days
to
Atlantic
Beach!
No worries, folks. I’m just lying low for a few days looking at options.
Hangin’ out with Crazy Eddie [linkie], in fact.
David Edgren.
Month: July 2016
Well, [expletive deleted]!
It’s been a pretty tough day.
You’ll recall from yesterday that today was the second day of my cardio stress test. The treadmill day. I was a little apprehensive, as I really do not like the device, and stay as far away from them at the Alaska Club (the fitness gym Heather and I belong to) as I can.
The day started innocently enough.
“Come in to my parlor…”
Rich, the nuclear med tech, started out the day as yesterday, with a gamma ray emitter injection. A short wait then it was off to the treadmill.
The object of this day of a cardio stress test, in case you’ve never had one, is to crank your heart rate, measured in beats per minute (BPM), most of the way up to the max exertion you are supposed to be able to tolerate, then watch EKG readings for any abnormalities. The max BPM is calculated according to as follows:
The short story is that I made it to 130 or so and was doing great. My EKG waves started and had stayed picture perfect.
My GP doc, Natalie Beyeler, was there, encouraging me along. When they cranked up the treadmill to the next level, though- steep grade and I was almost running at this point- my BPM went to 135 and then my oxygen saturation levels suddenly crashed, sending the heart readings haywire. The O-sat level hit 85 and Dr. Beyeler stopped the test, although I was able to continue to walk all the way through about a two minute “cool-down” phase at a slow speed and on a level grade.
The bottom line is that, while my heart appears to be doing great, my lungs just aren’t (right now at least) doing their bit. I will probably do just fine on the flat or up mild inclines on the road, but it is clear that my ability to climb real hills and then mountains is in question at this point.
So my doc has scheduled a few more tests next week. On Wednesday, the 12th, I’ll have a pulse-oximetry test, an echocardiogram, and a pulmonary function test scheduled one after the other. On Friday we’ll have the results and Doctor Beyeler and I will confer further. We’ve known all along I’ve had asthma in the background and my O-sat level usually sits around 93 or 94, which is a tad lower than it should be at my age. I’ve never smoked, worked in a coal mine, played with asbestos, or done other stuff knowingly that would damage my lungs. I did have severe childhood asthma, though, and have carried around a rescue inhaler (which expire before they are ever used) for years.
So I won’t go into options or courses of action at this point, I’m pretty raw still over this happening, and it is no time to make significant decisions, especially since I’ll have much more information by the end of next week. I did go out tonight and bought, at Wal-Mart of all places, a middling good oximeter- the device that they clip on your finger at the start of a doctor’s appointment- to measure O-sats during rides and workouts.
The device, which measures continuously, was just a little less than $36. Over the course of a 45 minute ride on the exercise bike at moderate resistance at a ten mile/16 kilometer per hour speed, it never went below 92 and hit 95 a couple of times right before the end of the workout. I was more focused on breathing deeply than I had been, but this just confirms my sense that the long almost flat weeks of The Long Warm-Up section of my planned route (The Atlantic Coast to Little Rock, Arkansas) is my friend.
Any thoughts?
David Edgren
Have a Heart, Day 1
I did the resting part of my cardio stress test today.
The doc injected me with a gamma radiation emitter, sent me away for an hour, and then rolled me into this donut after hooking me up to a couple of ECG leads. I then had to lie perfectly still for 12 minutes while modern medicine worked it’s technological magic.
Completely painless and pretty boring. The machine produces a bunch of pictures that look like this.
I can tell that I was not cut out to be someone who would interpret cardio stress test photos. Supposedly the machine puts a whole bunch of these together and build a 3-D image of the heart and provides a lot of data about what it is doing.
So we’ll see. Part two of the test, the part involving me and a treadmill (ugh!), is coming up tomorrow morning.
Bugs!
Anyone from Florida or the Gulf Coast want to clue me in as to what sort of bugs I’ll run into on my ride in the first couple of weeks? Particularly the biting or stinging kind.
Alaska’s State Bird (a little larger than full size)
We’ve had a very rare almost mosquito-free summer here in Alaska. By the 18th of this month they’d be winding down anyway. I’d like to have some idea what I’m headed for, having not spent any time at all in North Florida, the Panhandle, or along the coast. Also if you have suggestions for any kind of bug dope that’s effective and plays nice with copious amounts of sunscreen.
