Lucky Thirteen!

Oh morning, how I hated thee! First of all, I slept through my alarm clock by 3 minutes, which is not a huge deal at all but it is definitely a good indicator of my level of tiredness. Sleeping through music blaring eight inches from my head is always remarkable to me. Anyway, I managed to have a rather involved conversation with myself in the space of two actual minutes about what excuse I could make to not go to the gym and why it would be perfectly acceptable to forget it and go back to sleep. My 'bad brain' didn't win though and off I went.

Before I go too far, let me say that I wrapped up a stellar Day Twelve yesterday with an evening yoga class. We learned Sun Salutations yesterday and while that might sound peaceful and relaxing, it was actually contortionist aerobics. The one day I didn't take a hair elastic and wore long pants to the class was the day that we worked up an incredible sweat. (see link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbMr6GTWkG4&feature=related)

Back to now. Today is Day Thirteen and was a bike race day. I did 45 minutes (12 miles) of interval training on the stationary bike and then followed it up with some good stretching. I'm coming to see just how important stretching is and while the progress is incredibly slow (and sometimes painful), there is progress and flexibility reduces injury and improves performance.

Speaking of injury, I'm sitting here with my knee under ice right now because I think it's experiencing some overuse. I'm a person who is very, VERY sensitive to change of any sort and it's not unusual for me to become injured from one day to the next and then not injured the next day. So ice it is, until my knee relaxes and then it'll all be good to go again.

Now, onto more serious matters. I have a heart condition, I've had it probably for my whole life but only in the last 6 months has it reared its head. It's called Atrial Tachycardia and it means that the top of my heart cannot regulate itself and often times it goes batshit crazy and beats about a zillion times per minute. It's startling every time it happens and when it happens over and over in the same day it's exhausting both mentally and physically. In the last 3 months since I've really beefed up the exercise, those fibrillations have been coming fewer and further between. What I used to have about 5-10 times/day I now am getting only about once/week. Score! Right. The medication that I take for my heart doesn't actually change the rythym, it just slows it down overall. Exercise, especially when you get into the higher endurance (5+km jogging, hour+ cycling etc) sort, also slows your heart down because your heart becomes more powerful and each beat it produces sends a stronger push of blood into the body, making it not necessary to beat as often. Which is great! Unless you also have an artificially reduced heart rate....which is not great because it means that my resting heart rate is approximately 40-42 bpm. According to all the charts, I am an elite athlete. Only I'm not. What I am is blacking out on a quasi-regular basis and I'm frickin' exhausted even after a nap or a workout, both of which should energize you.

So I went to my family doctor yesterday to discuss what we could do about this. Not exercising and just sitting around and letting my heart get weaker (thereby beat faster) in order to counteract the medication didn't seem optimal to me. My doctor agreed and she's going to discuss the problem with my cardiologist (better her than me) and either I get to try a medication switch (beta blockers to calcium channel blockers) or I have to have an invasive procedure done whereby they send a catheter into my heart and burn out the section that isn't playing nice. If I get the medication switched and it doesn't work...then I get the surgery.

I can't say I'm really stressed out about it....ideally they give me the surgery, it takes me a week or so to recover and then I no longer have this annoying heart condition, I'll be right as rain, no pills required. Ideal as the surgery is though, it's voluntary at this time and I have a hard time volunteering for someone to stick a hot wire up a major blood vessel and start cooking my heart. I'm just sayin'. :)