What the Navy, a CPAP, and a stubborn body battery taught me about rest
Most athletes think they are operating at full speed ahead. They are not. They just think they are.
I learned this in the Navy. Full speed ahead is a command, not a default setting, and even then it is rare. Most of the time you are adjusting course, conserving fuel, holding station, or repositioning. There is no such thing as a straight line at sea, and there is no such thing as a straight line in training either. The athletes who understand this last longer than the ones who do not.
I am writing this post late because I should have published it on Friday. I did not. I was tired. Not the kind of tired you push through, the kind of tired that has been building for weeks and finally caught up with me.
Here is the part that might land with some of you. I started CPAP therapy recently and it has added almost 90 minutes of sleep per night. By every metric that should make me a better athlete and a better human. Instead I feel worse. Judge Judy agrees. My Garmin body battery has not crossed 50 in almost a month. Most days it tops out between 25 and 30, which is the kind of number you usually see on the back end of a hard block, not the front end of a recovery one.
The data is telling me something I already know. My body is repairing things it has been neglecting for years. Better sleep means deeper sleep, and deeper sleep means my system is finally doing the work it could not do before. That work costs energy. The fatigue is the cost of getting better, not a sign that something is wrong.
If you are newer to this sport, or if you remember what it was like to be heavier and out of shape and trying to build something from nothing, you probably know this feeling. The first few weeks of doing the right thing often feel worse than the years of doing the wrong thing. That is not a bug. That is the system recalibrating.
So I skipped a workout this week. I skipped a post. I went to bed earlier. I let Judge Judy yell at me and I did not argue back. Full speed ahead is not the goal. Forward is the goal, and sometimes forward looks like sitting still.
If you are grinding through fatigue right now and convinced that the answer is more discipline, more volume, more effort, consider the possibility that the answer is less. I wrote about the 23 hours around the workout here, and they matter more than the workout. If those 23 hours are broken, the workout is not going to fix them.
If this sounds like where you are, that is exactly the kind of problem I help athletes work through. I coach endurance athletes who want to train hard without burning out, and that means knowing when to push and when to back off. Book a free 30-minute call at madanthonymultisport.com/booking and let’s talk about what your data is actually telling you.
Coach Tony Hampton is a triathlon and endurance multisport coach based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with a growing focus on health and wellness coaching. He holds certifications through IRONMAN U, ESCI, Stryd Run Power, TriDot Pool School, and Precision Nutrition (PN Certified Master Coach).
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