Week 3

Tomorrow it will officially be three weeks since I last did exercise. Three weeks deep of detraining.

In the past three weeks I have been for a couple of walks, one 30 minute gentle paddle and a very easy bike ride where I was giving somebody some cycling tips. None of the sessions are exactly what I would consider 'training'.

In terms of the detraining I think it is going okay. Fitness wise I am coming along nicely, losing fitness at an admirable rate. In a TrainingPeaks sense my CTL is down to 41, so it has dropped a good 10 points in the last two weeks. I still don't have a good idea of how much fitness I need to lose in order to be considered officially detrained, but I feel like it is going well. Probably still a lot of weeks to go though.

Weight wise I seem to have found a happy(ish) balance at around 78kgs, which I can live with. The weight seems to have steadied around there and so that might be about my natural healthy body weight. Good to know. Still the weight is something that I will keep an eye on, I am hoping that holding a steady weight might not be too much of a battle, but it never pays to get complacent.

Heart beat wise, I have been keeping an eye on it with this nifty little device from a company called AliveCor. Dr Stobie suggested I get one to help me track how my ectopic beats and arrhythmias are going. The device is called a Kardia and basically you stick it to the back of your phone and by placing your fingers on it you can get an approximate EKG reading. It is pretty cool. All my friends are very jealous.

Using my little Kardia I feel like I am getting more normal readings like this one.

More frequent recordings like the above make me hope that perhaps my heart really is settling down.

However, when I start getting too hopeful that things are settling down I get readings like this one, where I don't really know what the heck is going on.

This particular reading was just after I had been for a 20 minute walk and as you can see it was all over the place. I have to say it didn't feel particularly great either, which is exactly why I took the reading. I didn't feel that unwell, just not quite right either. The little AFib signal in the right hand corner is because the Kardia tries to fit plots to known conditions, however, in this case I don't think it got it right because I haven't been getting Atrial Fibrilation. The heart wasn't right, but I don't think that was the problem. Still, quite interesting. In the case of the above plot I sent it to Dr Stobie for further opinions so we will see what he comes back with.

So the detraining is going alright, but I think there is probably quite a bit more to go. The countdown continues.