Midlife Wellness Community Facebook ad: “Read this if you've been blaming your sleep”

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The strongest man at my gym fell asleep sitting up on the leg press at 5:50 this morning. His head went down and came back up. Maybe for twenty seconds. Then he looked around the room to see if anybody had caught it. I was the only one who had. If I'd known that what happened to him over the next year was going to end up explaining the last two years of my own afternoons, I would have paid closer attention. I didn't. I looked away so he wouldn't feel it, and I went back to my set. I should tell you about the 5:30 crowd, because if you've never been part of one, it's a strange thing. I've lifted at the same Y since 2021. Weekday mornings, 5:30. There are maybe nine of us. I don't know most of their last names. I know their routines the way you know your neighbor's car. There's Gene, who is 71 and deadlifts on Tuesdays and Fridays and has for as long as anyone can remember. Retired machinist. Forty years at the same plant. And there was Dale. Dale is 41. I know that now. Back then I just knew him as the guy who was always mid-set when I walked in. Every weekday. Squats Monday and Friday. Same gray hoodie until it warmed up. Glass meal-prep containers stacked on the passenger seat of his truck, because I parked next to him for four years and you notice things. He was also the guy who talked. Stayed after. Knew whose kid made varsity. If you missed a week he'd say something, and you'd be a little glad he noticed. You know somebody like Dale. Every gym has one. He's the one doing it right while the rest of us are doing it mostly. That's why the leg press thing wouldn't leave me alone. Because a man falling asleep at a desk at 2 in the afternoon is a Tuesday. A man falling asleep sitting upright, in a gym, at 5:50 in the morning, twenty minutes into a workout he drove himself to — that doesn't file anywhere. I had nowhere to put it. So I didn't put it anywhere. I just started noticing. In February I watched him get under his third set of squats, stand it up twice, and rack it. He stood there with his hands still on the bar for a second. Then he stripped his plates, wiped the bench he hadn't used, and left at 5:55. Dale did not leave at 5:55. Dale closed his sessions out. That was the whole thing about Dale. The talking stopped somewhere in there too. Headphones in. In and out. If you said something to him he'd smile at you a half second late. In April he stopped coming. No announcement. The 5:30 crowd doesn't do announcements. His spot at the squat rack just stopped being his spot, and some kid with a lifting belt he didn't need started warming up in it, and that was that. I'd like to tell you I texted him. I didn't have his number. Four years of parking next to a man and I didn't have his number. I thought about him the way you think about a light that's gone out across the street. Not worried exactly. Just aware of a dark window. He came back in September. And I want to describe this carefully, because nothing about it was dramatic, and the not-dramatic part is the part that got me. He came in at 5:30 like no time had passed. Did a shortened session. Left. Came back Wednesday. A little longer. By October he was closing his sessions out again. All of it. The accessories. The finisher everybody skips. And one Friday I came out at 6:40 and he was standing in the parking lot with two of the other guys, arguing about whether lifting belts make your core lazy, and he was still going when I pulled out. Five months of dark window. Then the light's just on again. I'm an estimator for a commercial flooring company. I measure things for a living. I couldn't measure this and it bothered me for two weeks, and then on a Tuesday in October I just asked him. Not gracefully. I said, "Man, where'd you go?" He looked at me for a second. Then he said, "You want the real answer or the short answer?" We stood next to his truck for forty minutes. I was late to a job site. Here's what he told me, as close to his words as I can get it. He said he'd been tired for three years. Not busy tired. Not new-baby tired. Tired all the time, every single day, no matter what he did. And then he told me what he did, and this is the part where I stopped nodding along, because it was more than I do. It was more than anybody I know does. In bed by 9:30. Up at 4:45. Seven to eight hours, tracked. Training five days a week, programmed, for nineteen years. Macros tracked. The meal-prep containers I'd been looking at through a truck window for four years. Drinking only on weekends, and then barely, and then not at all. Bloodwork twice. Full panels. Thyroid, iron, B12, vitamin D, blood sugar, and the second time he paid out of pocket to get his testosterone checked because everybody on the internet swears it's testosterone. Everything came back in normal ranges. Both times. Every line. He said, "You do the whole checklist and the checklist comes back clean, and there's only one place left to look." He tapped his own chest. He said, "I decided I was just one of those people who's tired. Like it was a category I got put in. Some guys are tall. I'm tired." He said the mornings still worked, which is why the 5:30 crowd never saw most of it. He'd bank his whole life before noon. By 7 PM he had nothing. Zero interest in going anywhere or seeing anyone. He said, "I used to be the guy who talked. You know that." I said I knew that. He said, "Ask my wife what I was like at 8 o'clock on a Friday. Actually don't." And the racked squats, the February thing I'd watched. He brought it up himself. He said the third set didn't fail like a heavy set fails. The bar went up. There was just nothing underneath it. He said it scared him worse than missing a lift ever had, because a missed lift has a reason. So he left. He said coming in and doing half of what he used to do felt like wearing a costume of himself. Now here's where the story turns, and it turns on Gene, of all people. Old Gene. Deadlifts Tuesdays and Fridays. 