The Beat Goes On

For my whole life, up until a few weeks ago, I occasionally noticed a weird hiccup in my heartbeat. It happened very infrequently—maybe once every couple of weeks—and I never thought too much about it. Two weeks ago, though, I started noticing it happening a lot more often: first in a weights session, then when I was warming up for a time trial, and then while I was racing.
As far as sensations that are unsettling as an endurance athlete, a weird heart beat is probably up there as one of the most disconcerting. As far as I’m concerned, your heart is one of those things that’s just supposed to work—it either does, or it doesn’t. I was very skeptical of any in-between, half-working business, and I couldn’t help but think of that guy in the Olympic marathon trials this spring whose heart just stopped beating right in the race.
Last Saturday after a time trial with Burke, I mentioned this to my mom (kids, if you really want to mess with your mother, tell her your heart isn’t working right—just be prepared to deal with the torrent of emotions you unleash), and we both decided that as this was something that seemed to be getting worse, not better, I should probably call my doctor. I did, and she told me that she couldn’t allow me to keep training until I had an appointment—I’d probably be fine, she said, but if I dropped dead on the side of the trail, my mom would blame her and be really pissed.
My doctor’s office is totally baller (Full Circle Family Medicine/fullcirclefamilymedicine.com—I know it sounds like a bunch of hippies, but they actually do great work and even prescribe drugs), and one of the things that’s great about them is that you can make same day appointments. So on Monday, I called as soon as they opened at 8:30, and got an appointment for 9:15, and thus began a two-week-long saga that finally ended yesterday with a specially-trained cardiologist super-doctor man telling me that all that was happening was that my heart was occasionally making an extra beat (which is not a problem). Along the way, I was forbidden from hard training or racing, and was forced to wear a ridiculous heart rate monitor, give blood to get my cholesterol tested, and submit to a handful of other extremely weird heart tests, including a kind of ultrasound where we listened to my heart valves making extremely weird noises.
Rather than write a boring narrative of every doctor’s appointment and test I went through, I’m instead going to offer you readers a few of the lessons I learned from this experience:

1. If you ever have the opportunity to choose an activity to be in a hurry to do, I would not recommend making this activity anything to do with doctors or hospitals or getting your heart fixed. I was fortunate enough to have a doctor that understood that I really really wanted to get back to training and racing, and I still almost stabbed my eyes out with impatience.
2.  If you want to hang out with your peers (hip, young, athletic people in my case), I have discovered that hospitals and cardiologists are probably not the best place to do this.
3. Girl Scout cookies cannot be purchased from state Girl Scout headquarters. Yesterday I got to the cardiologist’s office early, and I hadn’t had lunch. It was in a corporate industrial park, and there was nothing nearby, except for the Maine offices of Girl Scouts of America. They didn’t have any cookies.
4. Blogging about somewhat bad things that happen to you is fun—falling on your face during a meaningless sprint race, for example, or getting harassed by Canadian customs officers. Blogging about really bad things that may be happening to you, like heart problems that preclude interval training, is actually not as much fun. Thus the absence of blogging for the last few weeks.
5. Now for the emo part. Before this season started, I set a couple of goals for myself: train 550 hours, log all of that training, and score NCAA points by finishing top-30 in a college carnival—which I fully acknowledge to be a stretch. However, that’s okay, because scoring NCAA points is a outcome goal—not something that I have a whole lot of direct control over. Instead, I’m much more concerned with the other two, which are process goals, which I am able to achieve on my own (though there is a lot of gray area here—I’m strongly dependent on coaches, parents, teammates, etc. to help my through the process).
So when a hurdle like this comes up and potentially gets in the way of my outcome goals, I want to be able to shrug it off and be content with having been fully committed to the process. I’m on track for 550 hours this year, and it’s all in my log, and that should be enough. Clearly, though, it isn’t, because the prospect of not being able to race this season seriously disturbed and disheartened me.
Ultimately, what I’ve realized is this: for me, training (process) is not an end in itself, though it can be and usually is quite fun. Instead, training is a means to an end—it’s the best way that I know of to improve (if any of you know of a better one, let me know). In a weenie sport like indoor track or swimming, you’d measure improvement by objective measures like personal bests. However, since skiing has so many variables, race results are not an objective way to measure “faster.” So instead, I assume that training really is the best way to get faster, and I substitute the completion of the training process as a measure of improvement.
For a lot of people, this logic could be problematic and dangerous, because if your process or training plan isn’t perfect, it actually might not be making you better. In my case, though, I’m pretty confident that while my plan isn’t perfect, it hits most of the bases, and executing it should be a pretty way to measure “getting faster.” Thus, for me, I’m not racing because I’m looking for a specific outcome; rather, racing is an end in itself, and it’s the most important part of the process—it’s the place where I can affirm my own improvement.
I’m not really sure where this leaves me though, because without an objective measure, how do you really know that you are faster, or if you are improving? For me, to a certain extent I can tell: I can feel that my technique and my fitness are miles beyond where they were at this point last year. I do also think that you can take some stock in results—if you’re destroying the field that you struggled in a season before, that should also say something. But now that I’ve thought about it a little more, I do also think that perhaps training is an end in itself. For example, what if you go through the whole season following your plan, execute it perfectly, and then get mono in December and miss all your races? That doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in the work that you’ve done, and that’s something of which I’m quite sure. I’m not sure what that value is—it could be something like learning to work hard, finish what you’ve started, etc.—and I don’t have the time or energy to figure out what it is right now, but I know it’s there.
And on that note, I’ll go back to my zen cave in the woods and meditate until the Jackson Criterium on Saturday. Hopefully I’ll fall on my face, and we can finally get back to business on the blog.

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