Still Going

Time for a bit of a quick health check tonight.

Well, in brief, I am still alive. So notch that one up as a win.

On the whole I am significantly less fit than I was. According to TrainingPeaks my Chronic Training Load (measure of fitness) is down to 33. That is about half of what it was a month ago when I started detraining, and it was already on the low side then. I am not sure if that means I am half as fit, but it sure does mean I have lost a lot of fitness. Something that I am painfully aware of when I do simple things like walking up a hill.

What does that mean heart wise? Well to be honest I am not really sure. I am noticing less problems with it, but I expect that may largely be the placebo effect and also because I am testing my heart a lot less often at the moment. When I check my heart I still get ectopics with a frequency anywhere between 1% and 25% of the time, so that could mean pretty much anything. Without exercise though I am having virtually no episodes of out of control ventricular arrhythmia, so that is very good. I was only really getting episodes of out of control ventricular arrhythmia during exercise before and so the lack of occurrence now may simply be because I am not exercising, however, it is still good that I haven't seen any.

One interesting thing that has come out of all of this is that I think I am going to be switching back to a decaffinated lifestyle soon, at least for a little while. After the various Holter Monitor tests I have done I have been told that I am okay to keep drinking coffee because it doesn't seem to impact the number of ectopics I get. However, a Holter Monitor looks at quite a Macro scale (24 hours) and so I suspect some of the finer details may get lost in all the data. One thing I have noticed since I have been tracking my heart rhythms closely is that I get a definite increase in ectopics about 20 minutes after coffee. I have tested it over a number of days and my ectopic load can go from 2% before a coffee to 20% after it, pretty consistently.

The potential link between coffee and ectopics is perhaps not so surprising, or a particularly big deal, except that I nearly always drink coffee before putting my heart under load during exercise in the mornings, about the same time as I tend to get these spikes in ventricular arrhythmia. Part of my can't help but wonder if there is a link. Obviously it isn't something I can test at the moment, since I can't really do strenuous exercise, but it is something I intend on experimenting with in the future. I don't think it is going to be a solution to all my woes, but I wonder if it could be a contributing factor. It is something I intend on looking into.

In the meantime I plan on working on the still alive thing.