writing or wrote or could write the book on this but I am going to see who if anyone has anything to say about it and shut my mouth for bit… but first…let’s throw out some bait and see if this snags any comments of value.
Coach Charlie Francis for sure, without any doubt in my mind suffered from high levels of undiagnosed anxiety. Why the heck has it taken me this long to say that, bring it up and open the door for discussion. ( maybe soon I will tell you but not ready yet and might never be ready )
I wonder why? ( I have a few theories) …
Oh, one more thing… cause you know this might save someone…
Angie Bailey my friend, she told me years ago she had severe anxiety. What did I do about it? ZERO. ( she was so fun and so cool and talented? OMgosh.
Everyone knows or should know that sleep is the corner stone of any kind of performance.
Let’s put it another way. We are able to learn all sorts of things about one’s performance by looking at and learning how one sleeps.
I have been a fabulous sleeper and worked hard to ensure excellent sleep.
Sustainable performance in any area requires a person to know how well they are sleeping, resting and regenerating otherwise the training might look like someone is literally running around or sprinting around in circles.
Re sleep, I din’t realize until recently how much I was messing up my sleep and how much that has done to me. Hopefully I’ll do better.
Regarding anxiety and elite performance, I’m actually reading Touched with Fire right now. It’s about how many great writers have had serious mental health issues annd it was a part of them that they couldn’t turn off. People have a lot of advice for normal people with anxiety and for people who do regular work those tips might work fine but it’s not fine if it takes away your ability to soar. I’m a writer and I can say that my best writing comes on days when I’m on the edge of sanity. Then things find me that they don’t when I’m in a placid state (oh, I should weep for us all, if the placidity of the Cow, or somesuch, were the Ideal we must seek!). I take modafinil for my anxiety and it works well but I can’t do good creative writing on it.
I’ve only personally known one elite athlete and her anxiety drove her coach crazy.
Sleep is the cornerstone of high performance that is sustainable over time.
severe mental health = multitudes of chemical imbalances stemming from a variety of discussed and not so much discussed causes ( abuse, trauma which is physical and or emotional intentional or otherwise the list goes on… BRAIN HEALTH and TRAINING HEALTH = this is what we are going to start talking about more of
No one wants to talk about brain health and training health but guess what? It’s happening anyway.
here are some business that are addressing neuro chemical needs of our gut and brains for human health and there for the new frontier of true elite sprinting and elite performance of all things we wish to pursue including writing and juggling and sprinting and loving and staying married and not dying at 61 years of age because of preventible STUFF.
MOSH ( who owns it and runs it? Super cool business )
ERGOGENICS ( an athlete with a very good idea)
BULLETPROOF = some fake performance stuff in this imho. good ideas on anabolics LOL ( ironic right?) We were putting oil in our shakes to do fall and spring training
Metabolic diet = Mauro was always anti culture and likely still is. He was talking about diet and performance when no one was
Let’s use information of the things we know for sure to accelerate knowledge about training health for elite sprinting. NOW we are talking about sprinting fast, breaking records and not only living to tell about it but learning to talk about how to enjoy all of the journey and extend the journey and share the journey.
I have not read Touched with fire. The book sounds interesting and thanks for sharing it Juggler.
Writers are cool and interesting people. They might be some of the only humans wandering about that are in the right kind of mind space.
Charlie was an amazing writer and so is his son. I wanted him to re-write a next version of Speed Trap and his manual but we just ran out of time.
Dr. Daniel Amen points out the importance of knowing if you are able to adopt certain habits regarding your performance.( coffee is one example only) He’s one of a few online people who have been around for a long time and been doing amazing work educating people with his content about functional health and medicine. Check him out because his contribution is notable.
Chemical imbalances for mental health: Not proven, look at articles like those below. Commonly, in biological matters, it is necessary to consider - Cause, Effect, Correlation, Coincidence. Along with placebo and nocebo these dimensions are incedibly difficult to unpick even for medical interventions. Let alone for supplements.
