Zone 5 Hazards

I really wanted to go riding again today, but woke up just dead on my feet, so went back to bed and slept in. The weekend was hot and I had a long drive and too much coffee on Sunday, but generally feeling like I have not gotten a good night's sleep since back from Az.

Thinking about that, it seemed improbable. Then I remembered something I'd read in Chris Carmichael's book. He was Lance Armstrong's trainer before, during and now after Lance's terrible cancer. He said when Lance first got back on the bike and tried to train he would have terrible fatigue. By trial and error they found that if he kept his heart rate just at the edge of the anaerobic threshold, but not into it, Lance could ride long rides and recover fairly well.

Thinking back on my own rides over the last couple of months, since I got the heart rate monitor, it occurred to me that even slow, relatively short rides, had sometimes fatigued me if I sprinted up a hill and got my heart rate up over 155 bpm. Before I got my monitor I used to just ride so as not to get blowing too hard, but since, I have made it a point to test my max watts on almost every ride. In particular, I remembered that the ride where my friend Sharel broke her ankle was an especially easy ride, except for the short 3-4 miles riding back up the trail to find her where I got very close to 100% of max HR, and it left me fatigued. This fatigue is also a new problem, so the timing fits with the arrival of HR monitoring.

I think this is a problem for me as I have a right bundle branch block - a timing problem where the 4 parts of the heart don't beat in proper synchronization, and so the blood flow becomes increasingly turbulent as I approach max. Prevalence is 0.7% at 30, 0.8 percent at age 50, and 11.3 percent by age 80. It usually results in about a 10% reduction in pumping efficiency. When I had my "coronary event" in '04, the EMS tech saw the RBBB on the heart trace in about 30 seconds. Anyone trained to read a heart trace will see it instantly.

In addition to a thorough workup when chest pains first appeared in 2000, as a result of my 2004 episode I was given an angiogram where my doctor reported I had no sign of coronary heart disease whatsoever. In fact he smiled and told me I had the heart of a 20 yr old, and he hoped his heart, lungs and aorta looked as good. As welcome as that news was, I still have the impairment, and occasional chest pain.

The rub is that while my calculated max HR is 220-age, or 167, my adjusted max HR is really about 150. When I take my HR up to 163, like on that ride, it's like pushing a normal heart to about 180 bpm. I have reset my HR alert on the Garmin to 155, and will try to keep my exertions below that level to cut my recovery time down to 1 day. I am running out of time to train, and long recoveries are really starting to get in the way. With so many other things coming together nicely, this is now the bottleneck in my training. I hope this does the trick, because June 13th is coming up fast.