Thanks.
The Final Route
I’ve finalized the b2b route on Ride with GPS. You can look at it on that site here [linkie]. This means I now have an official length: 4,129.7 miles/6,646.1 kilometers and fixed mileposts. So, when you drill down far enough into the Ride with GPS map, the mileposts will show up.
During the ride, then, when I say I’m at Milepost so-and-so, you’ll be able to spot exactly where I am.
Bear in mind that the finalized route is only based on the best information I have at hand right now. Roads or bridges may be closed during the actual ride due to construction or for other reasons. A levee top in Louisiana might be newly graveled and not reasonably rideable. Or Google and the other mapping engines might just have a road or a biketrail wrong, and I’ll have to find an alternate. But I will plan to stick as close to the route I have mapped as possible and will base my official progress on its mileposts. I am guessing by the time this is all over I will have ridden between five and ten percent more than the 4129.7 miles, even if there are no necessary diversions. Campsites and motels may be off the planned route. I may have to go out of my way to stop at a bicycle shop for repairs. I’ll make sure I keep you posted on those things, though.
Finalizing the route allows me to develop some map products that I will be using on the blog to illustrate different things. For example, a while back I divided the route into four 1,000 mile/1,600 kilometer stages and a fifth short remainder stage [linkie]. This was nice and uniform, but the stages were hard to grasp because by and large they began and ended nowhere in particular.
So I’m taking a different approach now. I’ll still divide the route into stages, but there will be four of them of varying length and they are based upon the dominating characteristic of that portion of the ride. Hence
The four stages are, then:
Stage 1: The Long Warm-Up – Atlantic Beach, FL (mile 0) to Little Rock, AR (mile 1,380)
Stage 2: The Fifteen-Hundred Mile Hill – Little Rock, AR (mile 1,380) to Togwotee Pass, WY (mile 2,922)
Stage 3: Down the Roller Coaster – Togwotee Pass, WY (mile 2,9220 to the Columbia River, WA (mile 3,714)
Stage 4: The Road to the Sea – the Columbia River, WA (mile 3,714) to Pacific Beach, WA (mile 4,129.7)
The name of each stage is pretty self-explanatory. I only gain 250 feet/76 meters in elevation above sea level-the aggregate climb is 19,500 feet/5,945 meters or so- in the first third of the ride. No hill is over 150 feet by itself and grades are relatively gentle in The Long Warm-Up. The second stage immediately becomes more challenging on leaving Little Rock, Arkansas. The Fifteen-Hundred Mile Hill is pretty much just that- a long, long climb over the Great Plains of North America up to the spine of the Rocky Mountains at the Continental Divide at 9,659 foot/2,944 meter high Togwotee Pass, Wyoming. This is a gain of just under 9,400 feet/2,865 meters, with an aggregate climb is about 45,000 feet/13,716 meters, a little over half again the elevation of Mt. Everest. The Down the Roller Coaster stage is exactly what it sounds like- five progressively lower in elevation summits and a final bump between Togwotee Pass and the Columbia River in Washington state as I lose almost all the elevation I gained- 9,225 feet/2,810 meters- in the second stage. The grades are sometimes steep in this third stage and the aggregate climb is 22,960 feet/7,000 meters, but there are full days that I can just put the bike on autopilot and coast downhill. The Road to the Sea, the fourth and last stage, is no day at the beach (I have to wait for the end of the ride for that) even though it is the shortest part of the ride by far. I will lose the last 375 feet/115 meters of elevation between the Columbia River and my destination at Pacific Beach on the coast, but that’s not near the whole story. Numerous hills on this final stretch, some approaching 400 feet/120 meters in elevation, add up to an aggregate climb of 15,900 feet/4,845 meters.
We’ll look at the elevation profiles and some other information about each of these stages in a post coming soon.
David Edgren
T Minus 20…
days
to
Atlantic
Beach!
The days are just flying by now. I finished up ordering all the biking clothes yesterday along with a few odds and ends. There’s just this and that left.
Tomorrow is the “resting” day of my two day cardio stress test. It’ll take a couple of hours on each day, apparently. I’ll keep you posted.
Pre-ride Weigh In #2
OMG! Jump start my heart!
