riding out today
Today's #ThatWasGood is that I have got back out on the bike again after a break of nearly three weeks now.
Because I have deleted previous blogs, I suspect not many current readers know the history. I've had Atrial Fibrillation (AF) over the last two years or so, resulting in ambulance rides to the hospital, resting heart rates of 150, and shock treatments to get the misbehaving muscle back into a relatively normal sinus rhythm again.
I'm on beta blockers now, after three cardioversion treatments last year. They still don't like my heart rate being as slow as it is, now at 40 bpm resting, but it's still beating (a good thing!) and generally behaving. However, I am getting short of breath, tired, and feeling palpitations doing moderate activity sometimes, and they're investigating why that is now.
And of course I have MS, so I get 'flares' involving very heavy fatigue, dyspraxia and various other symptoms (which I describe with 'The W's' here) which demand resting until the worst of it is over.
All this has made my target of 'getting as fit as I was in my forties' very tricky. There's a lot of three steps forward, two steps back (which can be frustrating as hell in the two steps back periods).
I suspect a lot of it is also that my forties are now nearly twenty years ago as well, so I'm trying to get a chronic and heart disease-ridden old shell of a man to be at the same fitness levels as he had just a couple of years after his stroke.
Oh yeah, I had a stroke at 42 as well. I was very, very unfit (and often drunk) until then, which is probably why I had a stroke. Didn't mention that, sorry.
I was very fit not long after that though, because the cliched 'I've been given a warning, I'd better clean up my act' kicked in—within the limitations I'd had since the MS diagnosis anyway.
Two years after the stroke, I used to get in a quick 60km ride in a morning before going off swimming with the kids in the afternoon. Rode the length of France for a holiday. Rode the length of the Rhine for a holiday. Still periodic MS flares of course, but still fit, regularly exercising and cycling in between them.
There are limitations to my riding now though. The last two years have been limited by doctors telling me not to exert myself too much as they hadn't then got to grips with the AF. So I sort of became more unfit by the doctors directions for staying alive.
Once sorted, they said yep, get on with it now, so the cycling could start again. Which was just as well as a lot of my trousers were feeling the strain.
I've been doing most cycling on the bike mounted on the trainer in the garage. I don't find it too bad, earphones in and measuring myself against known settings like percentage of trainer resistance, time, cadence, heart rate, power, etc.
It is by agreement with J (she made the rules, I agreed) that I don't go cycling out in the real world unless she is at home, so not working or off at a craft fair. She can't offer the support crew back-up if doing any of those, when I need cover for any sudden onset of the MS fatigue and wobbles (trust me, when it hits, I stop working properly immediately), or a collapse while I'm out somewhere in the north Cornwall wilds.
Of course I carry stuff that makes me self-sufficient bike-wise, spare tubes and pump, multi-tool, and a bit of emergency sustenance, but a broken me is what we're trying to cover.
After a period of MS flare kept me off for just over a week recently, there was another thing I have to manage straight after—physical effort levels. I had a lot to do in the garden last week that demanded some pretty hefty manual work.
I can do it when not impeded by the MS too much, but I have to choose one or the other, 'physical work' or 'exercise' for any given day. Doing one leaves me with little energy available to do the other for long.
Manual work, that needed doing when I did it, took priority last week.
But this week has freed up. A trainer ride on Wednesday, then J wasn't working today. So it was glorious fresh air, sun, and hills, views across the fields towards the coasts and moorlands, a bucking bike in potholed lanes, birds and butterflies, flies in the eyes (and surprise ones down the throat), rattling and bimbling along, and breathing like a steam train hauling a hundred hefty carriages.
Unfortunately, it was one of the days on which my breathing was curtailed and heavy at moderate effort levels, heart rate shooting up (yes, of course it was, but it was happening sooner than I would expect), and I was having some palpitations, but I managed to do a local 20km loop anyway—if a little slowly and with rests halfway up the more taxing hills.
But it felt good to be out anyway.
Written by a real person who completely ignores red wavy underlining and uses perfectly legitimate brand new words that just haven't made it to a dictionary yet.
Post Link: https://skryblans.com/riding-out-today
↓ There is a star to click down here, if you have been fully trained by modern social media to click stars mindlessly whenever you see them.
I have been similarly fully trained to receive them gratefully.