Next in a Continuing Series of Non-Cycling-Related Posts

I had the "procedure" done on Thursday, as mentioned in a previous post. "Ablation", they call it. It was a surpisingly not-entirely-unpleasant experience, starting with the staff at the hospital. When did hospital staff suddenly get so pleasant to deal with? Last I was in a hospital, and I'll grant that it's been a few years, the overall attitude was, "my, aren't you an inconvenience to my day, and don't you forget it". The fine folks at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue were nothing but nice, tolerated my questions (in contrast to a previously typical, "*sigh*, (curt answer to question)"), and even laughed at my nervous attempts at humor.

I'll spare the blow-by-blow leading up to it. The idea is to shove some electrical catheters up a few leg veins starting at that groin, with the heart as the destination. From there, try to reproduce the symptoms I've had so that the doc can figure out which part of my heart to hit with the arc welder.

"Bring an iPod", the cardiologist said. Wheeled to the procedure room, clutching my video iPod, I discovered they have a sound system with an iPod dock. I could have just brought the smaller, less-likely-to-cry-if-I-lose-it Nano, but I had Chronicles of Riddick on the big iPod. Hell, I didn't know, maybe I'll be lucid the whole time and want to watch a movie. Ermm, no. The iPod was whisked away to the dock, with a little of the ol' Motor City Madman soon blasting away.

The catheters and their sheathes are tiny little things. I figured that in order to do anything useful, they'd have to be the size of, oh, a pencil. This is what happens when people whose medical education stopped at college freshman biology try to imagine medical things. It turns out the instruments used are really about the size of a large needle. One hell of a big needle, but still smaller than I was picturing. In under five minutes they had a little joy juice flowing in my IV, and had the four catheters (two on each side of my groin) shoved to my heart, all displayed on the screen for my viewing pleasure. I never felt a thing.

The little bit of fun drug they shot into the IV wore off quickly, and it was time for the main attraction. I didn't get a really good briefing on how, exactly, they would reproduce the symptoms I've had. The "how" became apparently soon enough.

With the electrical catheters, the doc could vary my heart rhythm. At first, it was kind of amusing. Were I feeling this while sitting at dinner, I'd be heading to the emergency room. But since my heart was (I assumed) supposed to be doing that, I was giggling as the different rhythms were run. Cool stuff, really, as I could watch the EKG readout on the screen and get visual feedback as it happened. Not that I can even begin to read an EKG, but I don't think the patterns I was seeing happen in a normally functioning heart. I looked for an image on the web to illustrate, but Google can't give you everything, I guess.

The nurse pumped a little adrenaline into the IV, and kept upping the amount ever so often. That's about the time my giggling stopped. After a point, it felt like my heart was going to pound through my chest, and I was getting a severe headache. All the while, the weird rhythms kept going more intensely than before. All I wanted now was just a five minute break of normal heartbeats. The doc could go get a latte, I get a nice 70 bpm of a regular-looking EKG for a few minutes, we start up again in a bit. No such luck, we continued on. The EKG was looking whacky, as if a two year old had drawn his representation of The Fall of Man on the screen.

The nurse asked me how I'm doing. Now I know she was just trying to look out for my interests, but every readout on that screen probably said that it's time to break out the shocky paddles under normal circumstances. I decided to save the sarcasm for folks that don't have complete control of my heart beat at the moment, and went with the more polite answer: "Umm, if I were anywhere else, I'd be calling 911."

The cardiologist ordered up 8 (units of measure; "mikes"?) to be pumped into the IV. I asked the nurse if there is ever a TV moment where she says, "8 units? But Doctor, no one has ever survived that much. It could kill him!"
Doctor: "just do it!"
She said that never happens. Maybe it should; I think the treadmill stress test was easier than this.

The nurse said that it should be done soon. The cardiologist doing the procedure had some visiting doctors from another hospital checking out how it's done. Hell, he was done 30 minutes ago. He's just been showing off his toy to his other man friends the remainder of the time.

"Can you get the WhatsIt wave to do an inverted sigmoid pattern? Our older model doesn't."

"Dude, dis one iz da shitz. You crank that knob, you're golden."

