As mentioned yesterday, I saw a cardiologist and he was the opposite of enthusiastic at my thoughts on quitting coffee. I don’t know if he’s right on the most important and relevant points. And I’m not sure what are the most important and relevant considerations with regard to coffee consumption.
Don’t get me wrong about the cardiologist’s attitude toward coffee – he was VERY enthusiastic about thoughts on drinking coffee. He made no comment and didn’t even acknowledge when I listed the first of my reasons for considering quitting coffee, which was that caffeine causes blood vessels to constrict.
Like Diane pointed out … a lot of things can cause constriction or dilation of blood vessels. When we go outside on a very cold day, the blood vessels nearest the surface of the skin constrict the most, to help keep the most important inner parts of the body warm.
But caffeine causes all the blood vessels to constrict. Maybe its an insignificantly small amount of constriction, I don’t know and the heart doctor didn’t venture toward any relevant data or …. as I said earlier … or even acknowledge it.
So after sleeping on it I decided this morning to resume drinking coffee, but to a very diminished degree. So this morning I made coffee and had one single, precisely measured, 5 ounce cup of coffee. I savored it and made it last as long as a large mug of coffee.
Afterwards, all traces of mental fog and suggestions of an impending headache that I’d been having for the past 7 days of abstention totally vanished.
I felt like myself again! I turned that thought over in my mind and considered that I was probably more “purely” myself, without any additives…. if I could recover from the lack of additives, namely coffee and all its population of exotic molecules.
Then the thought came, probably from the science fiction area of my mind which formed during my teenage years of visiting the library and checking out many sci-fi books… the thought that perhaps coffee is more than a mere beverage. Perhaps it is an alien substance that takes over a person’s mind and thereby snatches his body.
If coffee is a body snatcher, it certainly tastes better than I would have imagined body snatchers to taste.
TODAY’S INDOOR ROWING – yes, I did do some indoor rowing today. Decided to do a version of the same 11K as yesterday, to see if my heart would go whacky again and lose its rhythm in an unprofessional, amateur heart manner.
The plan was to start out the first 1,000 meters at about 90 watts effort and then increase the effort by about 10 watts every subsequent 1,000 meters.
The heart rate started out by being bashful and not revealing itself. Which is what happens when its too erratic for the heart strap detector to make sense of it. After a few hundred meters it revealed itself in the 80’s. Then vanished. Then returned, etc.
While it was doing that, I could feel it skipping or whatever it would be best to call it when it is not acting perfect and either doing extra beats or lacking beats when it should have them. It felt like a klutzy, awkward heart. But it sounds best and everyone probably knows what it means if I say it was skipping. Skipping a beat here, skipping a beat there, etc.
While it was doing that, I realized that I was also thinking about Diane. Then I started to wonder if that was the reason my heart was skipping. Sometimes Diane makes my heart skip… her smile, her voice… looking at a photo of her and having memories come flooding into my mind from years ago… doing that can make my heart skip.
Then I started thinking about making the title of this blog post something like, Diane Makes My Heart Skip.
And I was going to do that, exploring thinking about her some more and paying attention the the skipping of my heart and looking for correlations between the thoughts I had and the skipping heart… but after about 1,000 meters, it settled down and skipped only once more, somewhere around 3,000 meters.
From 3,000 meters on, it was steady and reacted perfectly as the wattage was increased every 1,000 meters.
I continued to increase wattage by 10 watts every 1K, until reaching the final 1,000 meters and then I picked up the pace quite a bit and did 10 “power strokes” and used the remaining few hundred meters as a warm down.
After the heart steadied, I had the thoughts about how I felt “like myself again!” with the help of only one small cup of coffee… and the idea of coffee being an alien body snatcher came to mind.
I thought about other things too, but those weren’t thoughts of any note for a blog post. Rowing, like walking, has an influence to stimulate thoughts.
Happy rowing and thought stimulation to you.