Thinking outside the (pill)box
I take a lot of pills. All recommended by my various docs, but “a lot” just about sums it up. Here’s a week’s worth.
That box is 9x2x1 inches/22.5x5x2.5 cm. A month’s worth of my meds in four of these boxes fills about a third of a front pannier.
So two questions: First, take a look at the list of what is in each day’s compartment.
Daily (prescription)
- Allopurinol (for gout)- one 300 mg tablet.
- Atorvastatin (for high cholesterol) – one 20 mg tablet
- Azor (for high blood pressure) – one 10-40mg tablet
- Bystolic (for high blood pressure) – one 5 mg tablet
- Torsemide (for high blood pressure) – one 20 mg tablet
- Dexilant (for acid reflux) – one 60 mg capsule or Famotidine two E40 mg tablets (alternate every 90 days)
- Januvia (for Type 2 diabetes) – one 100 mg tablet
- Invokana (for Type 2 diabetes) – one 300 mg tablet
- Niaspan (for high cholesterol) – one 500 mg ER tablet
- Synthroid (for hypothyroidism)- one 200 mcg tablet
- Fenofibrate (for high triglycerides) – one 160 mg tablet
- Cyanocobalamin (for Vitamin B12 deficiency) – one 1000 mcg tablet
Weekly (prescription)
- Vitamin D (for Vitamin D deficiency) – three 50,000 unit capsules
OTC
- Aspirin – one 325 mg tablet per day
- Glucosamine and Chondroitin – two tablets per day
- Potassium gluconate – one 595 mg tablet
- Vitamin B complex – one tablet per day
- Vitamin E – one 1000 unit capsule every day
I’ll note that my endocrinologist wants me to stop the Invokana when I start the ride, as he doesn’t believe I will need it at that level of activity and he is concerned about its side effect of causing dehydration. That leaves me on one diabetes med: Januvia. My GP doc wants me to stop the Torsemide at the same time, based on the same concern about dehydration.
So what about the others? I trust my docs (and my GP is an avid bike rider), but I doubt either of them is on any of these meds. Does anyone reading this have any real life experience with taking one or more of these meds and bicycling to excess? I’d appreciate your feedback.
Question two is: how can I ditch the boxes. I need my meds separated into daily doses, as some of the pills are quite similar in appearance. I am also concerned about keeping each day separate from a cross-contamination standpoint. I think it would be a good idea to just handle one day’s worth of pills at a time.
So small zip-loc plastic bags? Individual daily packets made with a Food Saver heat sealer?
Something proprietary I don’t know about? Your recommendations are very welcome- thanks in advance.
David Edgren
The Fourth
Here’s to a great day for everyone, wherever you might be.
It’s a weigh-in day, and I’m hoping to wrap up getting everything that needs to be ordered ordered. I also owe a bunch of responses to all the great comments you’ve left. Readership of this blog has been steadily increasing- thanks so much for being a part of the Beach 2 Beach ride!
David Edgren
Inconceivable!!
If you had asked me what was the most common shared experience had by young people in the United States (after finding out the bad news about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I suppose) I would have immediately spoken up, “Learning to ride a bicycle.” When I was growing up in the Chicago ‘burbs in the 1950s and 60s, every kid over the age of, say five or six had a bike. When I’d go visit my grandparents or family friends, every kid I’d meet there had a bicycle. Even the rural kids in Southern Indiana where my maternal grandparents owned a farm all had bikes. Getting your first 24 or 26 inch bike was the nation’s equivalent of a coming of age ritual. But apparently no longer.
A recent survey undertaken by YouGov and reported by FiveThirtyEight here [linkie] confirmed what I had already believed to be true- that a little over half the country isn’t currently riding a bike. I can see that- up ’til a month or so ago I hadn’t been on a bicycle in a decade. But I was shocked to learn that almost 10 percent of young people nowadays have never learned to ride a bicycle at all. That’s three times as many as the cohort that includes me and my generation. I almost can’t comprehend being a kid and not having a bike to ride. Is it because of the decline of “free range” parenting? The ubiquitous availability of video games and other non-active entertainment? The growing racial and ethnic diversity of the USA?
Whatever it is, I think it’s a damn shame.
David Edgren
b2bbiketrip.com - A 2019 bike trip blog 