Today’s indoor rowing session was another for which the main goal was to burn a lot of calories for a Concept 2 challenge. The particular challenge is in a group of challenges, the entire set of which is called “January Revolutions.” A person can only choose to work toward ONE of the challenges among the all the choices. My choice was The Big Burn, whose goal is to burn at least 20,000 calories while rowing during January 2018.
Yesterday and the day before, the distance rowed was a standard half marathon (21097 meters) each day. That worked well so I did something similar today and set up a RowPro custom session with 17 intervals of 30 seconds each, following each interval followed by 1,241 meters of rest.
However, my heart was not cooperating. It seems logical that if a heart is not cooperating, it must be doing some antonym of the word “cooperating.” The word which seems most appropriate is “attacking”. Therefore today’s title: “Rowing Through A Heart Attack”
I don’t blame my heart because I think the catalyst for its non-cooperation was a can of sardines because the last time I had a can of sardines, I also experienced very noticeable heart irregularities later that same day. It seems to be something to do with fish oil and I noted the correlation in this blog in the blog post written on November 18, 2017, when I mentioned returning fish oil to the store.
So today was a spontaneous, though not deliberately planned experiment to see if the same thing would happen after eating sardines. It was similar, but worse.
I had a can of sardines for lunch, along with some corn chips. (Fish and chips.) Everything seemed okay until about 2,856 meters into today’s rowing session, when my heart rate increased even though pace had decreased. Heart rate remained high and irregular, with the heart rate display appearing and disappearing throughout the remainder of the rowing session. I took several breaks and drank an extra amount of water, in hopes of diluting the fish oil effect, but the abnormal behavior remained throughout the session.
Unlike Chris George (see photo at top of this blog post) I did not “power” through it. Maybe I should have? Instead, I took it very easy and barely increased the effort during the half minute intervals. I varied the pace a bit, trying to fish for the right amount of effort but the heart didn’t cooperate at any of the effort levels I tried.
Hopefully, it will return to normal by tomorrow.
Heartfelt hopes and wishes for you to have happy rowing.