The Chemical Injury

You spend a significant amount of your time training and racing, plus juggling work, family, and your social life with your sport. Going for a ride is as common as going to bed at night. But now it’s getting harder to get through the day due to fatigue. Training no longer energizes you like it used to. You’re more irritable than ever. The few pounds you’ve gained, the first in some time, are probably due to your increasing appetite, which includes constant cravings for sweets. And you’re on your fourth cold this year. If you could only sleep as well as you used to. “Luckily I’m not injured,” you tell your training partners.

Well, my friend, you are injured. You have a chemical injury.

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Chemical injuries typically don’t produce pain like their physical counterparts, although some chemical imbalances associated with inflammation can be painful. More often, and by far the most common characteristic, a chemical injury makes you tired. Fatigue is a common complaint from athletes. Either the cause of the problem, or the fatigue itself, may in turn produce other chemical symptoms, with a pattern of falling dominoes like that described above. In addition to fatigue, our chemically injured athlete has irritability, increased weight gain, excessive hunger, frequent colds (chronic infection), and insomnia.

As with any injury, the first step is to rule out more serious conditions, such as anemia, serious infections, or immune disorders. This is often easily done with the help of a healthcare professional who might perform blood tests, take a proper history, and perform a physical exam.

Once serious problems or diseases are ruled out, more conservative methods can be considered after reviewing lifestyle and training factors. Perhaps the problem originated when the training schedule became too busy. It wasn’t just the training log but all of life’s time commitments that pushed this athlete over the edge. Our athlete was squeezing too much activity into an already too busy schedule. For many individuals, this upsets the body’s ability to properly recover—not only from training but from all the day’s activities. And as the months go by, a recuperative deficit builds up. Perhaps a better word is “stress.” The body’s adrenal system is designed to adapt and compensate for all this stress but sometimes the load is just too great.

So, let me piece together the possible events leading to this athlete’s chemical injury. Perhaps it was some early success in racing that led our athlete to increase training for longer competitions. Undoubtedly, total workout times were not only increased but so was the intensity. With that came the added stress of rushing through meals and dashing from the office to a workout, then from the workout back home. Almost all athletes can relate to this scenario.

Initially, the adrenal glands tolerated the increased stress. After all, that’s their job. But like a long event you’re not trained for, the vicious cycle of work, family and social life, training, and racing got faster and more difficult to maintain. Soon, there was less time to do the things that needed to get done, and recovery was hindered. And because our athlete attempted to keep up with life’s busy schedule, eventually the adrenal glands became less effective at dealing with all the stress. At this point, the training equation (Training = Work + Rest) is no longer balanced. Waking in the middle of the night with difficulty getting back to sleep, not an uncommon sign of adrenal stress, further reduces recovery.

With the adrenals not able to keep up, many other bodily functions begin to decline. The blood sugar becomes unstable, which may produce symptoms of fatigue. Also, as the brain is deprived of the sugar it needs, cravings and increased hunger follows. And not only is the brain sensitive to relatively small changes in blood sugar but the whole nervous system is affected. As such, irritability and mood swings may follow. Because of the influence the adrenal glands have on other hormone systems of the body, the athlete’s metabolism can fall. This is due to elevations in the stress hormone cortisol, which reduces the hormones DHEA and testosterone. High levels of cortisol can wake you in the middle of the night, and cause your body to shift fuel usage by increasing sugar burning and reducing fat burning. This can result in more stored body fat, and perhaps weight gain, and coincide with decreased endurance. Now our athlete has to work harder to keep pace even in training. And race results become even more frustrating, contributing to more stress. Inevitably, hunger intensifies—typically for sugar and caffeine—and fatigue worsens; and the vicious cycle continues to maintain, and worsen, the chemical injury.

Excess adrenal stress is frequently accompanied by decreased immunity. With the body’s defense system suppressed, colds and flu, and even allergies or asthma, become more common. Telltale signs include colds that last much more than three days or those that recur a month or two later.

Like any problem you encounter, correction first involves finding the origin. While many people seek relief of symptoms—such as consuming more caffeine to help get through the day—the real cause may linger unless you or a healthcare professional determines the cause.

By avoiding symptom treatments and addressing the cause of the problem, the resolution of a chemical injury is usually not far off. Additional nutritional support for our athlete may be necessary. This might include vitamin A for the immune system or zinc for the adrenals. But if the lifestyle schedule, which may have created the original stress, is not modified, any nutritional remedy won’t be successful, as problems can continually recur somewhere in the person’s chemistry—either the same set of symptoms or a gathering set of new ones.

In addition to all the signs and symptoms associated with this athletes’ chemical injury, these imbalances may cause other dominoes to fall that lead to secondary physical symptoms. They could even trigger a series of problems much like those described above for the physical injury. A common example of a combined chemical and physical problem is chronic inflammation. Joint pain is typically the combination of a physical muscle imbalance not allowing the joint to move normally, and the eventual chemical response to that impaired movement—inflammation. Hence, because both chemical and physical injuries enlist the actions of the brain and nervous system, there’s a risk that these problems will also affect one’s mental state.