The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-307 – The Continuing Adventures of Wendy Nail
(Audio: link) [audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4307.mp3]
Link epi4307.mp3
Intro Bumper:
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Well, my friends, here we are, Late Friday afternoon and time to publish another episode of the long running Podcast series RunRunLive…A serial magazine series sponsored by the Cialis and the History Channel about the trials and tribulations of Yaks farming on the north eastern permafrost… No? Ok, It’s not sponsored by anyone except the neurotically charged neurons of my cranial sphere.  And mostly we talk about distance running and endurance sports and we talk to members of our community about their adventures and transformations and epiphanies.  
And at 25 words with 4 conjunctions that, my friends, is a sentence Vladmir Nabokov would be proud of. 
Just got back from running 1:45 outside on the roads.  That’s two outside runs for the week! I’m killing it!  Heh heh… My training is going good and bad.  On the good side I’m getting the miles in.  On the bad side my AFib is really getting annoying.  
Let me ‘splain…I’m not a doctor, so I’m going to dumb it down to my level.  If you look at your heart it’s a big manual pump.  It’s got these four chambers to it.  Each one of these chambers is like a Turkey baster, you squeeze it and it squirts blood out one side, you let go and it reflates and draws blood in the other side.  
There’s a one-way valve on each side of each chamber, just a simple flap valve, like in the back of your toilet. 
Leading into and out of these turkey-basters are four big pipes.  These pipes return blood and carry blood away.  These are the pipes that get clogged up when you hear about people getting ‘bypasses’.  
The thing is, in order to squeeze and release those turkey basters your heart muscles contract and relax.  The trick is that they have to contract and release in the right sequence or the blood doesn’t move around well.   
What’s going on in my Afib is that erroneous electrical signals are cascading down the sheathing material around these pipes and causing my heart muscles to get the turkey basters out of synch.  This is exercise induced and only happens when I push hard and towards the end of my runs.  
What it feels like is a loss of power.  If I look at my heart rate monitor it will read max, like I’m doing wind sprints.  But it’s not really my heart beating too fast or at max, it’s my heart reacting to these bogus electrical signals and doing the funky chicken.  
When I think about it, now that I know what it is, I can trace it back a few years, but it only got noticeable in the last year or so.  
In its current form it’s just sucking the joy out of my running.  What I love about running is that point when you get warmed up, deep into a workout and can push the gas pedal down and transcend the workout.  Right now, when I get to that point, the engine sputters and coughs. It has removed the ‘flow state’ or the ‘runner’s high’ state from my workouts.  Which makes them more like work and less like the flights of fancy that I love. 
But, all is not lost.  I’ve scheduled myself to go in for a procedure called ‘Cryo-ablation’ where they snake a device up the veins through your groin, into your heart and freeze a ring of scar tissue into those four big pipes.  That ring of scaring blocks the spurious signals from getting to your heart and all is well.  They say it works 80% of the time and I’m a perfect candidate.  But, like Mark Twain was fond of saying, “There’s liars, damn liars and statistics.”
The other alternative is that I could just learn to run slow and short.  But I don’t think I’m ready or wired for that.  Let’s face it. In the grand scheme of things I’m a super fortunate, super blessed guy.  I have nothing to complain about and I really mean that.  
Besides, I’ve got you right?  And who’s going to hold off the zombie hoards if I