IGLA 2019 and My Recovery

IGLA 2019 has wrapped up, and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots and Gay Pride was celebrated yesterday. I loved spending time with old friends, meeting new friends, and getting back together with my swimming community. Hanging with the teams all united in a Team New York/IGLA pride parade group was so much fun (so much glitter, but so much fun).

The week before I left for New York, I had appointments with both my therapist and psychiatrist. I'm doing much better, though they both said that if I were to go back to work now, there's a very high likelihood that I would relapse, and it's just not a path I want to go down. The dark times spent dealing with both the physical effects of my breakdown and the time trapped alone in my thoughts are not my happiest memories of any time I have spent away from work.

I don't know if the physical recovery came first, or if the beginnings of the mental side of it did, but I have most of my faculties back. I can't really multitask yet, at least not in the way that I'm used to. I find myself often telling Brian that I'm not listening to him and to give me a minute. I'm sure that the technical side of my brain will pick that back up quickly enough.

I swam faster than I have in a very long time--not across the board. The 200 fly was an exercise in pain tolerance, and I swapped to survival fly at the 100. I was within a minute of my best long course time...I have so far to go! But that's not what it's about. It's about getting up and enjoying the challenge of the day, or the week, or the current season. The meet started with the 200IM for me, and I swam faster than I have in over a decade, pulling in my highest individual place for the meet with a 2nd place age group. The 200 fly is, well, it's always a crapshoot, but I had good improvement from my previous couple of times I swam it, holding my stroke together for the the first hundred. I swam the 400IM, which is a race I'm growing to love. Based on the technicality that I never swam short course meters in high school or college, it was a lifetime best performance--we will just forget about the fact that my previous best long course time was way faster than that.

The race was amazing and fun--I was in a race for 3rd during the last hundred, and my teammate, Dean, managed to pull ahead and grab that, outswimming both myself and Chad (who was actually gunning for a 50 fly record split at the beginning of this race). I gave it all I had, but simply could not power through hard enough to get ahead of either of them, but I loved it. The final day of racing at the pool brought me to the 800 free and the 400 free relay. The 800 falls in the same level of performance as my 400IM, though I was clearly showing signs of fatigue. I cruised through the first 400 with the intention of negative splitting, and then picked up the pace. By the time I reached the 600, it hurt too much to maintain the pace, but I did manage to hang on to out-touch the next guy in my age group.

It's always so much fun swimming the relays with my teammates. My earlier days as a sprinter stick with me to let me still perform ok there--I had the privilege of anchoring our age group's winning 400 free relay, and simply maintained a solid lead that everyone built up for me. It was so large of a lead that I made the snap decision to make sure Mike hit the wall before I took off--there was no reason to risk a false start. I managed a 3rd place in my age group in the open water swim on Saturday morning, waking up at 4:30 to have sufficient time to get there for check in. Coney Island is a long subway ride from Manhattan! But I had a couple Nathan's hot dogs (thanks, Kevin!) after the swim was over to get me a classic New York experience.




I leave IGLA with some great memories of my swimming family. There were certainly the bittersweet goodbyes, especially with people that you meet that you know you just click with. As I was reminded though, it is not goodbye, but "see you later."

A place called home

A shot from my 10k postal swim last year

For a very long portion of my life, I spent time finding solace in the water, chasing a little black line…up the pool…and down the pool.  It was peaceful, and gave me a sense of calm that I haven’t experienced from any other activity.

The occasional case of runner’s high has cropped up.  I’m not sure I’ve ever felt anything similar while on a bike ride.  But the focus, the calm, the passage of time, when the rhythm of my stroke or the beating of my legs was the only real noise I could hear was always that the thing that separated me from myself.

There have been times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because everything else has gone to crap, and times in my life when I’ve turned to swimming because it was a fun activity and the camaraderie around the sport was a win all in itself.  I cherish those times.  Some of the best friends I’ve had and still have are swimmers, whether they’re still in the water or not.  They’re still swimmers.

My life has fallen apart, a handful of times, perhaps just two or three over the course of my 45 years, on a level that it is at now.  This is the worst of the 2 or 3, my mind having betrayed me to the point where I can’t work, where I know that even though I have these momentary points in the day that I can put a few thoughts together, the idea of going an entire workday is preposterous.

