There's a Hole

There's something missing from my life
Cuts me open like a knife
It leaves me vulnerable
I have this disease
I shake like an incurable
God help me, please

Wow. I'm not handling rest well.

This has been made clear to me by the key players in my life: husband, best friend, coach, kids, my dogs. It is also just plain clear to me.

As a coach I have NO problem assigning rest. It is easy to see from the outside when an athlete needs it.  Someone is still tired three days post-race? Okay! Slow down, Cowboy. An athlete is flat-lining in performance? Okay! Let's take a step back here.  An athlete has been training and racing hard all season? Time for a break, Friend!

It's harder to see when you are the athlete in question. We have trained ourselves to fight through fatigue. It's admitting defeat to recognize that we are human, and need to take a break.

Harder than acknowledging we need rest, however, is dealing with our reaction to rest when we actually take it. This is what I am having a problem with right now.

Rest should be lovely. Your life can be unstructured. You can eat what you want.  You can "reconnect" with all that you have cast aside in order to train. The problem is that if you have taken on triathlon as a way of life--as a life choice, as it were--than un-choosing that life, for no matter how short a time, can be very, very hard.

It is a known fact that a common time for indivuduals to succumb to heart attack is when on vacation. There is a reason for that, and it's not just that we eat fatty food when we take time off. It's that taking a vacation--separating ourselves from the rhythm and cadence of our daily lives-- is stressful.  I know I frequently feel I need a vacation after taking a vacation. The vacation I need, though, is in the form of predictability.

I taught sixth grade for fifteen years, and one thing I learned in that time is that children thrive when the work and play patterns of their day are predictable. Even something like an assembly can throw certain children completely off so they became irritable and upset and unable to focus. Though students often look forward to a break in their daily rhythm, the effect such a break has on them is not always positive.

I bring these things up--the stressful nature of vacation, the way kids respond when the predictability of their school day is altered--because taking rest for an athlete who has worked steadily for nearly a year, is akin to those things. You are breaking the rhythm of the established life, and this can feel very wrong.

For me, the first week of rest is the hardest because it is a cold turkey situation. My body and mind do not react well at all. I get sick, I can't sleep, I am uncontrollably irritable. I have long lists of things to get done, but I am at a loss as to where to begin with these things, and what I really want is a nice hard run to clear my mind so I know where to begin. And there's the rub. Nope! No run for you!

And herein lies another problem... many of us really are "addicted" to exercise from a physiological standpoint. It is no secret that addicts often move from an unhealthy addiction (gambling, drugs, alcohol) to a healthy one (fitness). There is an endorphin release when we exercise, and many athletes rely on this release to stave off depression and to help curb another addiction.  I know this is true for me. I use an anti-depressant (an SSRI, Zoloft) year round to keep the major  life is meaningless depression at bay, but my dosage of it is very small. I use exercise to supplement that small dose, but when exercise is taken away from the mix the depression envelops me like a gigantic, dark wave.

I have the impulse to write a list of things that can help one deal with enforced rest, but because I am personally having such a hard time with it this year, I feel, coming from me, such a list would ring hollow.

So instead I am throwing it out to you.
What do you do to help deal with the inevitable unease and stress that results from disrupting your steady dose of training? I know there are those of you that relish your rest, and think this post smacks of unhealthy, deep-rooted psychological discord. Let's just cut to the chase and acknowledge that this is so--that clearly I, and my brethren who struggle with rest in the way I have described, are in need of years of good therapy and maybe some electric shock treatment.
Other than years of therapy and zapping brain waves, however, what other effective ways have you found to help combat the distress that rest, ironically, can cause?