71. That March, before Dale disappeared, Gene had followed him out to the parking lot. Dale figured he wanted a spot moved or something. Gene said, "I watched you rack that bar." Dale said he was fine, just run down, and started in on the checklist. The sleep. The food. The bloodwork that came back clean twice. And Gene let him finish the whole list, and then he said something Dale repeated to me word for word, and that I've repeated to probably ten people since. Gene said, "Forty years at the plant, you know what I did the last fifteen of them? Quality. "And I'll tell you what every green inspector gets wrong. They audit the loading dock. "Every truck, every invoice, every pallet, checked and perfect. And the plant's still behind. "Because nothing wrong ever came in the door. "The problem's out on the floor, and nobody walks the floor." Dale said, "Meaning what." Gene said, "Meaning everything on your list is what goes in the door. "Your sleep, your food, your vitamins. Deliveries. "And that blood panel of yours is checking deliveries too. Iron came in. B12 came in. Fine. "Nobody's asked whether the machinery that turns any of it into something is keeping up. "There's no line on that paper for it." Then he said, "I'm not telling you what to take. My doctor's the one who put me onto what I take, years ago, and that's the right way around. Ask yours." And he got in his car, because Gene is done talking when Gene is done talking. Dale sat on that for two months while things got worse. Then in June he did what I'd have done, which is read about it at night on his phone until his eyes gave out. I did the same reading later, after our parking lot conversation, because I don't take a stranger's forty-minute story on faith and neither should you. Here's my version of what he found and I found, in plain words, probably imperfect. Your body doesn't store energy in a tank somewhere. It manufactures it, all day long, as you go. The stuff it makes is called ATP. Every cell runs on it, and your heart, your muscles, and your brain take the biggest share, because those three never get a night off. The manufacturing happens inside your cells, in the mitochondria. And on that line there's one specific molecule whose job is carrying the charge from one stage to the next. Fuel and oxygen come in one end. Usable energy comes out the other. This molecule is what moves it along. It's called CoQ10. Your body makes its own. You make the most of it around age 20, and after that production drops. Every year. A little. There's no day it happens on and nothing about it announces itself. There's a study from 1989 that measured it directly in human heart tissue. People aged 19 to 21 came in around 110 micrograms per gram. People in their late 70s came in around 47. I'm not going to pretend I understand tissue chemistry. I can read 110 and I can read 47, and I can read which organ they measured it in. And then the part that made the whole parking lot conversation click into place. It is not on a standard blood panel. Not the thyroid panel. Not the iron. Not the B12, the D, the blood sugar, the testosterone Dale paid out of pocket for. There's a lab test for it, technically. It's a specialty send-out used for research. Nobody runs it on anybody in a normal physical. It isn't that Dale's doctor missed a line. The line isn't on the paper. So both of Dale's panels were accurate. Every number was correct. Gene was right without knowing a single term for any of this. They audited the dock twice. Nobody had ever walked the floor, and there's no form for walking the floor. Now the objection, because Dale had it and I had it and you probably have it. Dale had already taken CoQ10. Of course he had. A guy who tracks macros has taken everything once. It was in a "men's energy stack" he bought maybe three years ago. He went and found the bottle that June and read it properly for the first time. 100 milligrams, on a label with nine other ingredients and a proprietary blend total, so no way to know how much was really in there. He'd taken it first thing at 4:50 AM with black coffee and a pre-workout on an empty stomach. And he'd given it about two weeks. Four problems. And they're all the same problem: not enough of it actually reaching his cells, for long enough to matter. The research doses sit at 200 milligrams and up, so he was at half or less. It's fat soluble, so on an empty stomach a good share of it goes straight through you. And it isn't a stimulant. It builds up in tissue over weeks. Blood levels don't even level off for two to four weeks, and most of what shows up in the research shows up between week four and week twelve. So "nothing happened for two weeks" is the experience nearly everybody has. That's not the thing failing. That's the stretch before anything happens. Dale quit inside it and spent three years thinking he'd tested the molecule. He'd tested a fraction of it, wrong, briefly. That June he called his doctor's office first. I want to keep saying this part because it's the part people skip. He gave the nurse the name and the dose and asked if there was any reason not to add it, given what he was already taking. She called back in two days. No concerns. Mention it at the physical. One call. That's the step. You're not asking permission. You're asking the people who know what else is in you. He started in July. One capsule, with dinner, because of the fat thing. He changed nothing else, because after nineteen years of doing everything right there was nothing left to change. That was the entire problem, and it turned out to be the only clean test setup a person could ask for. He told me the first three weeks were nothing, and that he almost quit again out of pure habit, and that the only reason he didn't was he'd promised himself ninety days instead of two weeks. Somewhere in August his wife pointed out he was still downstairs at 9 PM. In September he walked back into the Y. By October he was arguing about lifting belts in a parking lot at 6:40 in the morning, which is the version of him I'd been missing for a year without being able to name what was missing. I asked him at the end, "So what is it you take?" and he pulled out his phone and texted me a link instead of saying it, which for some reason I trusted more. It's called solia. 