A year or two ago, I sort of went >poof<, and vanished from the (public) sports performance world. It wasn’t an easy disappearing act to pull off! I got a lot of email and phone calls from friends, colleagues and athletes alike, all of whom were wondering if I had finally run away to join the circus, as I have often threatened to do.

Skiba, Jones and Clarke at YaYa

As many of you now know, I was recruited to join a top-secret “moonshot” project to attempt to break the 2-Hour Marathon Barrier. You can read some of the press, and see some video in the links below. Thanks to all my colleagues at Nike for giving me the opportunity, and thanks to Advocate Medical Group and especially Dr. Tarek Karaman, who were willing to lend me out for travel to Oregon, Kenya, Ethiopia, Spain and Italy to help realize the project. Stay tuned for the documentary, which will broadcast on the National Geographic Channel later this year!

Effective November 19th 2012, I’ve taken a position as the Program Director of the sports medicine fellowship at my alma mater, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, in Chicagoland. Built by my friend and mentor Dr. Bill Briner over the past 20 years, the sports medicine program here is among the most respected in the world. It is an honor and a privilege for me to have the opportunity to direct it.

Because of the academic nature of my new practice, I have been presented the opportunity to do something I have always wanted, which is develop a sub-specialty clinic to address the unique medical needs of endurance athletes. When you ask how an injury or illness will affect your track workouts versus your endurance workouts versus your master’s swimming program, is your doctor able to give you clear advice? The fact is, most physicians aren’t lucky enough to see a significant number of patients who are seeking both health and performance. Oftentimes, this leads to athletes receiving very safe, but not necessarily state-of-the-art guidance in terms of recovery and return to sport. Moreover, many physicians don’t have significant experience dealing with issues that are common in endurance athletes, but very rare in the rest of the medical (even sports medical) world. This can lead to shuffling from specialist to specialist with no clear plan.

In contrast, my goal is to cater to you, specifically. I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career providing coaching, testing, and medical consultation to world champion, world-class and amateur endurance athletes from all over the world. This unique mix of roles allows me to approach your medical care from the inside out. I take into account your real-world needs as an athlete interested in performing at the top of your abilities. I coordinate care with your coaches, physical therapists, and other allied professionals in order to get you back into sport as safely and quickly as possible.

Athletes making appointments at the clinic will be scheduling to see me, personally. Initially, we’ll be up and running Wednesday afternoons starting on December 5, at the Nesset Pavillion. However, rest assured that if you are traveling a long distance or from outside of the United States, I can also make accommodations for your schedule. (Note that my office is only 10 minutes from Chicago O’Hare International Airport). Whether addressing a troublesome injury or the management of another medical condition and the way it affects your ability to participate in sport, I’d love to see you. Just be sure to bring any existing tests, films or relevant medical records along for your visit. We have radiology and diagnostic ultrasound in-house, and I also direct our state-of-the-art human performance and physiology laboratory, which allows us to immediately perform any necessary testing.

The practice accepts most medical insurance policies, so you shouldn’t have too many hassles there. Give us a call at (847) 318-6020 and let me show you the difference that world-class sports medicine can make.

Important Note: The sports medicine program and Endurance Medicine clinic remain totally separate from my coaching and professional sports consulting work. Please contact me through this website for access to those services.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to appear on BBC’s Bang Goes The Theory. The host, who was an aeronautical engineer in a previous life, was interested in building a human-powered airplane. He rocked up to our laboratory at the University of Exeter for a bit of physiological testing in my MRI machine. I wish I had better news for him!

Dr. Phil on Bang Goes The Theory

Jason has worked with me for 5 years, and has an inspirational story. I’m going to let him tell it.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Clementon, NJ with my Dad.   Those years were, hands down, some of the best memories of my life.  I was outside every day running around in the woods, playing basketball, or stirring up trouble with some of my friends.

What sports were you interested in/did you play as a kid?
Growing up, the two main sports I played were baseball and basketball. As much as I love baseball today, basketball was always my favorite sport. When I was in the 6th grade, all 5′ 2″ of me was certain I would play in the NBA.

Were other members of your family athletic, and did they support you in your athletic endeavors?
My brother Dennis was the stand-out athlete in our family. He was a very good pitcher from northeast Philly who at one point in his career was invited to an open workout held by the Florida Marlins. All of my family has been super supportive of my athletic endeavors, especially my dad. He would be at all of my basketball and baseball games when I was growing up. During my college years, he came to as many cross country and track and field meets as he could. When I picked up the sport of triathlon, he was there for every single one of my races.

