I went for my run yesterday, I was on time, there were no items lost in transit. A few minutes in to the run I noticed that I wasn't feeling too strong, my heart rate got up quicker than usual, and then was elevated more than usual (136 vs 132bpm). It should have clicked but I rather tried to justify this with many things.
Firstly I had had a pie for lunch, shock shock horror! I'm a bachelor, I cook for myself, usually low fat, low salt, low GI type food. The trick is to make it go as far as possible so I don't have to cook often. I quite like cooking, but I hate cleaning up afterwards. So I usually make as much as possible and freeze leftovers in meal size portions, taking these to work for lunch or I eat them when I feel too lazy to cook in the evenings. The point is that I usually don't eat pies, they are full of fat and salt and they give me heart burn... but once in a while they are SO GOOOD! I thought perhaps the pie was cramping my style... something to do with blood sugar levels.
Next I thought I could have some trouble with the amount of fluids in my body, as I have mentioned this needs to be tightly controlled. Too much and I start coughing as it starts draining into my lungs. Too little and I get headaches. I was leaning towards the too much fluid side of things, the amount of fluid I retain is directly related to the amount of salt I eat and it just felt like perhaps my salt consumption had been too much this passed week. But this was also not a very convincing argument.
Then I thought that perhaps I was increasing my running interval too much. I had increased it from 45s on Friday to 50s on Monday to 55s on Wednesday, of course there was a matching increase in my rest interval, but still it is almost a 20% increase in running time in the space of 6 days. So I thought perhaps this was ambitious.
Anyway I didn't feel like I couldn't carry on, I just felt like there was something slightly amiss. I continued to do the 5km run, and as I found out later it was slightly better than my previous time for the same route. My routine when I get back from a run is to take my meds for the evening and then go for a shower. I take quite a few tabs so I dish them out into one of those weekly container things, so I only have to do it once a week... sounds like I should have a walking stick, I know! Anyway I picked up the container and noticed that I hadn't taken any meds yesterday morning! So there was my explanation, I take 4 types of meds, the first is an anticoagulant, preventing blood clots forming in my heart and getting stuck anywhere else in my body. The second is a very mild diuretic, which helps with fluid retention. The third is a vasodilator which increases the diameter of my blood vessels, lowering my blood pressure and making it easier for my heart to pump blood around my body. The final drug is a beta blocker which basically slows my heart down.
So I guess the reason I wasn't feeling too strong was that my heart was beating harder and faster, to push thicker blood through smaller blood vessels. But it's not the end of the world, it's not like I do this every day...
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