Sue Reynolds Part 2

Summary

The conversation explores the extreme physical demands placed on athletes, particularly the mindset that equates exhaustion with success. Sue Reynolds shares a personal story of pushing her limits during training, leading to severe consequences, including a hospital visit due to kidney failure. This highlights the dangers of ignoring bodily warning signs in pursuit of athletic goals.

Takeaways

• In training, being utterly exhausted was seen as a good thing.
• Ignoring warning signs can lead to serious health issues.
• Pushing physical limits can have dire consequences.
• Personal experiences can illustrate the risks of extreme training.
• Athletes often equate exhaustion with success.
• The importance of listening to one's body during training.
• Consequences of overexertion can be life-threatening.
• Awareness of physical limits is crucial for athletes.
• Training should prioritize health over performance.
• Stories of personal experiences can raise awareness about athlete health.

Keywords

exhaustion, training, health, warning signs, consequences, kidney failure, running, physical limits, athlete experience, personal story

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Transcript

Lindsay Hiken (00:01.058)
Hi, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Ginger and Chocolate podcast. I am your co-host, Lindsay, and I'm here with Mike, my co-host, but he's having audio problems. So if you watch us on YouTube, you're gonna see Mike sitting here, but you're not gonna hear him ask any questions because he cannot, his mic can't work, but he's gonna text us questions as he listens to the episode. And we are here with...

friend of the show and recent previous guest Sue Reynolds. We're talking about her book and more. And so we're just going to kind of do a recap of last episode so that you guys know what it was about and then we'll move forward from there. So hi Sue, how are you?

Sue Reynolds (00:44.403)
I am good. love how we're accepting and adjusting. That's one of the things in Triathlon that we talk about when we hit race chaos and now we're hitting podcast chaos. And I love it. Instead of just saying, it won't work, we found a workaround very quickly. And Mike's going to be texting his questions and we're all set up on a group text. This is great.

Lindsay Hiken (00:56.138)
Exactly.

Lindsay Hiken (01:01.655)
Yeah

Lindsay Hiken (01:06.474)
Yeah, yeah, it is good. We're all we're all set and pivoting is the name of the game, you know. So let's do a quick recap. Tell us a little bit about your book that we were talking about last episode.

Sue Reynolds (01:23.271)
Yeah, so we talked on our last episode, we did a really quick synopsis of the first book, The Athlete Inside, which just in one sentence, it was about my journey of losing 200 pounds, discovering that an athlete had been hiding inside of me for decades and then discovering triathlon and ending up finishing sixth in the world in triathlon, which was a shock and still is a shock to me. So that was book

one and then we transitioned into book two, is called Across the Line. And this book, which will be out I know now in summer of 2026, so next summer, that book is about an experiment that came from place of curiosity where I wondered what would happen if an ordinary age grouper

Lindsay Hiken (02:05.204)
Thank

Sue Reynolds (02:20.933)
began training with Olympic level coaches. And I thought, I'm not like an Olympian, but why can't an age grouper train with the most elite coaches? So Book Two is about that journey. had just gotten into that. Most of that journey went really, really well. I ended up winning two world championships, which we didn't talk about that part, but that was really amazing.

Lindsay Hiken (02:46.998)
Mm.

Sue Reynolds (02:49.255)
But then suffered from overtraining syndrome and had to be off of Training for a couple of years and I'm just coming back from that so yeah, so the book across the line the line is the division between healthy passion and Toxic passion where you just get so caught up that you just push push push and go into a place that really interferes or

Lindsay Hiken (02:53.441)
Thank

Lindsay Hiken (02:58.049)
Mmm.

Lindsay Hiken (03:12.556)
Right.

Sue Reynolds (03:17.799)
disagrees with your own personal values and at that point you're going in the, in my opinion, the wrong direction. Yeah, so that's kind of where we were. It was a fun talk. I always enjoy talking with you too. And when we were offline, and I wanted to bring this up this time, I mentioned to Mike that

Lindsay Hiken (03:29.965)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (03:33.912)
you

Sue Reynolds (03:44.519)
how much he five years ago had made a difference in my life and that you often touch people in ways that you don't know. might be just the smallest little thing that you say that just resonates with someone. And with Mike, it was that he signed all of his emails to me with gratitude. And that really got me thinking about just gratitude and the role that it played in my life. And

Lindsay Hiken (04:06.104)
Hmm.

Sue Reynolds (04:14.279)
It's been kind of one of my prime focuses ever since those emails. yeah, so I was very ungrateful to Mike for his gratefulness because it certainly impacted me.