I withdrew from school one semester when this happened, what would have been the semester I originally would have graduated.  I overloaded myself with all of the hours I needed to finish my degree during a summer session.  I would go on to return to school in the fall to limp my way to the finish line, taking a nearly perfect GPA, and knocking that down almost a tenth of a point, but still enough to graduate with honors. Truth be told, I walked across the stage at my graduation ceremony and was announced “with high honors,” but when my diploma arrived, it was the next echelon down.

I started working.  I broke up with the guy I moved to LA with, and I joined the West Hollywood masters team, to try to find a place in life.  I was lost. I was working what would be the job that I came back to, and am employed doing now, and I met some very nice people and I still see some of them these days—sometimes at a swim meet, sometimes at a training camp.  I was very guarded back then, and wouldn’t really let people become my close friends.

Me swimming with the Grunions one weekend earlier this year
(Thanks, Kenny Brisbin for taking this photo)

So I moved. I told myself I didn’t like the city of West Hollywood—it was too cruisy, not my scene and I couldn’t deal with having to look like I was “on” to go to the grocery store.  After I moved, I continued to try find solace in the masters team I swam with as I went from one apartment to the next on the west side of LA for the next couple of years. I didn’t. I didn’t let myself. I told myself I didn’t like SCAQ because it was so spread out, too much like Corporate America meets masters swimming. But the truth is that I didn’t get to know anyone. I don’t even think any of them knew I was gay. So I moved, and moved again, eventually landing in Long Beach, and eventually finding the Long Beach Grunions, who were just starting up at the time, and who I found friends with and where I found my happy place in the pool.

The Grunions have ebbed and flowed for me. Some wonder why a place like Long Beach needs a gay swim team because being gay in Long Beach is just accepted.  To be frank, a former collegiate swimmer who happens to be gay shows up in Long Beach, and there aren’t enough fast swimmers to keep him or her interested in it, and they wind up swimming somewhere else, maybe with the team I swim with during the week now, maybe not. They push me to levels that I don’t get with the Grunions, but the Grunions have given me so much over the years, and my weekday team is never going to travel to a meet like IGLA New York during the 50th anniversary of Gay Pride and the Stonewall Riots, so there’ s a feeling on the Grunions that I just don’t get from the other team.

But now, after I’ve fallen apart, I don’t know what to do, really, to put myself back together.  Sometimes I need to stare at that black line for meters upon meters upon meters, and sometimes I just need to hear the rhythm of my stroke. My brain needs to sort itself back out. It needs to find its way back home.

I'm just gonna need a minute

...and it might be a really long minute.  I might just need a whole bunch of minutes.

I'm recovering from what would have probably been previously diagnosed as a nervous breakdown, but that diagnosis doesn't actually exist in medicine anymore.  So, officially, it's major depression with generalized anxiety disorder.  Unlike what you might think of something like this from how these events are depicted in Hollywood, there was no dramatic moment when I was drooling on myself in a corner and then saved by an incredibly handsome hunk of a man who swept me off to somewhere that they seemingly fixed me overnight.  There was no magic pill that suddenly turned me from being at a diminished capacity right back to my former self, and there was no self help group that made me realize that my problems are nothing compared to some of the people that are there and that I'm totally fine.

There was, however, stigma.  I am thankful for the people who reached out to wish me well--many of them had no idea what I was going through, and so many of them are just concerned and want me to feel better.  They're all rock stars.  I never felt stigma about this from the people who know me personally, so I consider myself lucky.  The stigma is about how society treats these things in general, and I got hammered with that in the week or so following this just in dealing with getting the paperwork filed to get me out of work on disability.

I'm a proponent of being open about mental health issues in general to help decrease the stigma around them, so thank you, Allison Schmitt for advancing the credo "It's okay to not be okay."

