Listen to your body - communicate with your coach
A very recent experience brought home to me the importance of these two points. In late April my coaching group rode from the UAE/ Oman border to Khassab in Musandam for a weekend camp. It was a very hot day making the climb particularly tough. On the return cycle journey along the coast, I suddenly experienced sharp pains in my left ribs to the point where I could not continue with the ride and had to put the bike in the back of the car! We originally thought these were spasms of the intercostal muscles. These pains continued for a few days but eventually subsided and were attributed by myself and my wife as being the result of the strain put on my left side during my attempts to steer the Dhow in the afternoon. The pains returned periodically over the course of next month, never as severe but occasionally preventing a full-blown effort on the bike. My lack of power on the bike, I attributed to weakness in my legs from the arthritis which had been diagnosed earlier in the year and was treated by a series of injections in my knees. More recently I noticed I was suffering from some shortness of breath and not able to go as hard in my training sessions as normal, even with swimming. At no time though did it occur to my wife Rianca, or myself, that this was anything more than a strain in my intercostal muscles in the rib cage. However, last week I was feeling progressively shorter of breathe, longer rests were needed during the swim intervals, I needed a nap after the brick session and by Wednesday evening the pain in my left ribs was acute. I slept with a heat pack over the ribs on Wednesday evening, but the pain then reappeared in the lower right ribs. The pain continued through Thursday, and I made an appointment with the GP for Friday morning to ensure there was nothing more sinister. The ECG result was the same as the previous year so it clearly had nothing to do with the heart. As the pains were perceived to be muscular in origin I was given a massage by the in-house physiotherapist. Whilst this did provide some relief the pains had returned by 5pm and I was in the same situatio as the morning, if not worse. What really set the alarm bells ringing was that I was totally breathless after walking up twenty flights of stairs to the swimming pool to give a swim lesson. At that point I decided to send a message to my coach at TriSutto saying that I was feeling short of breath and experiencing stabbing pains in my ribs. Promptly I received a message that I was exhibiting all the symptoms of a Pulmonary Embolism (PE) which is a medical emergency and that I should go and get myself checked out immediately.
Fast forward to the Mediclinic Parkview and I was admitted on Friday evening after a CT scan revealed micro blood clots in the lungs and a low-level bacterial infection. This is a serious condition but not life threatening at this stage as the clots are small. The treatment I received has been excellent and I should make a full recovery.
The lessons to be learned from this are that we should always listen to our bodies and don’t take lightly the warning signs it is giving off. The reality here was that I had probably had the PE since late April and I should have taken the recurring pains in the ribs more seriously at an early stage. Similarly, the shortness of breath and the feeling that I could work out to only 70- 80% of capacity was also a sign.
It is at times such as these that I am grateful to have a triathlon coaching organization such as TriSutto who have my back. Not only do they support me as an athlete but also my continuous development as a coach. With years of experience of coaching and managing both world class athletes and age groupers, they posses a huge bank of accumulated knowledge to pass on and share. Almost certainly they have seen it before and can pass on the appropriate advice and guidance.
Which brings me to the next point - always communicate with your coach. I was recently listening to "The Triathlon Hour" podcast which was talking about the importance of always communicating with your coach and that if you had a coach that limited communication you should sack them off immediately! I agree. I have unlimited communication with the senior coaches at TriSutto and I always make myself available for my athletes. Client confidentiality obviously prevents me from sharing some of the WhatsApp messages I wake up too! What I will say is that the more you know about what is going on in and around your athlete, with the work, personal and social life the better able the coach is to design the training program. Some of the advice that is given may not actually be about training but more with a real-life situation the client is facing in their day job.
One of the best pieces of advice I received from my own coach at TriSutto was that 90% of our job as a coach is to save athletes from themselves and to prevent them from falling down the hole in the road that they haven’t seen. Too often athletes are influenced by what coaching advice they see on social media or what their competitors are doing on Strava. A structured program with regular communication, whether that is verbal or a written text/email, is paramount to a successful and sustainable coach athlete relationship.
I would just like to say a huge shout out to Robbie Haywood @robbie_susie for his immense guidance, patience and continuous attention to detail.
By David Hunt certified TriSutto coach