Lindsay Hiken (04:24.856)
That's wonderful. Gratitude is sometimes for me elusive because I have a brain that is constantly searching for the next thing. And, you know, I have to work on it. I have to actively go look around and say, you know, what? This is amazing. My life is amazing. And I'm grateful for the life that I have because my brain wants to

say, okay, you know, reach a goal like, well, what's next? Not thinking through like, this was an amazing journey. And so when I stop and take a breath, I can get into gratitude. But my default setting on my brain, unfortunately, is not gratitude. And partially, I think it's because of, you know, mental health stuff we've talked about on this show, you know, my brain is

in some ways operates against me, you know, and so that's part of the that's part of the little journey. But I love that Mike signs things that way. And I like I love that that that was an inspiration to you. You never know. You never know how you're touching somebody. So, you know, I kind of want to I kind of want to pick up where we left off with the overtraining. And one of the thoughts I had about the overtraining is personally,

I'm taking a break from triathlon because I feel burned out, although I haven't been racing recently. So I was kind of like, why do I even feel burned out? shouldn't. And I hadn't been racing and I hadn't been training consistently. But I think that there's lots of different ways of sort of overtraining and burning out. And for me, it was the cycle of trying to train.

in conjunction with my work that takes up a lot of time. And so I would do this sort of weekend warrior thing. And I still do it with running, which is, you know, I'm still working on it, but where I would do too much at one time. So I would do like nothing, nothing, nothing, and then everything and then nothing, nothing. And my body did not really react well to that. And that might be slightly different than overtraining, but it has some of the components of, of it. So I know you have stages.

Lindsay Hiken (06:43.426)
that you described a little bit of overtraining. we go through those?

Sue Reynolds (06:47.207)
Yeah, I think there is a big difference between becoming burned out and overtraining. But, and I certainly have been through the burnout part too. So I totally understand that. That's one of the things I tried to incorporate that a little bit into the book too, and looking at what might be some of the factors or elements that we can put in our lives to avoid the burnout.

Lindsay Hiken (07:16.322)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (07:16.423)
as well as to avoid the overtraining. So the way I see it, just so we kind of have around the same page with kind of definitions, is that like burnout is more of a mental condition where you just get really tired of doing the same thing. And it's probably related to fatigue as well, because I think when we're tired, we're not as resilient mentally.

Lindsay Hiken (07:25.304)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (07:33.432)
and

Sue Reynolds (07:44.602)
And so, you know, it's just harder to deal with all the mental stuff. So you get tired and you get, you know, you're wondering why are you doing this? And you're, you know, it's just, maybe you're even bored because you're doing, you know, it's just workout day after day, year after year. And I think that really to be, you know, the whole book is about being a top performing athlete, but to be a top performing athlete,

you have to be able to stay engaged for years. I mean, you don't become a top performing athlete in one year or two years. And so burnout really becomes a big factor. You have to be able to keep going for years without it, without becoming burned out and it becoming monotonous. So for me, when I'm talking about the burnout part, what I've discovered is that I tend to get burned out

Lindsay Hiken (08:18.616)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (08:44.719)
when I can no longer see the purpose in what I'm doing in triathlon. In other words, triathlon no longer aligns with my why or my life purpose. And because when it aligns with my life purpose, then how can I not but do it? You know, I have to do it when it aligns. But if my life purpose changes or if my...

Lindsay Hiken (08:51.671)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (08:58.579)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (09:03.862)
Right, right.

Sue Reynolds (09:11.287)
life purpose or my why for doing triathlon wasn't very strong, then when things start to get boring or monotonous or tiring, it's really easy to go down that road without having the strength to come back because you believe so much in your purpose and your why. But that's kind of more of a mental thing. When I'm thinking about burnout, that's impacted by fatigue.

Lindsay Hiken (09:31.288)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (09:39.736)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (09:40.144)
Whereas overtraining syndrome is truly like a medical situation. It's when you've become so fatigued that your body no longer responds to rest because your adrenal glands are just all messed up and the cortisol and stuff and all the hormones that produced that align with rest and being active just aren't being produced the way they're supposed to.

Lindsay Hiken (09:46.252)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (09:55.563)
Thank

Sue Reynolds (10:10.169)
So in that, there are symptoms like fatigue and depression and just all the things that your hormones impact. So it's very similar in that way to just being burned out, but it's different in that it's a medical condition that you have to recover from physically instead of just mentally. I making sense? I don't know. Okay.

Lindsay Hiken (10:15.768)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (10:37.684)
Yeah, you are. it? Yeah, absolutely. Does it feel as though? Can you tell mentally that you are over trained? Like, is there can you tell a difference mentally between the two? Or do you not even know when you're over training necessarily at the beginning?

Sue Reynolds (10:54.455)
Yeah, think most people, well, in the beginning, absolutely not. So let's go back there. in my book, call this overtraining, I call it the invisible vortex because I think it's, you people talk about the slippery slope, but to me, it's like you're going down this hill, but it's not a slope because it's so confusing. It's just like a rural wind. It's just this whole like vortex.

And I think it's invisible because, at least for me, it's just so hard to recognize. And I'll try to explain why. So as I looked at this, I think there's four different stages to getting into overtraining syndrome. The first one is the one that everybody writes about, know, there's a mismatch between your training and your recovering.

Lindsay Hiken (11:52.952)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (11:53.148)
your recovery. that's just medically how does it happen? Well, you're putting too much stress on your body and you're not recovering with enough recovery to match it. And the stress can not only come from physical stress, but it can also come from mental stress or emotional stress or any kind of stress. It doesn't have to be just physical stress. So someone may be going through the same physical stress that they've always been going through.

But if all of a sudden we throw in a divorce or a job loss or whatever on top of it, then all of a sudden we don't have enough recovery to match both the stress from training and the stress from life. So, but the first stage I'm just calling mismatch is where this is mismatched. There's either not enough recovery or there's too much stress.

Lindsay Hiken (12:25.463)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (12:34.36)
Okay.

