It’s not like me to get all carried away but Sunday was a big deal to me. It’s been 9.5 years of struggle to get here.
A brief history
December 2006, January 2007 : Ventricular Tachycardia x 3. These can kill you.
January 2007 : catheter ablation for Ventricular Tachycardia x 2. Partially successful.
2007 – 2008 : mostly ok on Beta Blockers, but I had one more VT in September 2007
April 2008 : open heart surgery and cryo-ablation for VT. A cryo-ablation kills parts of your heart muscle with surgically applied frostbite, and this is the reason for my user name. At the time I started this log this operation was the most important thing to know about my running. I haven't had any VTs since.
April 2008 – July 2012 : No longer on Beta-blockers (hooray). Occasional Atrial Fibrillation (possibly initially caused by the open-heart surgery) becoming more frequent Atrial Fibrillation, to the point where I couldn’t really race in 2012
December 2008 : TIA or mini-stroke, scary stuff, caused by Atrial Fibrillation. Put on warfarin to prevent blood clots, probably for the rest of my life.
July 2012 – August 2013 : permanent Atrial Fibrillation ie all the time, non-stop, for over 13 months. The lowest low.
August 2013 : catheter ablation for Atrial Fibrillation, heart back (temporarily) in normal rhythm
September 2013 : cardioversion for Atrial Fibrillation. That’s where they put electrodes on your chest and shock you. Bam. Heart back (mostly) in normal rhythm
September 2013 – May 2014 : Still getting palpitations but this time it is Atrial Flutter with a bit of Atrial Fibrillation thrown in
May 2014 : catheter ablation for Atrial Flutter with further ablation going over the previous ablation for Atrial Fibrillation.
May 2014 – January 2015 : mostly ok but still frequent interruptions to training for Atrial Fibrillation and/or Flutter
January 2015 : gave up chocolate. It took a long time for the penny to drop, but I decided that chocolate was the root of my ongoing problems. Thanks to Jase for suggesting on here that I actually tried to analyse what the triggers might be. No more daily chocolate bars to keep me going at work. I read on the internet that it is because of the theobromine, and everything on the internet is true.
February 2015 – January 2016 training consistently for the first time since 2006. No training sessions lost to A-fib/A-flutter.
January 2016 – gave up snacks, mostly. I had got fat after all those years of relative inactivity and no amount of training seemed to be getting rid of it. I had a chat with Phil at new year about his own recovery from illness and subsequent return to fitness, and he was big on the idea of cutting out snacks to lose weight. I lost about a stone in 2 months and suddenly I could run more easily and more quickly, especially uphill. Who would have guessed? No more daily coca-cola, bag of crisps, cake, flapjack, bag of sweets and maybe another coca-cola to keep me going at work. I’m not going to get as thin as Phil though.
There’s a lot more detail about the first couple of years in this post, for anybody interested
http://attackpoint.org/viewlog.jsp/user_7726/perio....