"Cool, can I try?"

"Sure. Whoa, whoa, whoa, not so much there! Wow, that was close, you nearly killed him. But no harm, no foul, right boys?" (manly, gut-holding chuckles)

"And check this out: it's got an iPod dock."

I was hoping to be undrugged for the part where the offending piece of the heart was vaporized. Could I feel anything? Notice anything at all? Smell burning heart flesh? But by the time the test portion of our program was completed, I just wanted a nap, and nap I did. When I wasn't looking, they must have gone ahead and put a little something in the IV. Next thing I know my eyes pop open to see the nurse and the cardio tech.

"Hi, I'm Richard, the tech. Here's what we're going to do today during the procedure..."

"Your sedation wasn't that good, buddy. Are we about done here?"

I don't know how I stood it doing so much hospital time as a kid. The remaining five hours after returning to the room were insanely boring. Too tired to read, not tired enough to sleep much. Hungry, but don't really feel like eating. Since there are puncture wounds at four points in the veins of my legs, they don't want me moving, not even lifting my head off the pillow. Aye-fuckin'-eeeeee! At least they have satellite TV these days. But it's the cheap tier of DirecTV, on a crappy old school screen, with the sound coming out of a tinny speaker in the bedside control.

Sweet freedom comes at nine in the evening, and I'm off. The release instructions say to resume normal activity after two days. Apparently for those that usually get this done, "normal activity" does not include riding a bicycle at a racer's training level. The cardiologist gives me the special instructions of staying off the bike for a week.

Once back on the bike, I'll give it a week and do a ramp test in preparation for winter training. We'll see if there's any power improvement over the winter, or if this whole thing just removes a training annoyance.

Invasive Heart Procedures to Increase Performance

Increased performance is what I'm hoping for, anyway. But that's not the reason I'm going in to have a catheter shoved up a leg vein and have some electrical nodes in my heart zapped. Wolfe-Parkinson-White Syndrome it's called. One is apparently born with it, though I've never really noticed it until the last five years or so. There's just nothing like being in the middle of a training ride and having the ol' ticker rate skyrocket without the benefit of actually pumping blood. Through the wonders of a power meter, I see that I'm limited to 150 watts when this happens. Anything more, and the wooziness and light-headedness kicks in. Lots of fun when there are still three non-trivial climbs to get home. Once I do arrive home, and I always have, even at rest lying on the bed my heart is beating along at 150 bpm. This only happens once or twice a year, and never in a race, but is this going to kill me in the middle of a race sometime?

The cardiologist said, "dunno, but no racing for you until we find out." So I spent the end of my road season doing more officiating than racing until the stress test could be scheduled to find out if a killer heart problem lurked within.

Any cyclist who has done hard intervals should appreciate the stress test. It's a ramp test on a treadmill. Dorky competitive athlete that I am, my first question was, "how high does it go?", with the intention of hitting that upper limit. That isn't the point, of course. I was reminded by the cardiologist that it's not a competition, but merely a test to get me to max heart rate so he could look at the EKG. Bollocks to that, I'm maxing this baby out.

It goes to seven, it turns out. "Anybody ever hit seven?", I ask. A rare few have hit it, apparently; highly competitive, young athletes. Seven shall be my goal, then. I remind you that I was there to hit max heart rate, not break the machine. If max heart rate can be hit at level three, then it's mission accomplished. But I'm having none of that.

Every three minutes the machine goes to a new level, with the incline increasing as well as the pace. It doesn't get difficult until level three. I'm hitting 150 bpm, which is a bit below LT. I've done multiple hours at this heart rate.

Level four hits, and I'm up to the high 160s a bit after. I can do that for an hour. At level five, the end becomes near. I'm up into the 180s, which if this were a race, I'd be preparing for getting dropped. The coveted seventh level doesn't look like it's going to happen. Level six kicks in, and thirty seconds later I'm done. Max HR comes out to be 191, one beat more than I've ever seen on my Polar heart rate monitor in even the hardest race. I left nothing on the treadmill which, as the cardiologist keeps trying to pound into my thick skull, was the goal all along.

