Alive

I got some tests done on Tuesday at the hospital and will see a specialist next Tuesday once he's had the chance to look at the data. In the meantime I'm still allowed to go running, in fact they very much encouraged me to go running on Wednesday morning wearing their own HRM so that they would be able to see what's happening to my heart under those conditions.

After feeling pretty damn awful on Friday morning I seem to have mostly recovered but I don't know if that very slight discomfort in my chest is a figment of my overworked imagination or real, and if it's real if it's significant.

I went out for a very, very easy 5 mile run on Monday morning, did not run on Tuesday because I knew I would be on a treadmill doing a stress test just a couple of hours later in the hospital and did another easy run on Wednesday, this time wearing both the HRM from the hospital (with awkward cables sticking out) as well as my own HR strap.

Apparently I broke their record for the longest time on the stress test treadmill, but since they asked me to stop BEFORE I was going all-out I'd guess they just never had a runner on that thing, so that's not much to boast about,

Assuming that I get to go running properly again I will fall back to a Maffetone-style program. I wrote yet another quick app for the Suunto to give me a HR alarm (btw, any other GPS watch I've ever seen has this built into it from the start - the lack of such basic features is definitely the Ambit's biggest drawback) which I tested out this morning and which seems to work very well. I fully intend to stick with this protocol for several weeks. It's definitely not the most exciting form of training. In fact, I unsuccessfully tried to talk myself out of it but lost the argument with my more logical self because I know that it can achieve spectacular results for long endurance athletes of the very patient kind.

I've been feeling a little bit better every day since Friday and 5 days later I'm pretty much back to normal, assuming that the HR monitor that's still attached to me hasn't picked up anything abnormal. Since they never told me to stop running I'll keep doing just that; probably a bit paranoid at the beginning but hopefully a little bit more confident every time.

One lesson I learned is having your heart acting up is pretty scary.

8 Dec

5 miles, 42:07, 8:25 pace, HR 130

9 Dec

Stress test on treadmill (Bruce protocol, I think) for 19:10

10 Dec

5 miles, 40:48, 8:10 pace, HR 134