I must admit, having a heart condition is taking some getting used to. First there were the drugs. I went from taking nothing to taking statins and blood pressure pills daily, plus blood thinners twice-daily.

It’s also complicated my approach to my final training block prior to Ultra-Trail Australia. This is due partly to uncertainty and partly to anxiousness.

To be honest, I don’t feel any different now compared with before I found out I have atrial fibrillation (you can read all about that in this post from last month). While I feel fine, my heart has been doing some slightly unnerving things.

But I’m getting ahead of myself - let’s go back. As part of my treatment I had a procedure called a cardioversion. This involved a transesophageal echocardiogram, during which a tube was inserted into my throat to allow the cardiologist to make sure I didn’t have any clots lurking in the top two chambers of my heart. Dislodging these could result in a stroke, and nobody wants that.

Once that was confirmed, they applied pads to the front and back of my chest and shocked my heart. The idea is the shock acts as a reset, and causes my heart to go back into a normal rhythm. Like turning a PC off and then on again, or in the olden days whacking a TV on the side to stop the good old vertical and horizontal scroll.

Easy, right?

Well, turns out even after two shocks my heart refused to cooperate. After the procedure (I was under a general BTW so blissfully unaware), I was no longer in atrial fibrillation. So far so good. But instead of being shocked back into a normal sinus rhythm, my heart had opted for a junctional rhythm - another form of arrhythmia (abnormal heartbeat).

In this form of arrhythmia, the heart either beats too fast or too slow. Given my resting heart-rate dropped from around 58 to 39 after the procedure, I’ll leave you to figure out which applies in my case.

And then a week later I’ll be at the start line of the UTA 50k where, don’t worry, I’ll be taking a conservative approach!

When I next catch up with my cardiologist, he’ll also be putting me through a “stress test”, to determine how concerned I should be about my elevated calcium score. So that will be interesting - both the outcome and the process.

But before that, UTA. I am very excited about this event. It will be bigger than Ben Hur (you can get a flavour of it in this post), but also the course looks spectacular. I will be posting about it multiple times over the coming fortnight or so, starting with a piece about the logistics of getting to an event like that.

Do you have a question about UTA or something you’d like me to cover while I’m there? Are you going to be at UTA? If so, please get in touch at [email protected]

In the interests of transparency, I am competing at UTA on a complimentary ticket. I am paying all other expenses involved with the event - travel, accommodation and so on - out of my own pocket.

Upcoming Events

There are way too many events for me to list everything that’s happening around the country, but here is a selection of upcoming races (with a bias towards South East Queensland).

The Running Calendar website is a great source if you want a comprehensive understanding of what’s available around Australia.