Healing
During the summer of 2012 I was in the best physical shape of my life. Seven years after graduating from college I found myself running my fastest 5K times ever. The difference maker for me was training my body to use fat as a fuel which improved my training and racing. Adding fat burning training to my routine on top of the core strength, stability, and years of running helped take me to the next level. In the late summer and fall of 2012 I ran some of my fastest 5Ks ever, ran a fast half-marathon and generally felt the best I had ever felt.
The following year I picked up where I left off in the Spring of 2013. I usually run a lot less in the cold winter months and focus on more yoga and weights to maintain strength. So I resumed my long distance training in the Spring and it was business as usual. I could feel I was getting in better shape as my runs were getting easier and easier.
The weekend of July 4, 2013 was one of the best weekends of running I've ever had in my life. I had Friday off from work so it was a 3 day weekend that I took advantage of by helping myself to a few 2+ hour runs through the woods. Thursday afternoon I got home from work and went for a run. I got up Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and felt like I was floating through the woods for well over 2 hours.
Now I am trying to talk about healing and I'm trying to get to the point but it's important you understand that the weekend of July 4, 2013 I was at a peak physically, mentally, spiritually...everything was clicking. Each of my four runs went somewhat the same. I would start out very slowly and focus on my breathing. I made sure to breathe through my nose at all times and kept my breathing in rhythm with my stride, breathing in for 3 strides and out for 4 strides. By the end of each run I was typically rolling along so relaxed I could feel bundles of stress melting and pealing away from my energy field.
Then on July 9, 2013 I was brought right back to square one. All of my fitness was gone in an instant. The happiness and joy I had while floating freely through the woods was replaced by a crippling depression. The strength and endurance I had built was replaced with weakness and chronic fatigue.
The Tuesday after my magical weekend of running two very bad things happened. First, I woke up that Tuesday morning, checked my phone, and was horrified to learn that my best friends girlfriend had passed away overnight. Needless to say this broke me up big time. I was stunned and saddened to the point of not even knowing what to say or do.
For reasons I will never fully understand, I went into work that day. Mentally I was in no place to be there but I think it was my way of not dealing with the emotions head on. Even as a yoga teacher who lives and breathes this stuff, when it came to the real heavy stuff I had to tuck tail and run away.
So I ran from the trauma and at some point in the day the second horrible thing happened. I don't know when as I never felt it, but at some point in the day a cowardly brown recluse spider bit me on the ankle and the knee. If you don't know what a brown recluse spider is, or the drama they bring let me try to explain it to you.
A brown recluse spider doesn't just attack you physically, it attacks you mentally, emotionally and spiritually as well. The effects didn't hit me until the following morning when I woke up feeling like I had the flu. I rarely get sick, especially sick enough to miss work but that day I don't know if I got out of bed once. It was like the flu and pneumonia both hit me at once. At that time I still didn't know I had been bit by the spider.
It wasn't until three days later on Friday that I noticed a large, disgusting red wound on my ankle and off to urgent care I went. The doc investigated and concluded that I had been bitten by a brown recluse spider, an ailment for which there are exactly zero medical treatments for.
Dealing with the problems from the bite took a very long time. Being that there was no medical treatment for brown recluse bites I was on my own as far as healing from it went. It was through fighting through the brown recluse bite that I began to explore the healing benefits of yoga.
Up until that point I was generally pretty healthy with no major injuries or pain. After I got bit I had pain in every part of my body at some point. For a couple days the pain might be in my knee, then it might move to my foot or my shoulder. It was very bizarre and very annoying. I tried every yoga tactic I knew of to try and alleviate the pain.
I had moderate success here and there but nothing really stuck. I might have a pain free day or two but then the pain or stiffness would come roaring back at some totally random spot in my body. There wasn't much information online about dealing with a brown recluse bite and I felt like I was facing this challenge all alone. I was up against all these physical ailments from the bite while also trying to process an unexpected and heartbreaking death.