When did you first realize you had polycystic kidney disease (PKD)?
It was the summer before my freshman year in high school. I did what most teenage boys do now and again and got in a little fight. During the fight, I got kicked in the side but did not think much about it. A few days later, I complained to my dad that I had some pain in my side. At the time I did not know it, but because my dad also has PKD, he knew right away that most likely I had PKD and had ruptured a cyst on one of my kidneys. I was admitted to the hospital for tests, and a CT scan confirmed that I had the disease.

How did the diagnosis of PKD impact your life in general, and your athletic training in particular?
At the time of my diagnosis, I was really too young for it to get me down. My dad told me to live my life but take it easy with the roughhousing with friends or doing stuff like wrestling and boxing. All in all, I lived a normal life. A few times I would pop a cyst and be on bed rest for a few days. That was never fun, because the pain is like someone stabbing you constantly in the back.  I had to take a few blood pressure medications due to the disease and the doses got heavier when I was a little older and in college, despite running competitively and taking on the sport of triathlon. Around age 22 or 23, the disease began to progress a bit more quickly, and I started to notice the effects on my training.

You received a kidney transplant in 2009 with a donor kidney from your good friend, Nick DeSantis. How bad had things gotten by then, and how did it come about that Nick donated a kidney to you?
Things were pretty bad at the time Nick let me know that he was a match and going to donate his kidney to me.  At that point, I was on dialysis three times a week for 4 hours at a time.  I had four surgeries, including emergency surgery to remove a piece of my intestine that had closed off due to complications from the first kidney surgery.  They had to install a colostomy bag and they said I was very lucky to live. This is when I started dialysis as well.  Dialysis was tough, because it was not only physically draining, it was also mentally draining.  I’d have to say it was more mentally draining, because I was spending a lot of time around people who were chronically ill. When you are in your early 20’s, you still feel invincible. Seeing the basic frailty of the human body staring you in the face like that, day after day, can be really scary. You see some people who didn’t take care of themselves properly, but you also see the others who did everything right. You wonder if you are going to end up the same way, no matter how hard you try.

The doctors wanted me to start looking for donors in late 2007.  They would not be able to test for a donor match at that point, but they knew it was only a matter of time.  As soon as my kidney function had dropped past a certain point potential donors were allowed to test.  My doctors had never wanted me to be on dialysis, but my kidney function dropped too quickly, so it was necessary for me to be on dialysis to keep me alive until I was able to have the kidney transplant.

Check out the rest of Jay’s interview on our Facebook page!

Catriona took her third win in 3 races at the Texas Ironman

There are athletes, and then there are athletes.

I have had the good fortune of working with some of the best athletes in the world. At Cat’s level, you get all sorts. There are the athletes for whom every setback represents a catastrophe, and those who tough things out besides discomfort or injury. And then you have Cat. I once joked that Cat is the sort of athlete who could suffer an amputation mid-race, and would call me afterwards and say, very calmly:  ‘Yeah Phil, my foot fell off halfway through the run, but I tied it off with a bit of shoelace and kept running on the bloody stump.’

Catriona has had an amazing season so far. She had great wins at the Texas 70.3, a hat-trick at St. Croix, and now this. There are all sorts of lessons to take from our approach to training and racing. The most important is the benefit of a calm mind and a rational approach. Two weeks before this latest race, Cat emailed me pictures of an outrageous blister on her foot. In all honesty, it was one of the worst I have seen in my medical career. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to see when an athlete is trying to get in their last big workouts before one of their biggest races of the season.

The thing is, nobody freaked out. Cat, though a bit nervous, was basically calm where other athletes have called me in similar situations in hysterics. I assured her that this was no big deal, that there was plenty of training in the bank, and with a bit of adjustment of the taper using RaceDay Apollo, she would still smash the Ironman, which she did. There was no attempt to train through the injury, and there was no panic-fueled attempt to squeeze in extra training at the last minute afterwards. We simply decided it was a non-issue, and that recovery needed to be the main priority if we were still going to race well. We used the data we have carefully recorded to adjust the plan going forward to account for this setback. Problem solved.

Maintaining a calm outlook is also of great importance while in the thick of the race. Cat and I were both trained as scientists. The beauty of this is that we are able to dispassionately review and evaluate data. By keeping careful track of her training and racing, we know exactly how hard she can ride, and how long she can ride that hard for. We know how she will run after riding at different power outputs. This knowledge lends a certain amount of security. The other competitors in the race become a non-issue. People rode past Cat with their hair on fire, and we were happy to let them go. We had a rational plan and we stuck to it because was  supported by data, not the emotional reaction to what others are doing. You can see the results every time Cat walks up that podium.

The take home message is this: Learn to separate your emotions from the situation you find yourself in. The best athletes, firefighters, doctors, or soldiers succeed under pressure because they are able to dispassionately assess very stressful situations and then act accordingly. This is a learned skill. Get out there and practice it 🙂