It’s kind of like running at altitude
Here’s a comparison of today’s 60 minute treadmill run with an identical workout a year ago.
I haven’t been having very good workouts for quite a while, mostly going back to a round of something like bronchitis back in October. It was sort of like the flu, then got better, but never completely cleared out. I’m fine sitting around in the office, but in general I haven’t been breathing right for a while. My resting heart rate is 10-15 points high, and I feel like I’m running uphill or at altitude all the time.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have any “acute” medical symptoms either. I finally made an appointment to see a doctor last week, explaining it to the appointment desk as a followup to the bronchitis back in October. He seemed a bit puzzled about why I was there at first, since I look perfectly healthy and my vital signs look pretty typical. The health care system isn’t really set up for “consultative” visits, but one piece of data that turned up was that my peak flow rate for breathing is down about 25% compared with a visit a couple of years ago. (I had come in with a lingering cough and chest congestion after a trip to Beijing, which has notoriously bad air, so I wasn’t breathing very well then either.)
Apparently, my current peak flow rate is reduced even further than that, which partially explains why I’m fine sitting around at the desk and why my normal easy aerobic paces are driving my heart rate up into LT-training range.
I’m doing various tests to get a better handle on how to address this. They mentioned that I could try an asthma inhaler, but I wanted to understand what’s going on before throwing medication at it, since I haven’t had any problems before other than seasonal allergies. In the meantime, I’m sort of an odd bird in the pulmonary lab, since although I feel crummy, my blood O2 is fine, my peak flow rate is still within “normal” ranges, and my spirometer test (lung capacity) is apparently still well above “normal”.
I’m going ahead with training for Big Sur, based on the fact that nothing major seems to be wrong, and the doctor seems confident that at worst we could treat it with an inhaler. In the meantime, I think I’m going to treat this a little like training at altitude, and dial down the paces and intensity so I don’t spend all my training time in high aerobic or LT ranges.
Tags: altitude, fitness, health, running, training
January 9th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
[…] Aside from the mysterious breathing problem, I’m still evaluating how things look for this training cycle, getting ready for Big Sur in April, and shifting back to more running and less cross training. I’ve been logging more time on the stairclimber, elliptical, and rowing machine for a while. Just trying to get into a marathon training mindset at the moment. […]
January 14th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
[…] Since my training paces are all off due to the mysterious breathing problem, I’ve ordered a new data recorder to make tracking and logging heart rate and pacing data easier. I’ve been using the Timex Bodylink system since it came out, but haven’t been using a data recorder since last spring when the previous unit went missing somewhere in Maui. […]
January 28th, 2006 at 9:34 am
[…] Continuing to cautiously ramp up mileage and longer runs. The heart rate monitor is returning better data now, after a new battery. Yesterday I logged 9.5 miles on the treadmill, at 9:00 pace. Taking out the warmup and cooldown, the HR data for the middle 80 minutes looks substantially better than a similar run a few weeks ago. I’m still starting out 10 points higher than my 2005 baseline, but I’m not getting the steeply increasing heart rate anymore, and it seems to be tracking about 10 points higher than the baseline all the way out now. […]
February 26th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
[…] Part of my current planning challenge for this year’s Big Sur Marathon is that my physiological performance is very different (worse) than where it’s been over the past few years, so I don’t have a good sense of what my sustainable paces actually are. I also don’t have a clear sense of the root cause, other than some test data showing that my breathing is slightly off. […]
April 24th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
[…] Some shortcomings: - Breathing and HR are still behaving strangely. The symptoms haven’t gotten worse, but haven’t gone away either. - Weekly mileage maxed out in the low 40’s instead of low 70’s. Average in the high 20s to mid 30s, vs mid 40s to mid 50s. This is partly due to running slower paces, but I’ve also logged fewer hours on this training cycle. - Longest runs in the low teens, no 20+ mile runs. Normally I would like to have logged 3 or more. - Relatively little LT pace training compared to previous training cycles. This is partly related to the mysterious breathing problem, since I limited LT and anerobic training for a while, in the interest of being cautious while seeing how my body is behaving. - Difficulty getting my mental game together this time around for training at what feel like really slow paces. […]