200 milligrams of pharmaceutical grade CoQ10 per capsule, as ubiquinone. One ingredient. No blend, no proprietary anything, nothing to guess about. Rice flour and a vegetable capsule and that's the label. Third party tested, every batch. Made in the USA in a GMP certified facility. One capsule a day, with a meal. That's the whole protocol, and I'd have been suspicious of anything longer. Here's where I have to turn this around on myself, because I told you at the start this ended up being about my own afternoons. I'm 38. I'm not where Dale was. But standing in that parking lot listening to him list his checklist, I did some quiet math on my own life. My last physical came back fine. All of it, normal ranges. And my workdays go soft at about 2:30 in a way I have been calling normal for two years. I estimate flooring. At 2:30 I read the same takeoff twice. And if there's no plan on the calendar after 7, I don't make one. I used to make one. I couldn't tell you the week that changed. So in November I made my own phone call. Same script Dale used. Name, dose, anything I should know. My office called back the next day, no concerns, mention it at the annual. I'm eight months in now. I'm not going to hand you a fireworks story, because I don't have one and I've stopped trusting the ones I read. Nothing happened for the first few weeks, which by then I knew to expect. What I've got is smaller and I'll give it to you straight: the 2:30 fog shows up closer to 5 now, some days not at all, and last month I noticed I'd said yes to three things after 7 without negotiating with myself first. I can't prove the capsule did that. I'm one flooring estimator, not a study. Dale can't prove his either, and he'd be the first to say so. Some people notice something in a few weeks. Some take a lot longer. Some don't notice much at all. What I can tell you is what I watched with my own eyes across a year, from one rack over, before I knew there was anything to explain. So here's who I think I wrote this for. If you've got a checklist you could recite in order, because you've audited yourself with it a thousand times. If your bloodwork keeps coming back in normal ranges and you keep feeling exactly the same, and somewhere in there you quietly filed yourself under "one of those people who's just tired." If the morning version of you still performs and the 7 PM version of you has gone missing, and somebody in your life has adjusted to the missing version without ever saying so. Or if you've got your own Dale — somebody whose light went out across the street, and you noticed, and you didn't say anything. The checklist isn't wrong. Every line of it is what goes in the door. Normal bloodwork means the things they checked were normal. It doesn't mean everything got checked. Those are two different sentences, and there's a third sentence nobody says out loud, which is that the thing that converts all of it into energy isn't on the paper at all. Do it in this order. Call your doctor's office or your pharmacist. Give them the name and the dose. Ask if there's any reason not to add it, given whatever else you take. One call, and most offices will have an answer back inside two days. If they say yes, one capsule a day, with a meal. Not on an empty stomach, and not with your 4:50 AM coffee. Don't change anything else. Your list is fine. Leave the list alone. And give it ninety days instead of two weeks. The two weeks is how a man who does everything right ends up certain he already tried the one thing that was pointed at the actual problem. I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to talk like one. I measure floors. I'm one guy who watched the strongest man at his gym fall asleep sitting up at ten minutes to six in the morning, and then watched him come back, and finally asked why. https://trysolia.shop/products/coq10-cellular-energy-capsules P.S. The phone call is the part everybody skips, so once more. You're not calling for permission — it's a supplement, not a prescription. You're calling because that office knows what else is in you and you don't, and because CoQ10 does interact with some medications, blood thinners being the main one to check. Dale's call took four minutes. Mine took six because my nurse likes to talk. P.P.S. There's a 90 day money back guarantee. Every penny, no questions. And ninety is the honest number, not a marketing number. Blood levels take two to four weeks just to level off, and most of what the research shows lands between week four and week twelve. Two weeks tells you nothing, which is exactly what Dale learned from two weeks. Use the whole ninety before you decide anything either way. P.P.P.S. On price, because it costs more than the drugstore bottle and I checked why before I ordered. The common shelf dose is 100 milligrams, so you'd take two of those to get where one of these gets you, which closes most of the gap by itself. The rest is testing every batch instead of once, and one ingredient you can see instead of a blend total you can't. The multi bottle worked out to under a dollar a day for me. I've spent more than that on a gas station coffee to fight the 2:30 fog it never fixed. P.P.P.P.S. They only sell it on their own site. It's not on Amazon, and anything on a marketplace under the name isn't theirs. I keep a spare bottle in the pantry — not for a dramatic reason, just because a shipping gap is how a habit becomes a bottle in a cabinet. P.P.P.P.P.S. Gene still deadlifts on Tuesdays and Fridays. I asked him once, after all this, how long he'd been taking his. He said, "Long enough that I don't think about it," and put his headphones back in, because Gene is done talking when Gene is done talking. And Dale — I have his number now. Four years of parking next to a man, and it took all of this. If you've got a Dale, you probably know exactly who, and exactly which window went dark. That was worth one awkward question in a parking lot. It usually is. Kalén A, Appelkvist EL, Dallner G. Age-related changes in the lipid compositions of rat and human tissues. Lipids. 1989;24(7):579-584.

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