During the time I was dealing with the bite I was working on my album "Spiritual Warfare - A Hip Hop Tale Based On The Bhagavad Gita." I recorded the album in Newport, RI which was a few hours from where I loved and I would listen to my demo versions of my songs on the way to the studio before recording the final versions. I was headed to record one day, still dealing with migrating pain when one of my own lyrics stuck out to me:
The following year I picked up where I left off in the Spring of 2013. I usually run a lot less in the cold winter months and focus on more yoga and weights to maintain strength. So I resumed my long distance training in the Spring and it was business as usual. I could feel I was getting in better shape as my runs were getting easier and easier.
The weekend of July 4, 2013 was one of the best weekends of running I've ever had in my life. I had Friday off from work so it was a 3 day weekend that I took advantage of by helping myself to a few 2+ hour runs through the woods. Thursday afternoon I got home from work and went for a run. I got up Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and felt like I was floating through the woods for well over 2 hours.
Now I am trying to talk about healing and I'm trying to get to the point but it's important you understand that the weekend of July 4, 2013 I was at a peak physically, mentally, spiritually...everything was clicking. Each of my four runs went somewhat the same. I would start out very slowly and focus on my breathing. I made sure to breathe through my nose at all times and kept my breathing in rhythm with my stride, breathing in for 3 strides and out for 4 strides. By the end of each run I was typically rolling along so relaxed I could feel bundles of stress melting and pealing away from my energy field.
Then on July 9, 2013 I was brought right back to square one. All of my fitness was gone in an instant. The happiness and joy I had while floating freely through the woods was replaced by a crippling depression. The strength and endurance I had built was replaced with weakness and chronic fatigue.
The Tuesday after my magical weekend of running two very bad things happened. First, I woke up that Tuesday morning, checked my phone, and was horrified to learn that my best friends girlfriend had passed away overnight. Needless to say this broke me up big time. I was stunned and saddened to the point of not even knowing what to say or do.
For reasons I will never fully understand, I went into work that day. Mentally I was in no place to be there but I think it was my way of not dealing with the emotions head on. Even as a yoga teacher who lives and breathes this stuff, when it came to the real heavy stuff I had to tuck tail and run away.
So I ran from the trauma and at some point in the day the second horrible thing happened. I don't know when as I never felt it, but at some point in the day a cowardly brown recluse spider bit me on the ankle and the knee. If you don't know what a brown recluse spider is, or the drama they bring let me try to explain it to you.
A brown recluse spider doesn't just attack you physically, it attacks you mentally, emotionally and spiritually as well. The effects didn't hit me until the following morning when I woke up feeling like I had the flu. I rarely get sick, especially sick enough to miss work but that day I don't know if I got out of bed once. It was like the flu and pneumonia both hit me at once. At that time I still didn't know I had been bit by the spider.
It wasn't until three days later on Friday that I noticed a large, disgusting red wound on my ankle and off to urgent care I went. The doc investigated and concluded that I had been bitten by a brown recluse spider, an ailment for which there are exactly zero medical treatments for.
Dealing with the problems from the bite took a very long time. Being that there was no medical treatment for brown recluse bites I was on my own as far as healing from it went. It was through fighting through the brown recluse bite that I began to explore the healing benefits of yoga.
Up until that point I was generally pretty healthy with no major injuries or pain. After I got bit I had pain in every part of my body at some point. For a couple days the pain might be in my knee, then it might move to my foot or my shoulder. It was very bizarre and very annoying. I tried every yoga tactic I knew of to try and alleviate the pain.
I had moderate success here and there but nothing really stuck. I might have a pain free day or two but then the pain or stiffness would come roaring back at some totally random spot in my body. There wasn't much information online about dealing with a brown recluse bite and I felt like I was facing this challenge all alone. I was up against all these physical ailments from the bite while also trying to process an unexpected and heartbreaking death.