Sue Reynolds (12:48.857)
Another kind of word that I think is misleading is even the word overtraining, because this could just as easily have been called under recovering syndrome. It's not necessarily that you're overtrained. It just might be that you're under recovering, or in my case, both. So that's the first stage. It's just that there's this mismatch. And then the second stage, which I really think says a lot about our society,

Lindsay Hiken (12:55.01)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (12:59.212)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (13:07.297)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (13:18.337)
is that we tend to praise people that work really, really hard, including people that work maybe too hard for their own health. So it's always like, you know, look at him, he sucked it up and, you know, he made it through and he did a quadruple ultra Ironman or, you know, it's just like, the more the better and the more you suck it up, the better human being you are.

Lindsay Hiken (13:26.648)
Mm.

Lindsay Hiken (13:30.689)
Yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (13:36.386)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (13:47.788)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (13:48.776)
And for me, I've been calling that stage just that we normalize fatigue. We normalize pain in sports and in other areas of life that it just became normal. In my training, if I finished a workout without being utterly exhausted to the point that I could barely eat dinner because it was too much energy to pick up the fork, that was a bad thing. It was a good thing.

Lindsay Hiken (14:02.658)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (14:17.585)
to be so exhausted and so just running on fumes. There was one run that I did that I passed out in the middle of the run. I just, every warning sign I ignored and just kept going until I literally passed out mid-stride and laid across the road unconscious for hours until a passerby happened to find me. Yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (14:28.933)
my god.

Lindsay Hiken (14:34.124)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (14:44.008)
my god.

Sue Reynolds (14:46.439)
Yeah, it was dicey. I ended up in the hospital with kidney failure because it was just, yeah. But I just pushed through all the warning signs and every time I did, I thought it was a good thing because I was being tough and I wasn't being a weenie. I was pushing through. So there's this normalization that fatigue and being tired and pain, the more you can do that, that's a good thing.

Lindsay Hiken (15:14.668)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (15:15.993)
So I kept, in my journey, kept getting tired and more tired and more tired. And every time I did, I celebrated it. know, woohoo, I made it through this workout and woohoo, I pushed through this pain and man, look at how tough I am. I passed out on the run even. You know, was just, it was just really, everything was normalized. So, and then the next stage that Daz, my coach at the time, Darren Smith, and I went through is we just started denying all the symptoms.

Lindsay Hiken (15:30.114)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (15:44.914)
You know, I didn't, I didn't want to believe that my body wasn't tough enough to do this level of training. You know, I kept thinking, I kept thinking if I acknowledge that my body can't handle this, I'll be a weenie. And I didn't want to be a weenie. So I just kept finding other explanations. For example, in our last podcast, I mentioned that on the bike for an easy ride where I would normally

hit 120 watts, I could only do 60 watts, half of that, and it felt like threshold. It did not feel easy. I was working my rear end off and could only hit 60 watts. But instead of saying, huh, something's wrong here, I decided my power meter was broken. And I told Dads, my coach, I can only hit 60 watts, but it felt like threshold.

Lindsay Hiken (16:19.5)
Yeah.

.

Lindsay Hiken (16:35.392)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (16:42.747)
So my power meter must be broken. So every time a symptom showed up, when I started having crazy sleep, I'd go to sleep for an hour and then my hormones would be all crazy. I'd wake up at an hour and then couldn't get back to sleep. I mean, was a, I started to say it was a nightmare, but it was not, a nightmare would have been preferable to not sleeping. So.

Lindsay Hiken (16:57.238)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (17:02.232)
Right.

Sue Reynolds (17:07.451)
But I decided, you know, well, I've been trying to get more sleep at night. Maybe my sleep clock is mixed up. And so I just, you know, I just blew that symptom off. So every symptom that came up, and I found multiple ways to explain it other than overtraining syndrome. So, and we probably, you know, I probably trained for four weeks after I was already overtrained.

Lindsay Hiken (17:26.808)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (17:34.856)
After all, already my body was broken, my adrenal glands, everything, know, glands, they were broken. And we just kept going, you know, making one excuse after another for why it wasn't over training. And then finally, Daz pulled me from training. And that was bizarre too, because in my mind,

I thought Daz was trying to test me and I was not gonna be the first one to pull me from training. I just wasn't gonna do it. And it was almost like Daz and I were in a contest to see which one of us would be the first to pull me from training. Yeah, was really, I was not going down a healthy road at that point. I was just bound determined to see this through. So I wouldn't be a weenie, yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (18:05.432)
.

Lindsay Hiken (18:14.528)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (18:19.032)
No.

Lindsay Hiken (18:24.504)
I just want to point out the level of mental fortitude that you have to be able to ignore all of the symptoms because it's one thing to say, well, I ignored them and my coach and I were thinking it was all these excuses. But some of us don't actually possess that level of mental fortitude when it comes to training. Maybe at my job I would.

Lindsay Hiken (18:53.694)
I could, if I passed out on the road, that would be it. You know what I mean? I don't even know that I would run until I passed out. think I would probably start walking and then I would, you know, and so I just wanted to acknowledge that you have a very high level of mental fortitude as well as, you know, your physical talents.