My psychiatrist immediately got the paperwork out to California for state disability, and that's going slowly, as expected.  Her office does this on paper, rather than using the online system.  Her office also wrote up a one paragraph letter to my work that I looked at and laughed a little internally, knowing full well that a 40-plus page set of documents would be coming that I'd need to sort through and figure out what needed to be filled out by whom, and then get those things done.  What I didn't know was that there would also be a 4 page long behavioral health assessment that would be used to determine my eligibility for my company's short term disability insurance.  There was nothing like this needed when I was out previously for a recurrence of Epstein-Barr/mono.  In that case, it was my doctor's opinion that my physical symptoms made it such that I needed to be out of work to recover, and that was good enough.  My psychiatrist's opinion that I'm not capable of working and need to be out of work to recover does not seem to be good enough, even when coupled with the fact that I had three appointments with her inside of a week (mostly to deal with paperwork, because her appointments are 15 minutes long, and she won't do any of this paperwork without me being present), and I'm seeing a clinical psychologist weekly now. Somehow, a 4 page form that assesses my capabilities based on 'ridiculously-complex' details like "Count backwards from 100 by sevens" is deemed to be the critical factor in this process.

I'm just going to postulate that this set of forms does not accurately depict any individual's decline in mental capacity accurately--in particular when you're dealing with someone who nearly had to go to college 3 years early, and only avoided that due to his parents' overwhelming generosity and desire to keep him a kid as long as he could be--and paid a ridiculous amount of tuition to send him away to a private boarding school to make that happen. I'm forever indebted to them for that--I got to experience my final years in high school that I might not have ever had without their foresight.

The problems I'm having are things like not being able to maintain a train of thought long enough to write an algorithm to calculate a matrix of partial derivatives for an optimization problem I was working on.  And for some reason, it's more important that a four page form be filled out that attempts to assess mental issues than it is that my psychiatrist and psychologist have concluded that I need to be out to recover.  And to further complicate these issues, this form has to be reassessed every 4 weeks, potentially because there is apparently distrust in my doctors' trained and professional capabilities in determining when I will be ready to return to normal life.  I want to get back to work--I just want to do it in a way that minimizes my chances of relapse.

My therapist told me that there was noticeable 'motor retardation' at my last visit, but it was improving.  I'm having issues with insomnia still, but that's improving.  I'm on increased dosages of drugs to help with these things, and my psychiatrist wants to leave them where they're at to see how I stabilize over the next few weeks.  It takes me significantly longer to do things than it used to.  Like all day long to pay the bills rather than the hour or so it used to take me.

My therapist told me that writing will help me--I just looked at my blog and noticed I haven't posted anything for a very long time.  He also told me that going out and being social is critical. That working out will help--I'm doing well at getting in one workout a day, but not so well at the remainder of training I would like to be doing.  I'm trying to feed myself enough, and I managed to make a banana cream pie for my husband's birthday, though it took longer than I expected and barely set up before we dug into it at the end of the day.

I don't respond to conversation at a normal cadence and find myself searching for words I can't quite seem to remember, so sometimes, I just need a pause to keep going.  You know, like when I wanted to have lunch at that brothy, noodle place down the street...what was it...oh yeah...Pho. 

So sometimes, I just need an extra minute to keep going.  I'm eventually going to be okay, but for now it's okay to not be okay.

Ella Eastin is a badass

My view this morning.  My toes got cold.
I eventually put slippers on.

Earlier this year, when I was watching the lead-up to the USA Swimming National Team selection meet, I knew of some of the backstory that was occurring with one of the team's rising stars, Ella Eastin.  I don't know Ella Eastin personally, and I first heard her name when we she was disqualified at nationals for what was technically an illegal turn in the 400IM due to what's known as "The Lochte Rule".  She had raced fast enough to qualify for World Championships, but the DQ would take her out of what would have been her spot on the World Championship team. Among swimmers, the rule is one of the most debatable messes ever.  In short, during the freestyle leg of an individual medley race, swimmers must be on their front after pushing off the wall, which runs contrary to how freestyle turns are executed in every other race in swimming.  She wasn't the only swimmer disqualified at this meet for exactly that reason, but she was certainly the highest placing one.



Fast forward to this year.  Ella Eastin was diagnosed with mono prior to the summer nationals, which serves as the selection meet for Pan Pacs, and then in combination with the results from Pan Pacs, for World Championships next year.  I had mono when I was in college and I swam when I was in college.  I did not, however, swim during the semester that I had mono and I feel like the idea of dragging your ass to the pool to preserve your chance to be on the national team for the next two years must have been ridiculously hard. Ella Eastin raced in the 200 fly at nationals, in prelims, and then did not swim the final, and then raced the 200 IM in both prelims and finals and placed 3rd, which was high enough to get her on the Pan Pac team.  I can imagine that she made the decision not to swim the 400 IM because of how grueling that race is, and what mono does to your endurance.

