- Morning, Traniacs. Just got done with a little swim.
And this isn't new news, this has been out for a while,
but Lionel Sanders injured out couplets for quite a while.
What is new is that he finally addressed it
on his YouTube channel.
I have been waiting for him to talk about it
before I started coming up with some commentary
of things that we could take away
from this really unfortunate situation Lionel is in.
And do I think that he can come back?
Can he still get to Kona? If not this year,
But potentially when in the future.
Lets ride!
(Upbeat Music)
Okay! So let's get into analyzing the latter
you always throw me off Pete
(Patting sounds)
So let's get into whether or not
Lionel Sanders can come back.
Now, few disclaimers about this.
Number one, I haven't talked to Lionel.
I haven't talked to anyone from team Lionel about this,
a lot of this is just speculation
and me making some inferences from the video that he did,
that we'll link to at the end of the video.
And just things that I know about injuries like this.
What we can see from other athletes
that have gone through something similar.
We gonna do it in three parts;
Number one, what actually causes injuries like this?
What do you have to be aware of that can be
a likely cause of stress fractures and things like this?
Number two, what is the recovery process?
Number three, can he come back?
Do I think he will make it to Kona this year?
So number one, really quickly how do things like this happen
and what do we need to be aware of?
Well, quite often stress fractures
are not a result of a fall itself
of a movement itself where you feel
(Grunt)
That happened! Like it's kinda like
when you throw your back out from sneezing.
It's not the sneezing that threw your back out
its a series of things that weaken an area leading up to it.
And in the case of stress fractures quite often
its because of over-training or improper nutrition.
Now, is this what happened with Lionel?
Well he did mention that he potentially
might have had some over-training issues.
He also mentioned that he had a bit of low vitamin D issue.
Which does end up leading to lack of recovery
and he did play around a lot with his nutrition last year.
So, when you end up doing that,
if you end up digging yourself into a hole,
hormones and the ability to recover
doesn't just come back on its own.
You need to spend a lot of time fixing it.
Like myself, 2017 was the year that I got over-trained,
and still here we are a year and a half later.
And when I do my hormone pounds my hormones are still low.
And I need to be very cautious
of the amount of training that I do.
It doesn't just come around on its own.
So what do we do as Trainiacs?
Well I'm a big believer that on teamtrainiac.com
that you train very very lightly,
instead of building you up
to the most amount of fitness you can get to,
to your next race, we go fairly gently
and keep you away from building too much fatigue
and that allows you to be fast
over the course of many years.
Because you can consistently do little bits of work,
little bits of work instead of tons of work
opening up the door for illness and injury.
Now, the healing process for this
Lionel himself says that
the doctors recommended healing time
is about twelve weeks of very very light training
Jan Frodeno had a stress fracture at right mid September,
and he just did his first race
which wasn't really even a terribly competitive race,
eight months later, Ben Hoffman had a stress fracture
right at the beginning of October
and he started racing about six months later.
So from the time that an injury happens,
until you can comfortably race again,
we're talking anywhere from
five to six, seven, eight, maybe nine months.
Now a bigger issue, is not the injury itself,
its how do you come back from that injury
if it was over-training or nutritional problem
that led to it.
Because as I mentioned what ends up happening
is your ability to recover,
as you start loading on training,
ends up becoming quite low
and that's why you'll often see
that athletes might go and be really fit, really fit,
really fit, really fit and then
because Prose have to dance that line
between absolute peak performance and not being healthy,
they might get to that peak performance level
and then the first injury that they get
is kind of an indication of over-training
and you see some athletes that
never really come back from it
because they went too deep
to get that peak level of fitness.
So the injury itself yeah,
Lionel can come back within a matter of several months
but if it was over-training or nutritional issues,
that's something that sometimes takes years to overcome.
A question here in the title of this video
is coming back from the injury,
can Lionel come back?
A to be competitive again, B to make Kona this year
to be competitive again, yes absolutely.
That's that's really no question
Ben Hoffamn did it came back got on the podium
at half Iron Man cam patchy,
then went on to win full Iron Man, South Africa,
Jan Ferdeno we don't necessarily know
because we haven't really seen him be tested yet.
But people come back from injury all the time.
Holly Lawrence is out there killing it
right now after a serious fracture,
couple of the bigger questions though,
can he make it to Kona? that is a harder question
12 weeks of recovery places him in a situation
where he can't really train purposefully
until the beginning of July,
which then gives him six weeks to train
for full Ironman Mont-Tremblant,
which is the last place that he could potentially
qualify for this year's Kona.
Six weeks is not a lot of time
to prepare for a full Iron Man.
If you if you just think about the timeline of how long
it took Ben Hoffman to come back to be competitive.
And win full Iron Man South Africa,
we see that he had about a three and a half month
period of training to build up to that
whereas Lionel's trying to do it
in less than half that time.
In addition to that, then we have to look at
who he is potentially going up against in Mont-Tremblant
we don't necessarily know
But how pro Kona slots are awarded now is
you have to either win a race
or be one of the highest finishing athletes
who doesn't already have a spot.
Of course, Lionel is going to be likely
the most talented athlete to step up to that start line.
Issue is for him at Mont-Tremblant is that
Mont-Tremblant doesn't tend to attract athletes
that are like A level professionals who already have a spot.
It's more like the B and C level athletes
who don't have a spot,
so there's less likelihood of a spot rolling down.
So for him to get a spot,
I imagine he's got a win finish second, or third.
And on just six weeks of training,
does he have the talent to do that?
Yeah, he's one of the most talented athletes around.
But that's placing a really big load and expectations
on his body at a time where he's talking about
over-training, nutritional issues, vitamin D deficiencies
which all kind of also leads to an inability to really load
on a lot of training and recover quickly.
So do I think that he is going to qualify for Kona?
it's hard to say and really depends on
who else shows up at the race in Mont-Tremblant,
and who is actually going to accept their spots?
So does he have the ability to do it? Yes, of course,
is it going to happen? Don't know.
A bigger question to me though,
with all of this is, can he come back mentally from
what's happened over the past year?
We've always seen Lionel have setbacks.
So he's very open about that he blogs about
that he creates videos about
and he's always taken them as a part of the journey
and as part of the learning process.
But what we saw in 2018, with Kona is that
it wasn't a learning process for him.
He looked at it as he was ready to win.
He learned everything that he needed to learn.
And he puts so much emphasis on winning Kona in 2018,
that when he bad performance,
I think the mental shock of that is probably harder
to come back from the physical shock of this fracture.
I don't know the guy well enough to say,
what sort of mental state that he's in, at all.
So I'm not even going to comment on that.
But that's one thing that I wonder about,
certainly more than the stress fracture,
does he have the physical ability to come back and
potentially win Kona, multiple times after this?
Of course, its a broken bone people recover
from broken bones all the time.
Can he do it with the mental side of things
that have arisen from not doing well in Kona 2018?
Bigger question, can he do it under the potential hormonal
and body stress that it seems like
he might be going through?
That's also a bigger question a broken bone is easy,
but it's all these things that are around it
that lead to bigger challenges, and when you're dealing with
trying to be the best of the best of the best.
You've got to have a lot of this stuff in place.
So that's more what I question.
Sorry, Trainiacs.That is my take on
what Lionel's going through.
Of course, I don't know him.
I don't know the exact situation that he's in.
I'm not even a doctor.
I just play one on the internet.
So hopefully this gives you a little bit of insight
that you can take away to sort of package up
where he might be at and what you can do
to avoid and understand these injuries.
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