We are all better off sticking with more widely accepted, simpler and cheaper alternatives. Drink more water, eat a diet that does correlate with long term health, eg Medditeranean or Japanese, supplement specific likely defficiences such as vitamin D in winter etc.
Brain health interventions beyond medically proven ones are a waste of time until proven otherwise, unless you are a big fan of placebos.
Our own wellness or debating the wellness of large, highly organized ( oxymoron) bureaucratic medical dogma of the past 100 years?
I know what I want. Oh wait. I have been learning this since I met my late husband because…
For anyone interested check these books out and their authors as each of them have high quality and well establish research and free content.
Here are some interesting thought leaders changing lives of people and their loved ones.
Oh and this guy has been the lead researcher in one of the studies on the links above. That study proved… sorry, I could not read further to see what was statistically relevant or not. What I know for sure is DR. DANIEL AMEN and TANA AMEN are helping many including me and my family for decades now. thank you dr and tana amen.
Dr Dale Bredesen UCLA prof and the only thing he is doing with mice for the past 30 years is helping families and their loved one’s reverse disease such as Alzheimer’s. ( The End of Alzheimer’s) Rather than accept my mom’s memory loss i decided to do different after falling down on the job for Charlie. I did my own DNA testing and starting doing some unofficial research. You know the kind others do on this site for 20 years for free now. Anyway, if I listened to articles on this site I might as well coach my mom now to take the suicide pill. I perfer to inundate with protocols from masters in their field like Bredesen.
Final call out to an amazing woman is DR. TERRY WAHLS. She is a middle aged, midwestern woman who found herself in a wheel chair due to MS. She too via her protocol reversed the symptoms of her illness. One of her books is interesting " The Wahl’s Protocol Cooking for Life". Too hard core for most but if or when it’s life or death I pick hope and life over what Charlie’s doctors thought they knew. He died almost 5 years to the day of diagnosis.
Oh, another person worth noting is Andrew Huberman Stanford school of medicine, he is really stirring things up with his free podcast. He, like Charlie went to Stanford. Not a bad school.
So Amos has been able to unpick the influences of 94 validated Alzheimer contributory genes providing a 60-80% risk factor for the disease with the rest being numerous environmental factors. Mostly based on white caucasians. And identify the relevant life style factors that can be used for treatment. He has eliminated the myth there is no treatment to cure, delay or stop progression. Amos has done this using a sample size of 10-100 people. Because all the academics, medics and drug companies who have spent decades and billions of $ are wrong.
And his flagship programme is available for only $365.
Presumably his programme is based on - dont smoke, dont drink (too much), eat a healthy diet, sleep, exercise and wear a seat belt.
Of course any lifestyle improvements can improve health outcomes but anecdotes dont make statistical cures.
Dr. Daniel Amen who has not one or two NYT best selling books but many. He along side with his business partner and life partner have been changing how the general public view and have thought about brain health.
Anyone with a computer has access to his website here and he has so many free blogs which cover many brain health topics life depression and anxiety only to name a few.
I wish I had access to their content when I was trying to perform at my best.
I was always hungry, full, tired and almost never feeling even or balanced. Gee whiz i got tired of the high and the low and dips and the valleys of my mood.
I always felt Amazing when it came time to compete. That is a very small percentage of time in the scope of 365 days out of the year. Thank-goodness extreme exercise has been an enormous aspect of most of my life.
Thankfully Charlie was “even Steven” so to speak but was he really or was he ULTRA patient? He was so patient with me and so many others. At least we were opposites and so similar in many ways as well.
No one really likes to talk about some of this. I find it fascinating that we can now learn about our genes and how to enhance how our genes might perform better and understand our personal warning signs.
As a one copy APO4 gene carrier ( just one example) I am able to follow a certain diet which reduces my risk factors. With specific nutrient advice and trial and error with guidance from some of these Md’s, we are literally able to customize our performance on and off the track. I think this is a pretty exciting fact.