Nothing shows up on the EKG, I'm cleared to race myself silly. Except that there's only one or two races left. Meh, I'm calling it a season. Not much of a season this year, but there's always next year.

In the mean time, I've seen the "electrical specialist". I swear that's what he's called. I expected him to come in with a tool belt and some wire cutters or something. The way he explained it, they just go in and zap the problem child in my heart, sorted. But does this problem have less noticable, more subtle effects that might decrease athletic performance? As a result, could going in for the procedure result in, say, a ten watt increase? He was non-commital. I might notice a difference, I more than likely won't.

But if you see me tearing up the roads next spring, you'll know my UCI-legal secret.

I'm Famous...and Mis-Quoted

Seattle Times article, with a brief mention of me. Yes, it is true that crits are not my favorite type of bicycle race. Yes, I do get pulled by the officials all too frequently from crits. For the record, however, never once have I hoped to be pulled from a race. On those occassions when I fall off the back, I hang on to the misguided idea that I'll somehow catch back on and ride accordingly.

But I'm not surprised by a media quote that is not what I said, even with the most liberal interpretation. I've been quoted a number of times over the years, and with exception of email interviews, I can't recall a single time when what got printed wasn't exactly what I said. If I counted it up, I'd bet that the majority of the time the reporter didn't even get the gist of it correct in one place or another.

No matter, it's an otherwise fine article that chronicles one guy's journey into the topsy-turvy world of amateur bike racing (unlike heavy rock, leave the solid piece of wood at home). It should probably be read by anyone thinking that bicycle racing is on the level of effort and committment of, say, finishing a sprint triathlon or local 5K run. When's the last time someone got pulled off the course of a 5K because they were too slow?

Bikeless in San Diego

This is the third year in a row that my June racing has turned into a steaming pile.  2007 isn't so bad, I'm actually still in decent shape, and could pop out a respectable criterium if called upon to do so (meaning, I might not get dropped four laps into it).  But in years previous, I've spent nearly the entire month of June off the bike.

I blame work.  Work makes a convenient scapegoat.  It can be a vicious circle of convenience.  Not motivated to ride?  Hey, guess what you've got more time for if you're not spending hours in the saddle?  (For those who answered "family" and "home improvement projects", I have to wonder how you got to this page in the first place.)  Now, because of all that extra time spent at work, there just isn't time to ride, is there?

In the past, I probably had a problem with motivation about the time June rolls around.  The big road races are about all done, it's probably been a mediocre season thus far (if not just outright shitacular), and now crit season is rolling around.  I call out crit season for the simple fact that my criteria for selecting a crit to race is the following:  how large is the field that is going to drop me half way into it, and is there likely to be a large crowd to watch me get pulled by the officials?  I kind of enjoy crits, it's just too bad I suck at them (short, repeated, high-wattage efforts are often not the specialty of 6' 150lb. racers).

By June, not only is my favorite type of racing more difficult to find, I've also been racing for three months.  Racing, on top of a long, dark, rainy Seattle winter of long miles, which came after a multi-month period of being a gym rat tied to a squat rack.  Maybe by June I'm a little burned out, who knows?

The workload around the office isn't any more than usual, I just find fewer excuses to blow off work to go ride.  July then rolls around, and after a refreshing break from saddle time, I wished I had spent more time riding because, hoo boy, sitting on my butt in front of a computer racing from one PezCyclingNews Daily Distraction to the next sure didn't make me any faster. 

This year was different.  This year I wanted to ride.  I haven't hit as many races as I'd like, and I'm pretty fresh (there's a lesson in there somewhere).  I still love the idea of a three hour training ride, I even relish the idea of 45 minutes of 95% heart rate hanging on to the back end of the Seward 6:00 race.

But it's been another crappy June.  I was sick most of this week, and right now I'm sitting in a hotel room in San Diego, where I'll be until Thursday for a work conference, and I'll be here with no bike.  The airlines these days might as well just put a big banner on their company web pages: "Don't even bother to try to bring a bike with you anymore.  You can try, but oh man, are we going to make you regret it."  They'll let you, but one would have an easier time deciphering the U. S. tax code than trying to figure out the rules for transporting a bike these days, and the I. R. S. at least gives you an estimate up front before you write the check.

