Some months ago, I became alarmed with my own heartbeat💓.
Sometimes, during relaxation, the heart skipped beats: instead of a nice steady oooooooo, I had an interrupted oo oo oo.
Recently, however, the irregular or skipped heartbeats had been returning to a greater degree and also not always whilst resting.
Accompanying these symptoms was an apparent dip in fitness, typically about a minute over 5km, but anything up to about 10%. Anyone who runs or trains regularly would be somewhat concerned by this alone and should be asking themselves a few questions about the training they are doing.
To encourage my heart💓to behave, I cut the training more than usual and completely cut out caffeine (known to upset heart rhythm).
On my last night race and after a short warm-up, standing at the start, I could feel the tell-tale signs of my skipped beats, and sure enough, as I stood there with a finger on the pulse, I could feel my heart regularly missing one beat in three.
Was I worried? Strangely not really, maybe my mind was more occupied with the thought of finishing the race. Unsurprisingly, I was slower than I should have been by about 10%. Sure, it felt hard (as it always will), but I’m not sure if my perceived effort was affected by some unconscious worry — probably it was. So, that little episode convinced me to do one thing: Visit the GP.
The result was that I tore a muscle in my heart💔; the ECG confirmed this. Sometimes, we never know why certain things affect us the way they do. Nevertheless, taking a bit of time off from running seems a natural thing to do. I will, of course, expect to lose a bit of fitness, but I’ve not been responding too well to training lately anyway, so there’s not much to lose in the short term.
So this is where I am right now. I’m scared but hopeful. It’s funny how something I thought was no big deal and probably something semi-normal in other athletes turned out to be a totally freaky thing pretty much confined to a select lucky few.
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