At Pan Pacs, she was the highest placing female US swimmer in the 200 IM, but the time she went was slower than the two women at US Nationals who were first and second at that meet.  Based on the qualification rules, they will compete at World Championships next year and not Ella Eastin.  If I had to guess, once Ella Eastin is fully recovered, she will dominate the scene in her events in swimming.  For now, it's a bittersweet story.  But watch for her in 2020.

I never imagined that while I was watching this unfold over the course of the summer that I would be sitting here writing this blog entry, specifically from this perspective. I know what mono felt like some 20+ years ago, and I wasn't anywhere near that level of swimming.  I slept 14 hours a day--I went to class, not always, and wound up dragging my ass through the semester.  It was one of the only semesters I did not pull down a 4.0 GPA--in fact, that semester and the final semester of my senior year were the only times I did not get all A's.  Mono beats the crap out of you--performing as high as she did on the international scene speaks to her grit and determination.

Until yesterday, I had thought that you get mono, you recover from it, and you're done.  I'd vaguely heard of Epstein-Barr virus, and didn't understand what its relationship is to mono.  And yesterday, my doctor called me and told me that I have what's commonly referred to as a recurrence of mono, or more specifically, reactivated Epstein-Barr virus. The tests that were run on me indicated that I clearly previously had it, and am currently in an acute reactivated phase of it.

Denial is powerful.  V8 does not cure Epstein-Barr.

Prior to my colonoscopy last week, I felt tired and run-down.  I wasn't having the greatest of workouts.  I bailed out of the half marathon I was running at the 4 and a half mile mark.  In all likelihood, this hit me sometime before then, but it would take the colonoscopy to point out to me exactly how much I had been knocked on my ass.  I told myself (and I told my doctor and I told my triathlon coach) that I was sure this was just dehydration and an electrolytic imbalance that was the result of the colonoscopy prep.  I decided I was going to fix myself with V8.  And I tried, and it basically didn't do jack.  I'm sure my doctor knew--doctors always know, and I'm sure he just let me believe it, because drinking a few extra V8's is highly unlikely to cause any sort of long term damage, and is probably beneficial from the standpoint of keeping your body balanced while fighting Epstein-Barr back in to remission.

So, what's up next?  Sleeping.  And resting.  And not working out.  I'll go for a walk.  As for long course nationals in 3 weeks?  A race that is 3 hours and some change right now is probably exactly what I would need to extend this mess and cause a further relapse of Epstein-Barr.  While I think I wouldn't have a problem placing in the top 18 of my age group and getting on the team for age group worlds next year, let's be real--doing so is not a good plan.  I'm not in the position Ella Eastin is, who is at the height of her swimming career and racing against the best in the world.  My best option is to completely recover from this, and then make a run at it next year.  Age group worlds will be there year after year, unlike the the elite level of any sport, where you've got this very finite number of shots at it, if you are able to compete at that level.

Just because.  Maybe I'll watch Top Gun soon.

As for my medical prognosis--who the fuck knows?  Reactivated Epstein-Barr is rare, and there is precious little on the web about how long it takes to recover from it.  It's probably less than the time to recover from a primary infection, but when that time was several months 20-some-odd years ago in college, what does "less than several months" really mean?  All I really know is what my doctor said, that some people rest for a week, go back to work for one day, and then it's too much for them, and they have to take some more time.  Some people manage to work, but that's all they can do.  It sounds like a real recovery is something like a few weeks of rest.  Time will tell. 

As I've found out in the last day, I have the added complication that I can't take a week off, go back to work for a day, and then have to take more time off because of the rules regarding short term disability.  The first 7 days out of the office for me are currently hitting my vacation time, and after that, disability kicks in.  Going to work for one day resets that 7 day counter.  I'll just have to figure that out in the next day or two.

Anyway--see you on the other side.  And if you have suggestions on shows to binge watch on TV, let me hear them!

Fell apart in Long Beach

I'm staring at the title that I just wrote and realizing that this post could be about any number of things.  It is not about my mental health--that seems to be under control now.

