July 24, 2013 by Ana To Athlete

(Un)lucky Number 13

So they say the number 13 is unlucky – I don’t consider myself a particularly superstitious person but perhaps that will change after this! I would like to turn my bad luck into fortune so here is my best spin on the current predicament I am in.

In just under 24 hours I will have surgery on my foot to bone graft and fixate a stress fracture which I somehow managed to get some time around Busselton Ironman last year (almost 8 months ago). How it all came about is a story for another day but the gist of it is, this will be stress fracture number 13 for me.

13 sounds like a lot but I will qualify it by putting things into some kind of context: the first 10 were all sustained during “the Ana years”, so when you work it out that’s averaging one a year during a period where I was running competitively as a distance runner (50-120km/week from age 12-22) and not eating much at all.

The last 3 stress fractures have been more “normal” athlete injuries, for one of a better description. That is, they have occurred predominantly due to training errors on my part, and have occurred over the last 7 years of being a healthy-weight competitive Ironman athlete. I have to add that with my personality type (ie a “Pleaser” and Type-A overachiever), being a Physio doesn’t really help with coaching errors – what the coach writes, I do, no questions asked. That part of my brain that analyses injures for a living doesn’t really factor in much when I am training (that isn’t work time, that’s my fun time!) and unfortunately it’s something I still need to work on in the future to prevent more injuries. While those down times have never been easy – time away from my love, running is always trying – in the past I have always managed to heal pretty well and been able to cross train through them.

Not this time.

Unfortunately this time the fracture was in a tiny bone under your foot called the sesamoid; it has terrible blood flow and so is notorious for being a slow healer. So, despite the 8 mandatory weeks in a boot, the use of bone stim, good nutrition and now over 7 months away from running, it hasn’t healed.

This left me calling for a little help from my friends, who fortunately include a couple of top Sports Physicians and Orthopaedic surgeons. At this point we were left with 3 options: 1) Remove the bone and hope for the best, which would likely include not a lot of running in my future; 2) Go back in the boot for 12 weeks, then operate after if it hadn’t healed – avoids surgery but not a great long-term outcome; or 3) to graft some healthy bone into my sesamoid and stick a screw in there to fix it in place. This would give me a 90% chance of being back to running in 9 months, and back to Ironman training in 12, and the best long-term outcome regarding risk of re-injury. For the medical nerds out there, the surgeon will also do a 1^st metatarsal dorsiflexion osteotomy at the same time to unload the joint permanently.

So, this leads us to the now. Granted, a week before major orthopaedic surgery would seem a strange time to start up a blog but for this little black duck, the timing couldn’t be better. Over the coming weeks I will have forced “down time”, allowing me to get some writing done, but more importantly the next few months are going to be quite challenging. What better opportunity to write about how to best handle it using strategies I have learnt over the last 7 years. My hope is that in the process I can help a lot of people out there – because while I am certain my predicament is unique, I’m just as certain many of you have been through similar challenges (or may face them in the future). I do know that one thing athletes are great at is talking a lot when things are going well, then going into a black shadow when they aren’t racing or training well. There have been many times in the past when I wish that I could have had some advice about how to cope with injuries – mentally, not physically – from the athletes out there, and so I am going to start a trend: talking about it. You can help by joining in the conversation and firing away with any questions or topics you might like covered. I will do my best to entertain and enlighten!

So, wish me luck, and see you on the other side! Hoping I can make 13 into my lucky number – I thoroughly believe everything happens for a reason.

Any questions or comments fire away.

Happy training!

K xo

July 22, 2013 by Ana To Athlete

About Me

About me –

Anorexia and I shared space in my world (Ana hogged it 85% of the time…) between the age of 12 and 21. While the onset was pretty sudden at age 12, of course the interchange between “Anorexia Patient” and “Recovered” labels was not an overnight exchange – but I have put it as age 21 as that was the first time I honestly, truly decided for myself (and was not forced) that I wanted to recover. The actual road to recovery was a rocky one but I am happy to report that I have maintained a healthy weight for 5 years now. It’s part of my history, but I don’t allow it to define me. It is what it is. I would rather not have gone through it, but I do try to now focus on all of the lessons that I have learnt and am certainly hoping that some good will come from it via Ana to Athlete. I still refer to it as “Ana”, or the “Ana years”, for many reasons – not as an affectionate thing, more because “Anorexia” sounds so harsh and scary and brings back too many horrid memories. And I guess, because it’s a safer name, with softer connotations – it’s too easy to pigeonhole people with the more formal name when really, no two cases are ever the same and no two people are the same.