During the time I was dealing with the bite I was working on my album "Spiritual Warfare - A Hip Hop Tale Based On The Bhagavad Gita." I recorded the album in Newport, RI which was a few hours from where I loved and I would listen to my demo versions of my songs on the way to the studio before recording the final versions. I was headed to record one day, still dealing with migrating pain when one of my own lyrics stuck out to me:
I'm a raw deal, like a vegan
and I don't care what you eat
I eat beats and I'm feastin
-Metal Wings
and I don't care what you eat
I eat beats and I'm feastin
-Metal Wings
Beats! I mean Beets! Beets...something about beets. I kept replaying the song and listening to the lyric again and again. It wasn't just the slick wordplay and double-entendres that caught my attention. There was something to this whole beet thing.
After me and my engineer put in a few hours of recording we broke for lunch. Newport, RI has great food and we were able to walk to an organic smoothie/sandwich establishment. On this particular day my injury of choice was frozen shoulder, meaning, I could not move my left arm at all, which was making things challenging. So me and my buddy go into the restaurant and look over the menu. Almost immediately I see a juice called "red power" prominently featuring beets!
I ordered a red power and my friend ordered a mango juice but the guy mistakenly gave us two red powers so I got a free bonus juice. We took our food and drinks back to the studio and had lunch.
Now what I'm about to tell you next you will probably think is a lie or at a minimum an embellishment of the truth but I kid you not this is the truth and nothing but the truth. With every sip of that red power juice a little bit of my pain went away and some of my mobility returned. My friend couldn't believe his eyes. He thought it was a ruse. He thought I had sat there previously for upwards of three hours with my left arm completely frozen in place only to begin moving it after sipping beet juice.
To be honest I myself was stunned. After the first juice I could move my arm again. It still hurt a little but it was a lot better. Figuring you can never get too much of a good thing I chugged the second juice and the difference in my shoulder and arm was astounding. Beet juice fixed my arm and I got the idea for it by listening to a rap song that I wrote and recorded myself.
Somehow, I had managed to record a clue for myself before I even got bit by the spider. At the time I wrote the lyric, I didn't even really eat beets the food I just liked the wordplay of the line. So the first thing that really helped me out with healing from the bite was good old fashioned beet juice.
Once I got a taste, I started hammering the beet juice daily and made huge progress. Of course, then I got lazy and stopped and the pain would return even months after the bite! I would think I was all set and then BAM the pain is back, the depression is back. I had to kick it up a notch if I wanted to beat this thing for good.
Another thing that helped me out tremendously was taking a sauna but at the time I didn't have access to one and only got the chance to take a sauna a few times during the spider bite battle. I continued to try to find ways to rid myself of the ongoing bouts with random pain.
It's no surprise that I found the answer to my trouble at a workshop at the Kripalu center. I attended a weekend with John Douillard and from there began to piece together a plan of attack to rid myself of the spider bite symptoms for good.
Strangely enough, the way I got rid of the pain for good is fundamentally the same thing I had been doing before I got bit which was increasing the use of fat for fuel. As it turns out the spider's venom likes to lodge itself into fat cells, which as we all know can stick around for a while. This is what I mean when I say the brown recluse is a formidable adversary. It finds places to camp out in your body and makes it very difficult to get rid of.
The weekend with John rekindled my focus on fat burning training and helped me realize that if I wanted to take care of this once and for all I would need to get my body back to being a vehicle that runs on fat for fuel instead of sugar.
Most people run on sugar for fuel. Runners especially run mostly on sugar. In fact, there are many in the running community that are aghast at the very thought of burning fat for fuel! A lot of people think they are addicted to coffee because of the caffeine which is true, however, you are likely also addicted to the sugar.
Everybody knows this already. You eat and or drink some sugar, ride your burst of energy and then either crash or consume more sugar to keep the energy going. Burning fat for fuel is a consistent slow burn and is how I was able to go on the runs mentioned above completely fasted and feel amazing before, during and after.
For me moving away from the sugar paradigm and training my body to burn fat as fuel has been life changing. It was what put me over the top in terms of sustainable endurance training. It was also what helped me get rid of ongoing lingering symptoms from the spider bite.