Sue Reynolds (19:15.761)
Yeah, but the question is, that a good thing or is that like a bad thing? Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So Mike has typed in a question here. Yeah, that's a good question. So Mike asks, what do you think the balance

Lindsay Hiken (19:23.414)
Well, like most things, it's probably a good thing used in moderation.

Lindsay Hiken (19:36.504)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (19:43.432)
What do you think the balance is between mental toughness and getting adequate recovery? It seems to be like a tough thing to find. Absolutely. You know, there is that line, and that's really the title of the book, Across the Line. know, where is that line? And how do you, you know, when is it beyond the boundary of when it's just mental toughness and something, you know,

like Lindsay just said, should be respected and heralded. And when is it craziness? That has just gone too far. For me, it was, and that was, so we've talked about the four, so far four of the stages of overtraining. And to me, that's the last one is just figuring it all out. Like where is that line?

Lindsay Hiken (20:18.968)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (20:40.817)
You know, what takes you to the other side? Is it that your body breaks? Is it quality of life or, you know, what is it? For me personally, it was when I realized that I was no longer living by my values. And I had, I ended up with a values conflict. I was putting so much time and energy into training.

Like literally my whole life, my social life, had the drop, all my family's stuff got really condensed. know, my other hobbies I didn't have anymore. I mean, it was just all in triathlon. And I started to realize that that value of being hardworking and being meticulous and, you know, being all, you know, uncomfortable.

Lindsay Hiken (21:23.35)
Wow.

Sue Reynolds (21:36.122)
overturn every stone and whatever it takes, find a way. All of that attitude was a huge value for me. But on the other hand, so was my family. And when it got to the point that I was pulling away from spending time with my grandkids or making sure that my visits with my grandkids, you know, worked around my training instead of the other way, then I thought this, this isn't

Lindsay Hiken (21:45.634)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (22:05.479)
this isn't like for me. So then I had to kind of like pull back and figure out where that was. So to answer your question, I think it's different for every person. For some people, that line might be a physical line. For others, it might be quality of life line. For me, it was a values line, like where am I no longer abiding by my personal, living by my personal values. So yeah, so I think it's hard. think until you...

Lindsay Hiken (22:08.0)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (22:34.375)
get close to that line, you just don't have any real reason to explore it. But when you cross the line, you have a lot of reason to explore it. Yeah. Yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (22:40.6)
So, your coach pulled you and your values were a little bit off kilter. And so you had mentioned that you had to take a couple years off. Is that what you said? mean, so how did what happened when you got pulled? Did you just stop right then? Or what? How did that work?

Sue Reynolds (23:01.701)
Yeah.

Sue Reynolds (23:07.353)
Yeah, so that is the primary reason why I decided to write Across the Line because virtually nothing has been written about that. I'm not sure why, maybe because people get mentally burned out, maybe they quit their sport or whatever. There's a lot written about the symptoms of overtraining syndrome and the cause of it, but there's nothing, virtually nothing written about coming back from it or

Lindsay Hiken (23:37.047)
Mm.

Sue Reynolds (23:37.478)
you know, the mental part of resolving what happened and, you know, just the, were so many questions in the first part of recovery about why did I let this happen? You know, why did I, why did I push myself so hard that I physically injured myself? You know, why did I let my coach push me that hard? Why did my coach push me that hard? So the first couple of months of recovering mentally,

Lindsay Hiken (23:49.09)
Mm.

Lindsay Hiken (23:58.178)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (24:05.677)
was the mental side and the physical side. The mental side was just to talk with my coach and to have us both really do some soul searching about how we got to that point. And thankfully, I'm so appreciative of Daz because he was willing to stay at the table, even though I was no longer an athlete who was going to be on a world podium or whatever.

Lindsay Hiken (24:20.898)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (24:27.382)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (24:32.903)
He was willing to be at the table exploring that with me. And I just really give him a lot of credit, given the level of coaching that he does, that he was willing to stick with a 70-year-old age group to figure this all out. So there was that side. And just to go down that road for a minute, my questions to dads were like,

Lindsay Hiken (24:42.848)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (24:59.889)
Why didn't you pull me from training when you said I was tired, when I said I was tired? And he talked about how as a coach, it's so hard to figure out when someone says they're tired, if they're really tired, or if there's a little bit more that they can push. He talked about his own competitiveness and how he hates to lose. So he did a lot of soul searching there too. And I thought about my fear of being a weenie.

Lindsay Hiken (25:15.052)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (25:27.687)
And really went back to my childhood to think about how did that, what about my upbringing or my family makeup or whatever made me so intent on not being a weenie and on performing. So that was interesting. And then we also discovered that we just had this communication glitch in that

Lindsay Hiken (25:27.841)
Mm.

Lindsay Hiken (25:37.112)
you

Lindsay Hiken (25:43.17)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (25:57.532)
When I said I was tired, I was really tired. he was having trouble, Daz was having trouble hearing that. And really, understandably, well, not maybe, definitely understandably, because I'm telling him things like, is my power meter's broken? I'm giving him reasons to not think that I'm tired.

Lindsay Hiken (26:01.377)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (26:18.402)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (26:23.128)
All right.

Sue Reynolds (26:24.803)
So, yeah, so we had to kind of explore all of that. on that side, well, I'll come back and tell you where that all resolved in a second. On the physical side, there's also nothing written about how to come back from overtraining. And again, I don't know if it's because psychologically overtraining is such a hard thing to accept, and because you feel like such a weenie when you say, can't do this.

