Physical Observations

So I went to the clinic on Monday for my yearly checkup as well as flight physical for my Vomit Comet flight this fall, and discovered two interesting things. (Well, interesting to me, but probably not to you. Oh well.)

My resting heart rate is 52 beats per minute, which I think is pretty good. It’s no Lance Armstrong with his 32 bpm, but hey, we can’t all win the Tour de France. Considering that the average for a women is somewhere around 70-75 bpm, I was pretty excited to find that mine is only 52. If you’d asked me, I would have guessed in the 60s because that’s the lowest I’ve ever seen my heart rate monitor go. But of course I’m not wearing my monitor when I wake up in the morning and haven’t started moving.

So my resting heart rate is great, and my “active” heart rate is still crazy. When running at my 5K race pace (anywhere between 10 and 11 minutes per mile, depending on how in shape I am), my heart rate averages 180+ bpm. Theoretically I shouldn’t be able to maintain that, but I do.

I also had an EKG and got the usual feedback: something normal “with sinus arrhythmia.” I’ve seen that sinus arrhythmia thing before and never bothered to look it up, because no doctor has ever told me it was a problem. I finally remembered the term this time and Googled it. Turns out it is a fairly normal term that simply describes how my heart rate speeds up when I breathe and slows down when I breathe out. It’s actually a phenomenon I’d noticed before when taking my heart rate, so now I have the proper terminology to go along with my observation.

And in other health news, I finally made an appointment with the orthopedic doctor to get my knee checked out at last. Same doctor that helped me with my dislocated knee almost five years ago. (The dislocated one was my left knee; it’s my right knee that’s currently giving me the slight issues.) I’m going in on Monday afternoon, so we’ll see what he says. It was aching again last night despite not having run or biked in almost two weeks. Stupid knee.