Fit vs. Healthy

Funny how being sick makes you think about things. In that sense, I think that illness, just like any other misfortune that might befall us, can be a blessing. Ah, grasshopper, I can think back to Ironman Brazil when it turned out that being physically sick was a blessing to me at the time.

But I digress. Herein I present more ruminations on the endurance life.

Premise: Triathlon training and racing can be part of a healthy lifestyle, or it can be used to push one's boundaries of fitness only, which may or may not be part of a healthy lifestyle.

Definitions (credit to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

• Fit (adjective) 1) : adapted to an end or design : suitable by nature or by art (2) : adapted to the environment so as to be capable of surviving
• Healthy (adjective) 1 : enjoying health and vigor of body, mind, or spirit (implies full strength and vigor as well as freedom from signs of disease)

Discussion
Here is some interesting reading on endurance sports and health: http://www.arthurdevany.com/archives/endurance_training_death_injury_and_risk/index.html

One's triathlon fitness is a pretty easy thing to measure--the ability to complete a given race distance in a given time. The faster the time, the more fit you are relative to everyone else in that race. One can argue that the ability to complete a triathlon under normal cutoff rules (let's say 2 hours for a sprint; 4 hours for Olympic distance; 8 for 1/2 Ironman and 17 for Ironman) implies a high level of fitness; although we've all heard stories about people completing the distances on little to no actual training. Now, depending on how much under those cutoffs a person goes would appear to be a fair indicator of one's fitness compared to others doing the same event. This is not to say that the individual's fitness relative to a previous benchmark they set for themself isn't exceptionally high or improved; it's just that relative to the field, that person is less fit than someone who went faster (eliminating mechanicals only--execution errors are related to one's inherent fitness and cannot be discounted from their effect on finishing time).

So person A, who is 25 years old and goes 4:45 in a HIM, is more fit than me, person B who is 49 years old and goes 5:48. Doesn't matter that person A is so much younger, they are more fit. It is unusual, at least in recorded history, for many 49-year old women to go that fast in a HIM. Now what about person C who is also a 49-year old woman and goes 6:30 in that same race? She is less fit than me and person A.

Easy enough, right?

Now who is the healthiest? We would have to take into account many, many factors, like routine blood tests, weight, cardiovascular and other testing. How often do these individuals get sick in the course of a year? How often are they injured? Are they able to perform well at their jobs? Are they happy? Are they fully functioning members of society? Are they vital? Do they have love in their lives?

You wouldn't make a statement that whoever trains the most is the healthiest, would you? In fact, I think that the less a person trains to achieve the same overall time is probably the healthiest! Now that doesn't mean the finishing time they are seeking is a "healthy" number; rather it means that the time taken away from the rest of their life has been minimized relative to that goal.

Which is better? Health or fitness? I think many endurance freaks automatically think that fitness implies health and that more is better. More might be better from our mind's desire for progressively bigger endurance tests or faster times, but it doesn't imply we are getting any healthier as a result. We might think we feel better when we have reached a training peak in anticipation of a big event, but I think that feeling is primarily mental. Certainly once we start to taper, our bodies go through all sorts of issues in reconciling the sudden drop in training volume, and of course, our minds aren't far behind. I think it's our bodies trying to get back to that equilibrium point of health. Sure we might have needed to train 10-20 hours per week to achieve the level of fitness to reach our time or distance goal, but our bodies are smart enough to know that we don't really need to do that much for health!

There are many people for whom the adoption of a more active lifestyle leads them down the path to better health, and this is a wonderful thing. But it's important to keep perspective that if what you are seeking is health that this should give you pause along the way to consider what you are doing and why, and how you can keep the scales tipped more towards health rather than just pure fitness.

For example, I seem to want to run. I am still not sure how much I actually enjoy it, for it can be difficult to separate the desire for the endorphins and the ability to eat more from the actual doing of the running, but I do know that because I am missing a good bit of cartilage in one of my knees that any excess weight that I carry is just adding insult to injury, and so if I intend to keep running for whatever reasons, that I should keep weight off my frame. The amount of running I do may or may not be considered excessive and conducive or even destructive to my health, but at least I think I'm minimizing the impact by keeping my weight down.

There has also been a good bit of obesity and Type II diabetes on my mom's side of the family, and in respect and fear of both, I am committed to keeping my weight down, my intake of fat to a minimum, and do my best to limit my intake of sugars outside of training and recovery nutrition.

Another example is sleep. For now, at least, I like to train a lot in my effort to get faster at the 1/2 and full Ironman distances (and anything shorter, truth be told!). But I recognize the need to be able to recover from the training as best I can, so I try to average over 8 hours of sleep per night. So I pat myself on the back when I hear of others training at the same level that I am who claim to exist on 5-6 hours of sleep per night. I may or may not be healthier than them, but I feel like I might be. Who can really say?

Does being light, eating very little fat and minimal sugars or sleeping a lot make me healthier? My only hope is that it makes me relatively healthier than I would be if I still did the same amount of training but paid no attention to those other things.

Does Ironman or even marathon training (insert any other endurance event that requires, let's say, over 7 hours a week of training to be respectable at it) make a person healthy? Certainly aspects of remodeling your life in order to fit in the training can lead to greater health. But now let's assume that we have a person who is training 10+ hours per week, sleeping seemingly a good amount, has a healthy weight, gets a regular annual checkup including the standard indicators of health, has a happy family and social life, and is not a substance abuser. And we have another person, same characteristics, except that they only exercise 5-7 hours per week. Who is healthier? Without doing some extensive testing, we don't know. And by extensive, I mean both physical and psychological!

I believe that the person who is exercising less is probably healthier. Why? For one that person needs to eat less food. While are bodies are pretty good at keeping up with whatever caloric demands we place on them, digestion is work, and it creates a lot of toxins, so I think that less is more.

But who is to say when the full picture of health is inspected that some of these "more is better" people (myself included, at least temporarily) wouldn't be as happy doing something else or less of whatever it is they are doing? Like I said in my previous post, if you want to be really good at ANYTHING, it takes intense desire and commitment. To tell a person to set their sights low just because it may not be in their best health interests, is, well, not currently in my vocabulary.

The point of this discussion is that it is important to periodically step back, look at yourself and what you are doing (even if it's not endurance sports), and figure out whether there's a way you can keep doing it but be more healthy doing it. If there is, JUST DO IT!

I know--I am one to talk. I did an Ironman with a sinus infections. But I have also DNF'ed Ironman races twice, and both times, I felt my health was in imminent danger. And I'm learning to just stop it all when I'm feeling under the weather. I no longer buy into this "above the neck, go ahead" crap. I can miss several days of training and come out OK.

After all, this is just a hobby! I really enjoy being fit--correction, hyper-fit, but I enjoy just being healthy even more.