Lindsay Hiken (26:54.476)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (26:54.713)
anymore or if people just quit, you know, and so they don't come back. I don't know. But for me, Daz and I were, we were both experimenting. I mean, we had not a clue what to do. So Daz just told me to do what I felt like. in the beginning I thought, well, I'll just go easy for an hour. And I'd get to 10 minutes and it was like, nope, you know, that's it.

Lindsay Hiken (27:01.848)
Thank you.

Lindsay Hiken (27:21.922)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (27:23.857)
So I still was active every day, but in the beginning it was usually just 10 minutes of walking and then my body just like shut down. It was just like, no. Yeah. And in the past I would have pushed through that, but now I know, okay, you've got to listen to your body. And this is a message to stop. It's not a message, you know, push through. So yeah, so 10 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of easy cycling.

Lindsay Hiken (27:34.966)
wow.

Lindsay Hiken (27:39.468)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (27:47.788)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (27:51.784)
I don't think I swam at all in the beginning. If I did, it was just 10 minutes. So yeah, so that went on for a couple of months. And then as Daz and I talked, I finally decided that remote coaching is a wonderful thing. I I really think it is. But a remote coach isn't there to see what's happening as you're training.

Lindsay Hiken (28:20.674)
You know, Mike just pinged us with a question. And his question was, how did, do you think that virtual aspects, so just what you went right into, the virtual aspect.

Sue Reynolds (28:23.162)
Okay.

Sue Reynolds (28:31.525)
Ahem.

Yeah, so his question was, it seems having a virtual coach would make it harder for them to tell when a training plan isn't working, we might be over trained, injured, et cetera. Yeah, perfect. Being in person gives us better communication, Mike says, because we can see body language and facial expressions better, yes. Do you think the virtual aspects was a contributing factor? Absolutely. And to complicate that, I liked DAS so much.

Lindsay Hiken (28:44.812)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (29:02.501)
I was always excited to see him and I was just so happy to see him each week when he came on the Zoom that I think that clouded the fact that I was also dying. So I asked Daz, I had listened to one podcast where Bob Bowman, who overtrained Michael Phelps, said that he could tell just by looking at Michael how, if he were overtrained.

If he was training too hard. I'm thinking, if you could tell by looking at Michael Phelps, that he was training too hard, then why did he become over trained? You know, he never would have, if he realized what was happening, I don't think Bob Bowman would have kept it happening. And so I asked Daz, I said, you know, can you tell just by looking at me over zoom, if, if, if I'm how fatigued I am.

Lindsay Hiken (29:40.536)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (30:00.008)
And he thought he could. And I reiterated, you know, even over Zoom, and he said, yeah, I thought he could. But then I thought, I'm not sure about that. And at that point, I decided that virtual training has its limits. I think it works well, very, very well with an age grouper, with an age group coach who is not trying to push that age grouper right to the line of between being injured and not being injured.

Lindsay Hiken (30:29.528)
Right.

Sue Reynolds (30:30.267)
But with a pro athlete or an Olympian, when you have to push that line, you know, right up to the line of injury and hopefully not across, I think it's really important that you're able, like Mike said, to put eyeballs on the athlete to see, you know, just little nuances that you can't see over Zoom.

Lindsay Hiken (30:45.49)
No.

Sue Reynolds (30:52.569)
Yeah, I just came in with another question.

Do you think coaching should include biomarkers and blood draws to indicate how we're actually doing physiologically? So, absolutely yes. So that was in the month between when I think I was critically overtrained and when we stopped, we started pulling those, I started pulling those biomarkers. Cause at the same time, like I'm telling Daz, I'm tired and he's not like reacting to that.

And I'm realizing there's a communication glitch, so I'm thinking, like, how can this be scientific? Something that's objective and not, something that's objective, not subjective, like just saying I'm tired is. So yeah, so I started sending him like my morning heart rate, my HRV, just everything I could think of. And we also started like logging certain

certain things like fatigue and moodiness and crankiness and sleep quality. And every day I would rate those one through four and send them to him. that was also, when I started recovering, that was also how Dad's news not to push me because one was I'm fine, four was I'm, isn't that good? And then like every single subjective thing, you know, are you cranky, four? Are you moody, four? You know, are you?

Lindsay Hiken (32:00.141)
Hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (32:17.356)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (32:24.469)
and

Sue Reynolds (32:25.543)
Are you tired, four? Are you sleeping well, four? mean, it fours all the way across. So yes, I biomarkers. And I'm not sure about the blood work. I did do... So in those first few months, I had read that there are other medical conditions that can mimic overtraining or vice versa.

Lindsay Hiken (32:29.943)
Yeah.

Sue Reynolds (32:56.015)
So I wanted to rule out things like low iron and other things that can cause fatigue. So I did do blood work. But there's no one biomarker that indicates overtraining syndrome. The way a doctor diagnoses it is by listening to your symptoms and then ruling out everything else.

Lindsay Hiken (33:15.064)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (33:23.457)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (33:23.879)
So when I finally, I had been training in Florida, when I finally came back to Indiana and met with my coach or my doctor, I gave him all the blood work and that was what he did. He ruled out iron deficiency. I don't know, there were a whole bunch of things that he ruled out. And then he said, yeah, he thought it was over training after ruling everything out.

