Hypomania and Productivity

 A week ago or so, I was feeling a little hypomanic. Hypomania, according to an Ask the Doctor article on Havard Health, is: "at least three of the following symptoms for at least four days: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity; decreased need for sleep; increased talkativeness; racing thoughts or ideas; marked distractibility; agitation or increased activity; excessive participation in activities that are pleasurable but invite personal or fiscal harm."

While hypomania can be bothersome and often harmful, when managed properly it can be used to one's advantage. In the article, "March Madness: 7 Signs of Hypomania," by Helen Farrell, she writes, "When the symptoms... coalesce to produce an extremely goal-oriented and focused individual, hypomania can be a good thing. The key is that functional people in a hypomanic state are able to keep their goals rational and concise, and they can plan around them accordingly."

In that past several years, I've continued to work on managing my symptoms in order to keep them from interfering with my life and to harness the energy that comes from hypomania to be productive.

It's interesting how the swings of bipolar can change my outlook and functioning in a short amount of time. Before the hypomanic episode, I was feeling pretty down and ready to abandon some goals. My wife did a nice job of reminding me that my running goals help improve my exercise and that exercise in turn helps my functioning in general.

Then, a couple days later the hypomania hit. Racing thoughts and ideas, increased activity, increased talkativeness and distractibility are challenges to manage, but I feel like I continue to manage hypomanic episodes much better than I have in the past. As a result, the episodes don't last as long and can actually be productive.

In my most recent hypomanic episode, I've cleaned more thoroughly, reined in my talkativeness, written several blog posts, and thought of more ideas for a couple of books I've been working on.

Previously, I've often jumped from one thing to another, leaving things half-cleaned or half-written. I've also tended to set out to accomplish more things than I have time for along with mismanaging my priorities.

Now, I still struggle with some of those things, and I know I'll never be perfect with or without hypomania, but I'm grateful that my management of hypomania has improved.

Be well.

Why So Many Injuries?

 In my last post I wrote about all the running injuries I've dealt with. While I believe some blame lies on genetics, most of the blame is likely from training error.

 The primary training error I've made is running too fast on my easy days. Often, way too fast. In and after college I blamed my coach for my running injuries. It may have been partially his fault — we didn't do much in the way of injury prevention exercises, but other things like static stretching before workouts were not well known to be harmful to performance. 

But, another thing that contributed to my college injuries was doing my easy runs too hard. In fact, I did my "easy" runs with athletes far faster than I and would sometimes get dropped on a longer easy run, and my coach had nothing to do with that. In fact, I'm pretty sure he told us to run at a conversational pace, and I definitely wasn't conversing while trying to keep up with faster athletes.

My eyes opened to my overly-speedy training runs this year when I read the book "80/20: Run Faster and Race Stronger by Training Slower." The thesis of this book is that approximately 80% of training should be done at an easy pace. In a future post I'll explore how to determine that easy pace.

Another training error I've made is not doing enough core and strength exercises. I stayed pretty injury-free in high school, and I think part of that was because I weight lifted several times a week. I like to run, so when I've had time to work out in the past, I usually spent that entire time running rather than working on strength exercises.

Finally, I've increased my mileage too much in the past. That error is an older one as I'm much more conservative with my mileage increases now, but it's definitely contributed to past injuries.

In a future post I'll write about what I'm doing to prevent running injuries.

Stay healthy.

Running Injury Blues

If you follow this blog, you're probably aware that I deal with lots of running injuries. Just because I have, however, doesn't mean you have to. I'm naturally injury prone, and I've made a lot of training errors that have led me down the injury path. In the next few posts you can read about the mistakes I've made, and I hope you can have far fewer injuries than me.

Here are some running injuries I've had since running my first marathon in 2009:

• Patella tendinitis
• IT band syndrome
• Posterior tibial tendinitis
• Calf strain
• Broken leg at knee (from basketball)
• Runner's knee
• Peroneal teninitis (left)
• Metatarsalgia
• Peroneal tendinitis (right)

There's one pro that comes out of that list: I average fewer than one injury per year, so when I sat down and listed these, it was fewer injuries than I thought. Part of this was that I enjoyed injury-free stretches from the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2012 and again from 2016 - 2017.

Unfortunately,  some of my racing seasons were disrupted or curtailed, and one, the spring of 2018, I would have abandoned altogether if I hadn't already been signed up for a marathon. This spring I wouldn't have raced due to my peroneal tendinitis, but races being canceled due to COVID-19 meant my missing the season due to injury didn't matter anyway.

Some of these injuries cleared up on their own and others required some physical therapy.

In my next post, I'll be writing about how my training errors have contributed to my running injuries.

Stay healthy.