Once I got re-focused on fat burning for fuel the pain and relapses seemed to come less and less. I've been able to move and exercise more consistently and am finally getting back on the peak fitness path after years of challenges mostly related to the bite.
Without yoga in my life I wonder if I ever would have fully healed from the events from that day. It's not just the physical venom the coward spider injected me with, it is all the emotional baggage that comes along from hearing the news your best friends girlfriend passed away and getting bit by a villain spider on the same day.
Why did this happen to my friend? Why did this happen to me? Of all people and all things, how did I manage to get bitten by a spider that is not even close to native where I live? Brown recluse spiders are supposedly not indigenous to anywhere close to where I live but one still managed to find me! And there is no treatment! I managed to find the one medical condition there is absolutely zero treatments for. The doc wouldn't even hook me up with a placebo he just said your on your own good luck with the yoga!
Blah, blah, blah you know how the chatter of the mind gets going especially strong when you are sick! Well if I didn't practice my yoga and meditation throughout dealing with this spider bite that chatter would still be going strong to this day.
See, my yoga practice has given me a different perspective on my experience. Looking back, it's an experience I cherish for several reasons.
First, as a running coach I have helped hundreds of runners deal with pain and injury. I was very lucky to have great high school and college coaches as well as learn yoga at a young age and prevent a lot of the issues that occur with runners. Because of that I never really knew what it felt like to deal with plantar fasciitis or runners knee. I could asses the potential causes in the runner. I could see possible compensations. I could even work with the runner on fixing the problem. But I didn't know what it really felt like to have that injury.
After the spider bite I knew because I ran through every possible pain point in the body and "injury" you can imagine, a few times each. I had a few bouts of plantar fasciitis. I mean...I had the exact symptoms of plantar fasciitis for a couple days, then it would go away. I had them all. Frozen shoulder, runners knee, the feeling of throwing my back out, headaches, IT band syndrome.
So in a way the bite was good because now I have the experience of every injury there is. I mean, within reason. I didn't break bones or anything like that. I think you get the idea.
Anyways, that's the story of my spider bite fiasco and how yoga helped me heal from it. Without my yoga practice I really think those events could have taken me to a very dark place and who knows what could have happened from there.
After me and my engineer put in a few hours of recording we broke for lunch. Newport, RI has great food and we were able to walk to an organic smoothie/sandwich establishment. On this particular day my injury of choice was frozen shoulder, meaning, I could not move my left arm at all, which was making things challenging. So me and my buddy go into the restaurant and look over the menu. Almost immediately I see a juice called "red power" prominently featuring beets!
I ordered a red power and my friend ordered a mango juice but the guy mistakenly gave us two red powers so I got a free bonus juice. We took our food and drinks back to the studio and had lunch.
Now what I'm about to tell you next you will probably think is a lie or at a minimum an embellishment of the truth but I kid you not this is the truth and nothing but the truth. With every sip of that red power juice a little bit of my pain went away and some of my mobility returned. My friend couldn't believe his eyes. He thought it was a ruse. He thought I had sat there previously for upwards of three hours with my left arm completely frozen in place only to begin moving it after sipping beet juice.
To be honest I myself was stunned. After the first juice I could move my arm again. It still hurt a little but it was a lot better. Figuring you can never get too much of a good thing I chugged the second juice and the difference in my shoulder and arm was astounding. Beet juice fixed my arm and I got the idea for it by listening to a rap song that I wrote and recorded myself.
Somehow, I had managed to record a clue for myself before I even got bit by the spider. At the time I wrote the lyric, I didn't even really eat beets the food I just liked the wordplay of the line. So the first thing that really helped me out with healing from the bite was good old fashioned beet juice.
Once I got a taste, I started hammering the beet juice daily and made huge progress. Of course, then I got lazy and stopped and the pain would return even months after the bite! I would think I was all set and then BAM the pain is back, the depression is back. I had to kick it up a notch if I wanted to beat this thing for good.