Lindsay Hiken (33:52.984)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (33:53.0)
But you can't just do a blood test and say, this is over-training. You can just say it's not other things. So, yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (33:56.717)
Right.

Yeah, that makes sense. have a friend who I kind of am during this conversation, I'm wondering if she's not over trained. She's not a competitive athlete, but she's someone who never ever, ever takes a rest. She works out every single day and has for years. And so on her days off from cycling, she's doing like strength training, Pilates, and then she'll walk

five miles or something. She just never, ever, ever takes a day off. And she's been going through this process of trying to rule out what's wrong. Because she said she's like, I'm losing my will to live at this point. You know, she's like, the heart rate goes up. She can't generate any power on her bike. She feels horrible all the time. Every time she works out, she feels horrible. And, you know, she she got an iron infusion. They tried. She said it hasn't changed anything.

Sue Reynolds (34:57.159)
my.

Lindsay Hiken (34:59.626)
they've, you know, they're trying different things. And I checked in with her the other day and she was saying she didn't feel any different. And I just was listening to the symptoms you're talking about. I just wonder if maybe she just over-trained herself by never taking a rest for like an amount of years. That's incorrect. You know, like a decade we're talking like never resting, not usually not even like a day of rest. and you know,

Sue Reynolds (35:19.697)
Yeah, for sure.

Lindsay Hiken (35:28.128)
I understand why she's like, this is a part of my mental health hygiene. But at the same time, she's seeing this physical backlash now. And it kind of matches what you're describing. Not that she's going to stop training because I can't imagine her stopping but at the same time, know.

Sue Reynolds (35:39.292)
Yeah.

Sue Reynolds (35:43.654)
Well, you would have said the same thing about me. I so wish now that I had stopped training before it got to the point that it did where I had to stop training and had a medical condition that with last year's. The research that I've read says that overtraining syndrome is not uncommon. One study

of college athletes said that like 60 % of them at some point in their career had suffered from overtraining syndrome. It's just that a lot of them will, and remember that overtraining syndrome is when your body does not respond to rest. So it's not just being fatigued and you take a couple of weeks off and then you come back. It's really, your body does not respond to that couple of weeks off. But a lot of times,

you know, the athletes who are over trained don't let it go as far as I did. So they're not as cooked as I was. So they can take, you know, a summer off or, you know, a season off or a few months off and come back. I think from what I've read, it sounds like the normal recovery time might take two months to six months. That was another thing with the diagnosis that my doctor wanted to see that the symptoms had lasted.

more than two months after I stopped training. And then that was something that was important to him. So yeah, I mean, it could be. I don't think overtraining syndrome is uncommon. it could. Mike just texted too that, I'll just read his words again. He said, your explanation of overtraining makes sense because a syndrome

Lindsay Hiken (37:07.286)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (37:18.71)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (37:33.786)
is usually defined by a cluster of symptoms with other conditions ruled out right. So that's why it's called overtraining syndrome. It's a cluster of symptoms and you rule everything else out. And the other thing that was interesting to me is that when my doctor charted this for me, he did not chart it as overtraining syndrome because that's not something that's recognized by everyone in the medical community.

Lindsay Hiken (37:40.312)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (38:03.117)
And I've talked with some other people now, a few that have been through this, who have told me that their doctors charted it as adrenal fatigue. My doctor just charted it as fatigue. So yeah, but Mike's 100 % correct. And I'm glad you pointed that out, that it's a syndrome. And there's a lot of other medical syndromes as well. Being a syndrome doesn't make it a bad thing. It just means that there's no one test.

that you can do to diagnose it. So it's just diagnosed through a cluster of symptoms. Yeah, good point, really good point.

Lindsay Hiken (38:42.794)
So I want to fast forward because I don't want to I want to leave people knowing what happened at the end before before we wrap up the show. So I know you had two years kind of off. And then how did you and I don't want to, they got they need to read the book to get all of the information. But

It sounds like you just took two years off and then what happened? Did you start training again? Did you get a coach again? What and how did you decide? Did you just do a short workout and realize you could, you know, your body was okay with it? How did that all work?

Sue Reynolds (39:19.515)
Yeah, so again, two parts, the mental part and the physical part. The mental part was that I really just wondered, do I need to quit triathlon and just focus on my family? But then Gwen Jorgensen has always been my hero and my role model. And I started thinking about, gosh, Gwen has two children. And I think she's a really good mom. And how does she do that?

And so I started studying her and other mothers, young mothers who are Olympians. they talked about what I call periodized commitment. And that was at certain times of the year, they were prioritized being a mom. And other times of the year, they prioritized training.

or certain days of the week, they prioritize being a mom. I think Gwen does that now. In other days of week, she prioritizes being, you know, her training. So, and then they all tended to have a really good support system. Gwen has her husband, who is an amazing support system for her. I have an amazing husband, too. So I decided that I could continue traveling. I just had to do it in a very, with,

periodized commitment. And for me, that meant that when I had an opportunity to be with my grandkids, or if my husband wanted to go camping with some friends, that was going to come first. And then all the other time, I could prioritize training. So I ended up hiring a new coach.

