Yup, this is more or less the conclusion I’ve come to. I still believe there might be something to it, but I’m waiting on more studies to come out so that I can understand more.
I do think that rapa offers something for athletes. I’m taking it about once a month now at a lower dosage of 4mg. Still hits me pretty hard, I feel fatigued, then I even feel a good rebound from it where I’m super productive for a day.
I just came back from Flagstaff 7-8K feet. Did a decent bike ride of 2700 ft ascent, 18 miles about 48 hours after taking 5 mg of rapamycin. Holy crap ! My muscles never ached this bad before. I was exhausted and my HRV overnight hit the bottom. I felt worse than after my endurance race few weeks ago. This is a second time something like that has happened. Last time I tried to do intervals within 48 hours of taking rapa, I had nothing in the tank.
I have a hard time timing rapa between my activities. I do majority of my exercise on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I don’t want to take my rapa too soon after the big efforts because I am concerned it may impair recovery and body adaptions, can’t wait too long because then I end up taking day or two before my hard efforts and I can’t perform.
Tuesday seems to be the best time, so I can recover on Monday and still have enough time to recover from rapa by Friday ! Double recovery. 
Honestly if it wasn’t for my periodontal disease I would quit it, but I am waiting for my next evaluation to see if my pockets improve.
I did have really bad peridontal disease and lost a tooth a couple of years ago. However, I have progressed a lot since.
One big thing I found was that sucking melatonin (a 10mg pill will do much that every night I am probably taking an average of a gram now) resulted in my gums not being inflamed. That is not sufficient necessarily for them to grow back, but is something that has an immediate (same day) effect. It is also a same day negative effect as it is not fixing the mitochondria in the gums, but helping them fight infection. Hence if you stop sucking melatonin the inflammation can kick off again.
This was a very visible shift from dark red to pink.
If I used a 4 week loading cycle for workouts: hard, harder, hardest, easy…I’d over lay Rapa onto the easy week (biggest dose) and maybe the hard week (lower dose). The longer the time between doses, the bigger the rapa dose I can tolerate. I don’t think I have to take Rapa all the time to get a benefit. It’s an idea anyway.
That sound like a good plan.
I stopped the rapamycin 10 days before the last big race.
It’s probably not a bad idea to adjust the dose and frequency based on current exercise regimen.
This is what I started doing. I do 4 week cycles. The fourth week is my rest week. I take it towards the beginning of that week and back off total load for the rest of the week.
If I’m running high mileage, and cross training endurance a ton, there’s just no need to take it weekly.
@midage_runner i agree. Rapamycin is a tool in the toolbag…use it where appropriate for goals and in coordination with other tools. I’m going to start ramping up my training again. I may have to backoff Rapa even more but I hope to ramp up the training load slowly enough that I can handle it.
What dosage are you guys using? I was using 0.1 mg/kg, but I was thinking about half or a quarter of that once every 3-4 weeks? Not sure it would have much o an effect, but… I’m a bit hesitant to get back on rapa given my training load, but really curious.
I’m at 0.13 mg/kg every 2 weeks plus a week off every 5th week. Any time I feel worn out or “not 100%” I’ll wait a week.
I’m a sprinter specializing in the 100-meter dash. After a year of dosing, I’ve never noticed an effect from rapa. Last night, after a good session, I had sore legs for the first time in a while. I don’t know what caused it, but I wouldn’t attribute it to rapa. I’m 76, so age may be catching up to me.
Interesting. I’m sure age has a major role here. I would bet that you see more of a benefit vs someone who is 30 or 40.