Hearts And Showers

Dear Children:

Some of you have said, “Thanks a lot Poppy for all the wonderful insights you’ve been sharing with us lately. Fascinating as those musings may be, it’s sometimes difficult to parse what you find clever from your fixation with fatness. Please Poppy, tell us how you’re doing with your health goals.”

All right. All right. But you must promise – better yet, pinky swear – that the following dull recitation won’t keep you from a readiness for questions larger than my OCD. After all, the larger questions are nothing less than the same questions that have beset us from the time fire inspired story telling. We mustn’t quit now. Assuming I get the pinky swear I’ll let you in on a secret. Sure you got your burning bush and your tablet etching on the mountaintop, but for most of us access to afflatus is in the pondering of these matters together.

Aside from belt size, the most important thing to me has been a freakish heart rate. Walking around beats per minute was about 105, way too high. Resting heart rate was in the middle nineties. For the past months I’ve trained on a cardiovascular machine tuned to maintain a heart rate of 120, which is just south of 80% of the target heart rate for a man my age. The idea is to lose enough weight so that my heart doesn’t have to beat so fast to get blood surging around a frame for which it was not designed as well as strengthen it and make it more economical. I was on blood pressure meds too. Uncontrolled, my blood pressure was around 150 0ver 100. The problem lay in how to measure progress required by obsessives.

Of course, if my resting heart rate lowered, that would be ideal. And, I wanted to improve the recovery time after exercise. That too was a problem because it took forever to get the heart rate down. If I took care of those two things, I figured I’d be some distance toward cardiovascular health.

The progress report is good. My resting heart is now in the upper sixties, down thirty beats per minute or so. I’d like to get it into the fifties. Recovery time has improved as well.

Heart rate is closely monitored on the treadmill as well as after a shower. I take my blood pressure after showering also. So, there are two measures of recovery. The first is the five-minute cool-down period after an hour on the treadmill. In that measure, my heart rate goes down from 120 beats per minute to whatever it is five minutes later. Three months ago, it would go down ten beats or so. Now it goes down twenty beats or so. It has never gotten to ninety-nine. My ambition for now is for beats to get into the lower nineties.

The after shower schedule has it’s problems. A workout will lower most people’s blood pressure. Still, that number is headed the right direction. Typically, blood pressure would be, say 135 over 85. Today, that number was 92 over 62. That’s toward the bottom of the normal scale. It’s past my bedtime at this moment: blood pressure stands at 136 over 79, higher on the normal scale for the upper number and about right on the lower number. I stopped taking the meds.

After a shower, most people’s hearts run a little faster. I don’t know why. By that time, however, my heart rate has slowed to around 85. That is down 20 points from a just a few weeks ago when 105 was not unusual. I may be able to do better.

Is that informative enough for ye?

I can’t get Mozart’s 24th Piano Concerto out of my mind. I listened to it twice today. There’s something spooky, primal and deeply appealing that is holding fast. Mozart is always the smartest one in the room. It feels like he is also the one up to the most mischief. Why is that comforting?

Much Love,

Poppy