Lindsay Hiken (41:00.066)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (41:10.331)
That was our initial conversation was that I had boundaries on how hard I was going to train and that there were going to be times when, you know, I said, I'm sorry, I can't train now. And that I realized that I might not be able to get as close to, you know, the competitiveness that I wanted to originally to be at, but that was okay with me. And my coach was totally on board with that. He was wonderful.

Lindsay Hiken (41:16.566)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (41:40.36)
And so that's the route we went down. And we started out, physically we started out by bringing back my swim because that was, my heart was least involved in swimming. It's different than riding my bike or running down the road. So we brought back my swim and I actually set lifetime swim records, PRs, at age 70.

Lindsay Hiken (41:43.64)
Thank

Lindsay Hiken (41:57.74)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (42:05.216)
Really?

Sue Reynolds (42:09.381)
So that was kind of interesting to see what could happen if I just focused on one sport. Then we brought back my bike and I'm still in the process of bringing back my run. So I've started working on just gradually building up my run volume from literally nothing for almost two years to I want to get up to a 10K volume.

Lindsay Hiken (42:38.52)
That's where I am right now with my life. I want to run and I did nothing since I broke my ankle. And now I'm starting to try to get up to that 10k volume. it's hard to go from nothing to something, anything at this point. I just will say I did a four mile run the other day and it was like, I I felt better on my Ironman.

Sue Reynolds (42:38.83)
So.

Sue Reynolds (42:43.771)
Yeah.

Sue Reynolds (42:50.716)
hard.

Sue Reynolds (42:56.838)
Yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (43:06.366)
marathon that I did doing these four miles, you know. So I hear you on the run. does take a while to get that back.

Sue Reynolds (43:15.451)
Yeah. So, and then I went one other step as I decided. So as I've, the coach, the Olympic coaches that I did work with have all stayed on as mentors. We, you know, I've become friends with them. So they're like, they're like in my corner rooting for me. And a lot of them suggested that I look into self coaching that, that they said that, you know, that kind of was my next step in,

developing as an athlete, and that after 13 years of doing this, had some, but I felt really insecure about writing training plans. I thought the intellectual, the emotional side, I feel like I'm not too bad on that. Always room for improvement, but not too bad. But I had no idea how to write a training plan. So I thought I'd try AI. So I signed up for an AI system.

Mike Ergo (43:45.039)
you

Lindsay Hiken (43:55.928)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (44:14.501)
which was fascinating because it looks at it like a gazillion data points. And every day it adjusts your training based on how your training the day before went. And to me, with a data-driven mind, I thought, man, no coach could ever touch that. So I was really excited about it. But, and I know, Mike, where your brain is probably going to, AI cannot watch you either.

Lindsay Hiken (44:27.543)
Mmm.

Sue Reynolds (44:42.631)
It does not see when you're smiling. It does not see when your eyes are foggy. And what I found was that AI started to push me too hard for my overtraining recovery state. And so I think for, again, for an age group triathlete who isn't trying to push, you know, the very edge, I think AI training would be wonderful.

Lindsay Hiken (44:55.062)
Mm.

Sue Reynolds (45:10.425)
AI coach, AI training plus a coach to help with the emotional part and the learning part and the alignment with life values and your life purpose. I think that combination would be dynamite. I also predict a movement in coaching away from training the physical part because AI is going to be able to do that so well.

Lindsay Hiken (45:13.484)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (45:26.232)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (45:40.165)
And I think those coaches that can make the transition into mental coaching and emotional coaching and teaching, I think those coaches are going to thrive in partnership with an AI platform. So yeah, so that was really interesting too.

Lindsay Hiken (45:46.092)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (45:52.441)
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true just in general with AI. People say, oh, it's going to take my job. it's it's not taking. It's just changing because there is always a human component of most many jobs anyway that AI is never going to be able to touch. Like you're saying, it's not going to be able to look at you and see, read your.

how you're doing your emotions and but I think you're right. I did do an AI training plan for my 10k. And so I'm of course, I'm slacking on the one downside is AI doesn't you know, for me the level of commitment to AI is a little less I'm like, yeah, I didn't do that. Let's recalibrate I didn't do any of that. So

Sue Reynolds (46:26.043)
cool.

Sue Reynolds (46:41.25)
I don't it.

Yeah, and since AI has no emotions, it's fine.

Lindsay Hiken (46:48.12)
Yeah, it just recalibrates the whole, you know, it just pushes out the training and just changes what you're doing. So a coach definitely helps with that part.

Sue Reynolds (46:54.151)
I thought it was funny. asked AI, will you take over the role of athletic coaching? And it said, no, because I can't see you smile and I can't hold your hand. That was pretty cute. I never knew AI could be cute.

Lindsay Hiken (47:06.744)
that's awesome. It is cute. Very cute. Well, now we know it has the ability to be cute. And apparently the number one country song right now on the charts was written by AI. But it can't sing it, you know? So there's that.

Sue Reynolds (47:27.047)
my gosh.

Sue Reynolds (47:32.167)
Yeah, that's true. Yet.

Lindsay Hiken (47:36.777)
Right. Not without sounding very computer like. So, okay, are you currently self-coached or are you still working with a coach?