Not so with airlines as they try to squeeze another buck or hundred out of the unwitting cyclists who remember back in the day of tossing the bike in a box and paying a small surcharge to bring a pair of wheels with them.  Flying to Monterey to Sea Otter on Southwest involved a maze of lengths, widths, weights, and charges for each dimension.  As the agent was going through all of it, and explaining that it would be this much for that length, and extra because it weighed so much, and blah, blah, blah, all I could think was, "I don't give a shit.  I need this box to go in that plane, and for it to show up in baggage claim when we're all done.  That has to happen, because I've booked a ticket, I've reserved a hotel, I've paid race fees.  I'm not scrapping the whole thing because you want $20 more than I think is fair.  Here's my credit card, fuck me in the ass; alternatively, charge whatever it takes to make this happen."  Because the agent was at least nice about it, I just smiled, nodded politely, and waited to hand her a credit card.

And fuck you they will.  $80 to bring the bike to Monterey.  To Monterey; getting it home would take another $80, or a long training ride, my choice.  That's cheap.  United, who used to give USCF members two vouchers for bike transport every year, no longer gives vouchers and wants $85 one-way.  That's if the box isn't too big and it doesn't weigh too much.  Go over either limit, and the price goes up.  I'm a software professional with a decent amount of disposable income.  I bitch about the price, but I'm not deciding between eating or flying a bike.  How the budding young Cat 1 who's barely getting by is supposed to afford to fly a bike to a big race is a mystery to me.

So I decided it wasn't logistically practical to bring the bike this trip.  I packed running shoes instead.  At the end of the trip, I will have been on a bike a total of three times in two weeks, one time being a recovery ride.  What I swore wasn't going to happen this year has happened again:  another crappy June.

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Find-and-Replace Editing for Cosmos Files

I have all of my training files set up the way I want, all loaded into the Cosmos, and when it comes time to get on the trainer I just punch one up and ride. That's all well and good until I did another ramp test on Friday. The good news is that the ramp test is up 6%. The bad news is that all of my training files need to be redone to account for the power increase.

One of my favorite workouts is 60 minutes of 15 seconds at critical power (high wattage work effort) followed by 15 seconds of recovery. For those that don't do division in their heads quickly, that's 120 work intervals I need to change (assuming I leave the recovery wattage alone) either in the Tacx PC software, or on the head unit itself. Mmmm, I think not. Took me long enough to enter that workout the first time, I'm not redoing it.

That's the extreme example. I've got plenty of workouts with eight or sixteen intervals for which I need to change the wattage. None of which I care to do by hand (though I've already done some just to get by). What is needed, and I can't be the only one, is a mass edit tool to go into a set of files, and anywhere it finds X wattage, change it to Y.

I write software by trade, so this is doable. The file formats are documented over at Whitepeak.org, it's just a matter of sitting down with Visual Studio for an hour or so and hammering it out. We'll see how bored I get this weekend.

Looks Like Another Day on the Trainer...

That's the shot of the Overlake bus stop where no less than five articulated buses, all running the same route, were stuck last night for lack of chains.  I gave a moment's thought to putting the knobbies on the cyclocross bike to get to work this morning but wussed out.  A trainer session in a warm house may be the order of the day.

CyclingPeaks Software Update Now Imports Tacx Files

If you're a user of the mostly wonderful CyclingPeaks software, and own a Tacx trainer, you'll want the latest update to CP WKO+. I didn't look to see what else is included in the update, but users can now drag and drop .caf and .cof files from the Tacx Fortius software to import into CP.

My Race Schedule for 2007

For anyone interested in the WA state bicycle races I'll likely be doing in 2007 (and why wouldn't you be?), click the button for the Google calendar:



Note that I'm not likely to do all of those races, but that's the short list for now.

Kickstart

I've had this space sitting here doing nothing for over a year. Rather than scatter my sought after musings hither and yon upon the web, I've been trying to conglomerate things down to one or two places. If all goes well, it will come down to where you're at right now, and the main site.

Until I get some time to write something worth reading, content yourself with the Tacx Cosmos Quick Start Guide.