What I am these days, is a Physiotherapist, Exercise Physiologist and director of a successful sports physiotherapy clinic with my amazing husband, who is also a physio. I am a 5-time Ironman finisher (and counting), and my favourite thing in the whole world is running – I think my relationship with running is borderline unnatural. But running and I, we have been through A LOT (I started running at the age of 12, so, you know…..we have a bond that is unbreakable!). I have two dogs, love my job, adore traveling and use baking as my therapy (did you think that went away after recovery? Sorry!! Haha). After almost a decade of Ana, you get pretty good at baking, so as a result I now do wedding cakes as a side hobby to Physio when I am not in full Ironman training (random? Extremely. Overachiever much? Yep that sums me up). I also have a small addiction to roses and forster the “nanna” within by sporadically tending to my rose garden.

Life is magical and you are beautiful. Embrace it.

K xo

July 22, 2013 by Ana To Athlete

About Ana To Athlete

ABOUT “Ana To Athlete”

This blog has come about 7 years after I was officially “recovered” from Anorexia – you know, according to the medical charts you now have a BMI above 18, are menstruating and managing to eat. You look pretty normal, you are expected to be a normal functioning part of society and to have the same normal problems that everyone else has….whoa hold up?! What the hell is “normal” anyway!?

As far as modern medicine goes, you are now recovered, but every ED patient knows that this is where the really hard work starts and alas – there is no-one there to help you anymore. You’re “recovered”, right? So everything must be fine. But no-one taught you how to live. How to laugh. How to enjoy food. How to be OK with this new “healthy weight” body. How to cope with the physiological issues that may remain with you for a while yet. How to address the fears and coping issues that got sent you down the ED pathway in the first instance. And not to mention the depression that is all too common in this stage.

WHAT THIS SITE IS, is a place for those of us who have been through the merry-go-round of “ED-Treatment-Recovery” (often with an addition or six of “relapse-recover-relapse” because let’s be realistic, no-one is perfect….) and have popped out the other side, now having our two feet relatively firmly planted in the healthy side of the ground, 90% of the time (what a mouthful!). My mission is to TALK ABOUT HOW TO LIVE AFTER ANOREXIA. And not just survive, but thrive. With a healthy dose of humour, experience, success stories, epic failures and celebrations. I don’t know it all, not even close. But I do know a lot, and I’ve been through a lot, and I would love to be able to help others in an area that is sadly lacking any information – the bridge between “Recovery” and “Happiness”. I would prefer they not be mutually exclusive anymore! So first and foremost this is a safe place to come to, like a “guide to life after Ana”.

Secondly, hopefully, Ana to Athlete will provide a platform for development of better recovery pathways, so that we can one day aim for reduced relapse rates and reduced rates of depression and anxiety disorders in recovered anorexics. There exists very little in research or practice to bridge the gap between leaving treatment, and achieving full participation in society (encompassing both health and happiness). Too often, the patient goes from a full support network – typically including a dietician, psychologist, nurse, fellow sufferers, and the routine of either a day or inpatient program – and once they have reached their goal weight it is assumed they are “healed”. But the mind is only partially healed, and the situation can be ten times worse because they now look normal – so they are assumed to be coping fine. It can be a fast and slippery slope into relapse from here, or worse – the improvement might remain static, so the person goes on to half-live a life carrying around a sub-clinical eating disorder. Too often, patients can hide behind their sport, “genetics”, or at times, their family network, and it never gets talked about. I would like to see more research and subsequent resources into bridging this gap in the future, and welcome any input from all of you out there regarding ideas and resources based on your personal experiences. In the meantime, I’m going to share what I have learnt along the way to becoming a successful athlete and happy adult following almost a decade of Anorexia.

And of course, as an extension of my recovery – the blog will delve into all that I have learnt about Ironman and in particular, female athletes. How best to train, eat, recover, race, psychologically prepare and generally celebrate life through the amazing sport that is triathlon. I don’t know many Ironman athletes who aren’t preoccupied with food and weight so to a large extent, the content is mutual.

WHAT THIS IS NOT, is a pro-Ana blog. It is not a “how-to-starve-oneself” manual, nor does it glorify ED’s – I wouldn’t wish one on my greatest enemy. Think of it more like a “how-to-love-life-and-become-a-kickass-athlete” guide: jump in and enjoy the ride.

Happy Training!