I think the track world in general is lucky and fortunate that Coach Charlie Francis had the passion to drive his self started business by selling his Aston Martin sports car and do things science is only proving now 30 plus years later.
I wonder if Andrew Huberman knows of his former and late alma mater Coach Charlie Francis.
We will be talking lots more about the Brain, anxiety and how it effects our performance short, long term and in and off the track.
I know it’s making many of you squirrely. Guess what? That resistance to discuss something that is at the core of who we are is also part of optimizing your brain and or part of showing others your lack of brain health and brain flexibility.
Everyone has anxiety but some of us have too much or out of balance issues going on which thankfully we know so much more about in 2022. Why are we not openly discussing this topic on one of the most incredible spots for free info regarding speed training the world has ever had and or seen. And it’s accessible to all who have access to computers.
Where is the second brain?
I will give anyone one hour free consult, ask me anything off the record phone consult skype, facetime, phone chat to anyone who answers this first on this site or via my social channel. YOur identity will not be published. ( VALUE = priceless Lol, I am so funny.
Sport wasn’t my passion but I was a decent enough athlete from a small town and the youngest child of 3 older siblings that were all athletic and smart and accomplished. I wanted to keep up and show off and get their attention. It was fun to try and see if I could do the same or better than Lori, my only sister. And then I had my two brothers always telling me what I could do. I got to play tons of sports growing up and loved each of them.
Anxiety is something I have only recently started to understand. Damn I wish I understood this 40 years ago. But you know what they say?
“Best time to dig a well is when you are not thirsty”
Or
“Best time to grow a tree is 20 years ago, next best time is NOW.”
I love both of those sayings. They guide me.
My passion has always been MORE and PERFORMING. does not really matter what it is either. It’s a game for me. I know understand that it’s part of how my brain has been wired and the exciting cool part is I finally get it and finally am able to see a piece to my personal puzzle.
OCD
ADD
ADHD
BIOPOLAR
ANXIETY disorder
Mood issues = up or down and difficult switching back and forth
Happy
Sad
Angry
rarely anything in between / zero balance
WHITE or BLACK
Now I see grey and all the colors of the rainbow.
I see happy and sad but also context and understanding and empathy and reason and the list goes on…
Charlie helped regulate me and I guess I did the same for him.
Stability is essential for some more than others. ( that would be me)
Why do any of us care about my ranting on about this?
YIKES. once you learn about something it’s tough to unlearn it. The good news is then we can address it and we can PERFORM BETTER. ( that is the part I really like and dig. My son likes to tease me about many things and one of the most painful things that used to really hurt me was he teased me about NOT making the Canadian Olympic team. I am funny but he is even funnier and he has his father’s humor. But each time he said this to me I pretended I did not want to jump off a building ( kidding but not so much LOL) I am able to laugh now and let it go and think it’s really interesting why my entire life has been spent holding onto " what ever" so tightly it was literally making me sick.
One major thing that has helped me with my ‘stuff’ is addressing what ever it is Head on.
Today i am hoping to go to Barry ONTARIO ( it’s about one hour north of the city of Toronto) and pay respects to my James’s late father’s first cousin. Long story but I feel CMF and I and our little fam missed out on tons of things in our families as a result of silliness that occured post Sept 1988.
I made and am making person commitments to myself to go get anything in my power that will help me move on.
thank you to each of you for your roll in my life and my families life.
Thank you for supporting my family.
Thank you for reading and talking and supporting something larger than each of yourselves.
I am here and I support you and I will continue to help you in any way I am able. Be patient please and thank you with me and our work and never ever stop learning and do not give up on you and your pursuit to love you and Sprint fast. I am so lucky and happy I allowed myself to follow my heart and dream of being as good as I could be on the track. Now I am going to continue that idea off track ( while still squeezing in the as often as possible speed session)
Lol, I am so funny.