Tawnee Prazak and Brad: Reflections on Healing From Tragedy Blended With Tips For Athletic Peak Performance, Diet, Recovery, And Testosterone

Tawnee is the popular host of the long-running Endurance Planet podcast, accomplished amateur triathlete, and respected coach. She is one of the queens of the endurance scene, and her programming extends from endurance training principles to healthy eating and mindful living.

She walks her talk with great devotion to not just racing fast, but doing it in a healthy manner. Our visit at her beautiful home overlooking the Pacific in Laguna Beach, CA was quite significant and impactful, for Tawnee has only recently returned to the public eye after a long period of mourning the loss of her baby Whitney after a full-term pregnancy and childbirth.

Tawnee has been incredibly vulnerable and open about the entire experience, processing the extreme grief, and soul searching how to move forward and continue living life. Visit her Instagram @tawneegibson and her blog, Life After Whitney for some powerful reflections about grief and healing. It was a pleasure to reconnect with this smiling, vibrant, very pregnant woman in January of 2019 and we recorded a pretty great show. It turned out to be a hybrid broadcast of our original intent to record two separate shows: Tawnee interviewing me for the Endurance Planet audience about matters of interest like hormones, diet, and evolved training methods and competitive mindset; and me interviewing Tawnee for the Get Over Yourself show to discuss her journey of healing and returning to the groove of daily life and returning to Endurance Planet broadcasts. So we smoothly interchanged the roles of host and guest, and talked long enough to support two full episodes.

You will be inspired by Tawnee’s strength and courage to not only tell her story in a raw and unfiltered manner, but also her commitment to healing and pursuing all manner of self-improvement, including a meditation retreat. On my side, I deliver choice plugs for my morning chest freezer cold therapy, maintaining my competitive intensity with Speedgolf competition, and my (soon to be) viral blog article about how I doubled my testosterone level in seven months going from what would be clinically a hypo diagnosis (below the bottom of the normal range) to the 95th percentile for males even in the younger age groups. We talk about a more sensible approach to diet than the warring factions and dogma of the various fad diets like keto and vegan. Yes, it’s a blending of different themes, in the spirit of the evolved medium of podcasting. Enjoy this hopefully interesting and thought-provoking conversation!

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad talks about the life lessons that come from competitive outlets like Speedgolf [10:30].

Don’t let your quest for physical fitness overshadow the importance of mental wellness and personal relationships in your life [15:25].

The experience of putting yourself out there and getting out of your comfort zone is more important than the actual end result [20:00].

There is a price to pay when you use positivity as a coping mechanism and ignore your true feelings and needs [23:00].

Tawnee shares how meditation and doing inner work was key to her survival after experiencing tragic loss [28:25].

Be mindful to not think in black and white terms when it comes to peak performance goals, as this causes most people to challenge themselves too hard, too frequently [36:15].

Tawnee and Brad talk about why minimally stressful exercise, like walking, is so key [45:00].

How to minimize the general decline that comes with aging [51:40].

Do you approach exercise strategically, or are you just burning off excess energy with ill-advised workouts? [54:50].

Brad shares details about the effectiveness of cold exposure and sauna use [57:20].

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