Wie man schon an der Überschrift sehen kann, geht es mir hierbei um Parkour, mein Training und um Neurodermitis. Ich habe auf Parkour.NET einen längeren Post im internationalen "Health, fitness, injuries & nutrition" Bereich verfasst, indem ich speziell auf diese Punkte eingehe, und eine Diskussion anrege. Die Diskussion könnt ihr hier finden.
Ich habe den Beitrag auf Englisch verfasst, und ihr könnte auch gerne hier in Deutsch antworten. Ich werde ihn aber nicht übersetzen, da mir das gerade, um ehrlich zu sein, zu viel Arbeit ist. Morgen muss ich noch eine Vor-Abi-Klausur in Sozialwissenschaften, meinem absoluten Hassfach, schreiben und darauf werde ich mich jetzt noch weitergehend vorbereiten. Hier der Post:
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This relates partly to me suffering from Neurodermatitis, partly to nutrition in general, and partly to être et durer.
Coming to the first point, Neurodermatitis.
It's a growingly wide-spread kind of genetics-caused illness / disease that results in an overreaction by the immune-system to normally harmless molecules. This results in irritation of the skin, dryness, eczema, swelling and hyper-sensitive reaction to outer irritations. This results in itching and infections on the skin, because the skin has lost it's normal function of protecting the body. The skin rips apart and lotion has to be applied to reestablish the natural humidity level of the skin. Also hygiene is a big problem because most washing lotions and water dry out the skin even further, which makes hygiene a tiresome topic for patients. When having a medium rush of it my arm may look like this one. Also the spread of the affected skin differs greatly. Some patients only show symptoms in the joint area of the arms, wrists and knees. However, over the puberty it has spread to every part of my body (in varying intensity), except the area on my back between the shoulder blades, and a small strip on my chest. Needless to say it influences my daily life.
Now coming to the nutritional component.
I have to live strong diet according to my current state of body, and carefully observe reactions after consuming troublesome food. For example my lips start to itch after eating tomatoes, I have to sneeze and my ears itch after eating apples, my throat itches when eating nuts, and I generally get VERY aggressive sweat and general itchyness after consuming refined (or even cane-) sugar, or synthetic components like coloring additives or conservatives. At the moment I also have problems with dairy products and most raw fruits and vegetables.
So this leaves plain bread with butter, which is now my most-relied-on source of carbohydrates. I eat about 10 slices of bread each day, because the taste is pretty boring and it only satiates hunger, but not the appetite a human being has for variety of color, taste, texture and smell. When at home I top them with organic-fruit-jam, which seems to work most of the times, because the fruit has been processed.
But since I still have weight-problems (could lose about 8 kilos at least, if I'd try hard) this doesn't really help any much. You aren't satisfied after eating, you do not eat healthily and you do not feel really well. However I'd also not feel well if I chose to deny those diets and just eat everything I'd like, because that would worsen my condition. Luckily a blood-test revelead that most of my micronutrients are still on their regular levels.
Now for training, sports in general and specifically être et durer.
Whenever someone practises sports he ought to sweat. It's a natural body function which seperates us from many animals (gazelles for example) and is used for cooling our muscles. However, what most people don't consider as problematic: Sweat is salty and slightly acidic. This won't do harm on normal skin, however let's think back: I got something like small little wound and sensitive skin all over my body... let's recap: It itches like hell. Mostly all over my body. It gets unbearable when I ate something wrong, like wanting to tear off your skin and replacing it with new one.
Now how this relates to training:
A normal practicioner might be sitting at home, seeing the sunshine outside, and decide "I'll go train!" So our friend ventures outside, combines technical training with conditioning and comes home after two hours training, tired but at the same time refreshed. He then procedes to take a shower and is done after 2:10. He can do whatever he wants after this.
Now let's take a look at my training:
I am sitting at home, seeing the sunshine outside, and think "I might go training, but it'll itch all the time, the sweat will make skin swollen, I'll scratch it and it'll worsen my condition. Maybe it'll still relieve my mind off of it a little. Don't even wanna think about the shower afterwards...", so I also go outside and do similar training. All the while trying to focus and forget about the constant itchyness, the scratching and also finish after two hours. Then I go home, still itching, sweating, swollen and scratching and hop under the shower. The shower takes ten minutes, but after that comes careful patting of the wet skin to not rip the soft skin apart, which has been soaked by sweat and water. After that comes an ordeal of applying lotion to my whole body for about one hour. All the time exercising ridiculous self-control to not scratch the irritated skin, which had to withstand a lot in the last 3 hours.
After all this I am grateful to have trained, but I could not stand this every day.
So what I do at the moment is training one to two times a week, and staying outside real long, devoting the whole day to training and movement, and the required hygienical ordeal afterwards. This however results in me always having 2-3 days DOMS after training and very little progress in terms of strength. I am however confident and still like training (otherwise I would've quit, but we all know one cannot just stop moving).
So coming to the être et durer. To be and to last...
What if training is destroying you? Any kind of physical activity is bad for my skin. It is good for my mind, because I need movement and I need to grant my body the satiation of this instinct deep inside of me. However, I sit at home NOT going training, because I don't feel like doing all the itchy stuff. I don't consider it to be worth the effort.
I had a chat with Yves about similar things, and we both agreed that Parkour-training should move you out of the "comfort-zone", but the problem is, that the "out-of-comfort-zone" for me starts when I start sweating.
What are your thoughts about this? What is être et durer in my case? Training, not training? Is there training without sweating? Dietary recommendations? Similar experiences? Please share all of them.
bye,
Dirk
ps: Please keep in mind: I have tried various therapies for getting rid of it (scientifically backed medicine, alternative therapies, acupuncture and all other kind of funky stuff). There is, so far, no ultimate cure for this disease.