Tuesday, August 2, 2005

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry

That's a dramatic fall off. I am much older than you but used to be a decent runner. (I.e., good endurance, not high morals.) Around age 50 I began to notice that I couldn't run the usual distance without stopping five or six times. It got progressively worse till, at age 58, I couldn't go 100 meters or climb two flights of stairs without getting out of breath.

It turned out to be sick sinus node syndrome, a condition where the brain's signals to the sinus node of the heart are not transmitted property to the rest of the heart muscle and as a result the heart would not speed up sufficiently during exercise.

Solution: pacemaker. Which has been great: 40 to 72 pulse instantly. (I still can't get past .3 km on the treadmill without getting totally winded but that's another problem entirely I suspect.)

I hope that this is not your situation but I personally never experienced such a dramatic fall off in endurance before I acquired this malady, though I was not in your class at all. Unfortunately, SSN syndrome is not necessarily a problem that older people experience.

I hope that someone else will have something more pedestrian like "overtraining" or "excessive blogging" to suggest as the cause of your difficulty.

Richard (ip:12.215.182.38) 2 August 2005 - 5:07 uur

To be completely fair, I managed to do an 7,5 mile run just today. (And mind you, the ten mile thing was a one off - the first time ever for me.) So perhaps I'm overexercised. The problem seems to be my muscles and joints, which have a hard time and are feeling very sore which is not usually a problem I have.

Sorry to hear about your SSN. I've actually had a full sport medical earlier this year, including heart checkup and endurance ECG, so I think, combined with the 7,5 mile run, we can rule that out for now. My heart rate seemed high enough today anyway ;-)

This line made me snort, thanks for that: "I am much older than you but used to be a decent runner. (I.e., good endurance, not high morals.)"

Arjan Dasselaar (ip:82.161.93.35) 2 August 2005 - 10:57 uur

Comment