Sue Reynolds (47:47.716)
I'm currently self-coached as I continue this recovery. I think I'm going to stay that way until January and then I'll make some decisions about whether or not I want to go back to AI with a coach or if I just want to go back to traditional coaching. So yeah, and I'm not sure where I'm headed yet. In the back of my mind, the race that I was most proud of in my entire life was

the Olympic distance world championship, came in sixth and it was only the third time I had ever done an Olympic distance. So yeah, so I'm really curious about how I could really fine tune that training and fine tune the strategy around Olympic distance racing. So I'm thinking about going that route.

Lindsay Hiken (48:22.872)
Hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (48:26.305)
Wow.

Lindsay Hiken (48:33.624)
you

Sue Reynolds (48:42.375)
And don't have my eye on any world championships right now. Well, with my overtraining, I haven't qualified for any in 2026. So I'm hoping that, you know, maybe do a few Olympic races this summer and then see where life takes me.

Lindsay Hiken (48:45.591)
Yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (48:48.951)
Right.

Lindsay Hiken (48:56.758)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's good. think that sounds like you've got a good handle on the mental aspects of what you need to do to recover. And we talked about that line between knowing when to push yourself and knowing when to not push yourself. when you were describing

what you went through to get to the overtrain state. It's pretty amazing to see how you were actually able to flip that type of thinking and kind of change your perspective because I feel like, you know, some people who have that default of being able to really push themselves would probably find it a little challenging to.

Sue Reynolds (49:34.225)
Yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (49:38.155)
not recover and then just go right back into the same type of activity level. So kudos to you for actually getting to that point. Okay, we are going to wrap up soon, but I wanted to hear what little nugget can we get from the end of your book without telling us the end, because I want people to read the book.

Sue Reynolds (50:00.616)
That's kind of funny because I told my publisher that I can't write the end of the book right now because I haven't lived it. So, yeah, so I think the book's going to end with what we just talked about, the resolve between wanting to, you know, realizing that I can be so passionate and I tend to have this ability to push through pain that I can get myself into trouble.

Lindsay Hiken (50:09.528)
Awesome.

Lindsay Hiken (50:30.776)
Mm-hmm.

Sue Reynolds (50:31.283)
And now I want to, you know, make some good choices. And I think where this is leading is, and this may be where the book ends. And again, I'm still writing this chapter. So I've been living in the chapter, so I don't know. But I think back to a race that a triathlon that I did this year in my overtrained state, where I stood at the start line.

Lindsay Hiken (50:57.144)
you

Sue Reynolds (51:00.039)
and I wasn't sure I could finish. It was very much like the very first triathlon I ever did, where you're standing there and you don't know if you can make it to the finish line. And I was so happy. It was just a different kind of joy than going out there and trying to beat the competition. And I waved to people on the run. I never would have done that.

Lindsay Hiken (51:06.7)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lindsay Hiken (51:20.32)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Hiken (51:26.36)
Right.

Sue Reynolds (51:29.431)
So I think that where I'm landing with all this is that there is a joyful part of triathlon that when I was competing hard I missed out on. I think I'm wanting to come back to that. So I may end up with that race where I came in close to last, but it was one of the most fun races I ever did. So yeah, so I think I'm circling back to that.

Lindsay Hiken (51:39.968)
definitely.

Lindsay Hiken (51:50.7)
and

Lindsay Hiken (51:56.601)
Excellent. And I think that that's a good place to sort of wrap up the episode. I'll just say for those of us age groupers who are never at risk of getting on the podium, you know, it is fun. It's very fun. It's a great community. You know, you're saying hello to people, especially if I see another black athlete out there, which we're only less than 1 % of, you know, the whole community.

We're like, hey, know, look, out here. This is amazing. And that feeling of just elation of being on the course with other people and having it be a personal journey is really fun. can't say enough about that. So if you're a listener and you're just maybe getting into triathlon and you're listening to Sue's story, you know.

Sue Reynolds (52:25.275)
Yeah, cool.

Lindsay Hiken (52:43.956)
don't worry if you're not going to be training with Olympic coaches and pushing yourself and getting on the podium. It's a cool thing to do for sure. But there's other cool parts of the community as well that are full of joy and love. that can be its own special thing.

Sue Reynolds (53:03.834)
Absolutely.

Lindsay Hiken (53:05.272)
Cool. All right. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much. And we will have you back when you're completely done with the book, when it's when it's all the way cooked, baked. At some point it'll happen. I'm sure knowing, hearing about you, you're going to finish this book. It's definitely going to happen. And then we'll have you back on and talk about, you know, what your coaching was like after coming back.

Sue Reynolds (53:16.423)
Yeah, hopefully that happens.

Lindsay Hiken (53:32.504)
So I appreciate it listeners. If you want to support the show, please share this episode or any other episode with someone you think that would benefit and enjoy from it. And we will see you next week.

Sue Reynolds (53:43.847)
And if one other thing, if anybody wants to reach out for me, my website is surenalds, R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S dot net, and all of my social media links are there. you can also, I post a lot on Instagram so they can follow me there.

Lindsay Hiken (53:54.594)
Perfect.

Lindsay Hiken (53:59.946)
Wonderful. And we will put that in our show notes so that everybody can see it and connect with you. Thank you so much.

Sue Reynolds (54:05.905)
Sounds good. Thanks you guys. Always a pleasure.

Lindsay Hiken (54:08.418)
Thank you.