain hair colour or create chemicals in my body like hormones simply aren’t getting absorbed into my body enough. It's basically an extreme example of what bad or malnutrition does to you body. The problem I face is when I accidentally get gluten in my system, (provided it's only a short term exposure to it) the damage is done, and it takes quite some time for my body to recover. The erosional damage that’s been done, needs to be repaired and this takes time and of course energy, proteins, minerals etc… all of which, I’m already not absorbing enough of anyway.
So last week, when I accidentally bought some nut and dairy (but not gluten) free muesli, within 12 hours of eating my first bowl, I was already noticing the tell-tale signs appearing. Falling asleep during the day, itchy knees and a complete lack of metal motivation led me to retrace my eating steps and discover the killer muesli lurking like a “free-from” assassin!!!
The reason why this is so bad for me and triathlon though is that I simply cant and also don’t even want to train. More than an hour of hard exercise and I’m shattered for the next 2 days. Mentally, I loose almost all motivation, concentration and focus. On Friday morning, my turbo session warm-up felt like a threshold set, and less than 5 minutes into the first interval and all I wanted to do was fall asleep on my bike. I literally could rest my head on my handle bars and doze off! This is neither good for training, or for functioning generally as a human!
The good thing is it's not permanent, though I’m sure every time I suffer from it; the damage isn’t quite fully repaired to its previous state. It's normally about 4-5 days before I start to feel an improvement and can begin to train again; 2 weeks later and I feel back to 100% and can train and function in general, like I would expect to.
However, I’ve learnt that what's important when this happens is to make the most of it. Just because I can’t physically get fitter doesn’t mean I can’t be getting better! My coach (@T2Coaching) reminded me of Kipling’s epic “If” poem; and adapted my training so that we still used the time effectively. Things that didn’t require motivation to endure, such as flexibility and conditioning work; technique work and also mental skills are all still possible and easier to accomplish when it's only 15-20 minutes of focus that’s required. I read recently (vague paraphrase here) that the best athletes are the ones with the best “Plans B’s”. Hopefully the last weeks worth of plan B has been pretty good and effective in still improving and moving forward without wasting anything. In the mean time, I’m going to check labels more than the price when it comes to buying from the “Free-from” section.
