Sometimes I think of my heart as being like a horse. Having a mind of its own and relatively simple minded, but it wants to get along with me as well as it can.
Today the horse was wild and crazy or agitated. A possible reason for its agitated behavior might be because of a chemical unbalance due to having taken a dose of a supplement called “NOS”.
The bottle was a gift to me, years ago, and is supposed to help produce a natural and helpful amount of Nitric Oxide. I haven’t taken any for quite a while and had forgotten about it until I spotted it on a shelf today and decided to take a dose to see if it would help me to row faster while not seeming to work any harder.
After taking the NOS, heart rate went crazy irregular and its rate went way too high. It hadn’t bothered me that way before. I looked at the expiration date on the bottle and it was sometime in 2010. Did it change into something else, in the years since 2010?
I couldn’t undo the fact that I’d swallowed them about 45 minutes earlier, so I tried some rowing as therapy to calm the horse.
Three short sessions had more appeal than one longer session so I rowed three 5Ks. The first 5000 meters didn’t seem to help (see the graphs or watch the video for proof that it was still agitated during the first 5K). Neither did the second one (see the graphs or watch the video for proof that it was still agitated during the second 5K).
But somewhere early in the third 5K – after about 1200 meters- the horse finally calmed down and returned to its normal regular and steady behavior with a normal BPM. It still seemed to be a bit agitated, because it seemed to speed up a bit too quickly when I would increase the effort level and when I GREATLY decreased effort level, it didn’t seem to slow as much as it normally would, but it felt quiet and calm in my chest instead of feeling “fluttery” and “agitated” like it had felt before and so it was almost “perfect” and resulted in a perfect line graph with no vertical lines disrupting it.
Third time was the charm, for calming the horse.
In the graphs below which show vertical lines in the heart rate graph, those vertical lines happened each time heart rate was too irregular for a reading to be calculated and displayed. You can clearly see that the vertical lines disappeared from the heart rate graphs during the last 3800 meters of the third 5K session.
The three 5K sessions were recorded and uploaded to YouTube as screen recordings and will be active either late tonight or early tomorrow at these links: “Indoor Rowing 5K 1 of 3“, “Indoor rowing 5K 2 of 3” and “Indoor Rowing 5K 3 of 3“.
Happy rowing to you and your calm horse.