Another thing that helped me out tremendously was taking a sauna but at the time I didn't have access to one and only got the chance to take a sauna a few times during the spider bite battle. I continued to try to find ways to rid myself of the ongoing bouts with random pain.
It's no surprise that I found the answer to my trouble at a workshop at the Kripalu center. I attended a weekend with John Douillard and from there began to piece together a plan of attack to rid myself of the spider bite symptoms for good.
Strangely enough, the way I got rid of the pain for good is fundamentally the same thing I had been doing before I got bit which was increasing the use of fat for fuel. As it turns out the spider's venom likes to lodge itself into fat cells, which as we all know can stick around for a while. This is what I mean when I say the brown recluse is a formidable adversary. It finds places to camp out in your body and makes it very difficult to get rid of.
The weekend with John rekindled my focus on fat burning training and helped me realize that if I wanted to take care of this once and for all I would need to get my body back to being a vehicle that runs on fat for fuel instead of sugar.
Most people run on sugar for fuel. Runners especially run mostly on sugar. In fact, there are many in the running community that are aghast at the very thought of burning fat for fuel! A lot of people think they are addicted to coffee because of the caffeine which is true, however, you are likely also addicted to the sugar.
Everybody knows this already. You eat and or drink some sugar, ride your burst of energy and then either crash or consume more sugar to keep the energy going. Burning fat for fuel is a consistent slow burn and is how I was able to go on the runs mentioned above completely fasted and feel amazing before, during and after.
For me moving away from the sugar paradigm and training my body to burn fat as fuel has been life changing. It was what put me over the top in terms of sustainable endurance training. It was also what helped me get rid of ongoing lingering symptoms from the spider bite.
Once I got re-focused on fat burning for fuel the pain and relapses seemed to come less and less. I've been able to move and exercise more consistently and am finally getting back on the peak fitness path after years of challenges mostly related to the bite.
Without yoga in my life I wonder if I ever would have fully healed from the events from that day. It's not just the physical venom the coward spider injected me with, it is all the emotional baggage that comes along from hearing the news your best friends girlfriend passed away and getting bit by a villain spider on the same day.
Why did this happen to my friend? Why did this happen to me? Of all people and all things, how did I manage to get bitten by a spider that is not even close to native where I live? Brown recluse spiders are supposedly not indigenous to anywhere close to where I live but one still managed to find me! And there is no treatment! I managed to find the one medical condition there is absolutely zero treatments for. The doc wouldn't even hook me up with a placebo he just said your on your own good luck with the yoga!
Blah, blah, blah you know how the chatter of the mind gets going especially strong when you are sick! Well if I didn't practice my yoga and meditation throughout dealing with this spider bite that chatter would still be going strong to this day.
See, my yoga practice has given me a different perspective on my experience. Looking back, it's an experience I cherish for several reasons.
First, as a running coach I have helped hundreds of runners deal with pain and injury. I was very lucky to have great high school and college coaches as well as learn yoga at a young age and prevent a lot of the issues that occur with runners. Because of that I never really knew what it felt like to deal with plantar fasciitis or runners knee. I could asses the potential causes in the runner. I could see possible compensations. I could even work with the runner on fixing the problem. But I didn't know what it really felt like to have that injury.
After the spider bite I knew because I ran through every possible pain point in the body and "injury" you can imagine, a few times each. I had a few bouts of plantar fasciitis. I mean...I had the exact symptoms of plantar fasciitis for a couple days, then it would go away. I had them all. Frozen shoulder, runners knee, the feeling of throwing my back out, headaches, IT band syndrome.
So in a way the bite was good because now I have the experience of every injury there is. I mean, within reason. I didn't break bones or anything like that. I think you get the idea.
Anyways, that's the story of my spider bite fiasco and how yoga helped me heal from it. Without my yoga practice I really think those events could have taken me to a very dark place and who knows what could have happened from there.