Today, I ran the Long Beach Half Marathon, or at least I made an attempt to run it.  At 4.6 miles, I cashed it in and stopped running and walked to my car.  I started this race pretty conservatively, executing the plan that my coach and I had discussed about how to run this race--it isn't, and never was a major goal race of mine, which puts it in a whole different category of what a success is defined as.  Stopping a third of the way into the race doesn't reach the level of any definition of success, except that I was successful in recognizing that suffering for the next 9 miles was probably going to cause an injury that would be the worst possible outcome of the day.  Well, except dying.  Dying pretty much trumps everything.

My knee started screaming at me, very suddenly, very shortly after I just exchanged some conversation with my friend, Chuck.  I was due to walk up the overpass we'd reached anyway....the plan was to hold something like 9 minute miles and walk up the hills to minimize the chances of post race day recovery that I have very hard times dealing with from a hard running race.  I thought this walk might let my knee loosen up a little bit.  It did not.  The subsequent slow jog downhill was excruciating.  I stopped and stretched, focusing on my IT band and it loosened up for a little bit.  I slowed down the pace to see how long I could make this last, and that turned out to be 3 minutes until it tightened up and screamed at me again.

There was no way I was going to make it through another 9 miles like this.  Luckily, the beginning of this course goes out to the west, and does several passes back near to where it begins--I was not that far from my car.  I walked off the course, got in my car, and drove home.

I had a week that did not treat me well--having gotten a vaccination on Friday that knocked me on my ass more than I expected it to.  "Muscle and joint pain" is listed as a common side effect of this particular one--it might be that.  It might not.  It might just be that it knocked me on my ass, and similar to anything that's like an illness, it might have left my body not functioning quite right for a while.  And running any sort of long distance is consistently the hardest thing I do to my body.  Some people are more biomechanically blessed for running than I am--a hard run of any distance beats the crap out of me.  That's probably why I generally enjoy it.

So, I'm going to get back up on the horse....not today, maybe

tomorrow, or maybe after I get through this colonoscopy this week.  Maybe I need to do more strength work--focusing on that a little more can't possibly be a bad thing as I age.

Long Course Nationals in Miami!

One of the tactics I employed while getting ready for my first Ironman (so many years ago), was to let everyone I possibly could know that I was doing it.  The motivation behind this was not, "Hey look at me, I'm bragging about doing this crazy-ass ridiculous sport."  It was much, much more selfish than that.  I knew that, in the middle of a 140.6 mile long race, any number of reasons for not finishing could start to make sense to me.  I also knew that if everyone I knew was aware I was doing it, nothing short of physical danger to myself was going to cause me to voluntarily quit the race.

So, I'm being selfish again, and I'm putting it out there to be held accountable again.  Sometime during my trip to Brazil, I decided I wanted to switch things up a little bit, and make a run for qualifying for age group worlds to represent Team USA in Spain next year.  Long Course Multisport Nationals is the place you have to qualify for this event, and it's Miami in early November.  I do not have a shot in hell to qualify for the team in the half-iron distance triathlon.  My running capabilities make that the case, but I am (of course) exaggerating a bit.  My best half iron time is 5:19, but that was done on a course that was a little short, so it's probably reasonable to say my best time is more in the 5:30 to 5:40 range.   With the top 18 places in each age group going, the 18th place in the age groups that matter for me (I'm going up an age group next year) were 5:47 (40-44) and 5:33 (45-49) last year.  I'm aware that last year's race was a hot and windy day, so the times may not be consistent with the courses I've done my best times on....though Vineman 70.3--that's a maybe.


In any case, it would require a good, if not great, performance from me to make the team in that event, and all of the stars would have to line up correctly, and it's something I'll consider in the future. This year though, I've said I always wanted to try an aquabike event, because it's no secret that running is my third best sport in a triathlon, to put it mildly. Sometimes, I wonder what goes through people's heads when they pass me during a run at the end of a triathlon--I'm certain that anyone vying for a spot on the podium is basically like "Good, one more down."  Though, others may have an internal dialogue going that amounts to "Dude, you can't run for shit."  Don't get me wrong--I enjoy running, and it's continuing to improve for me.  It just remains the sport that has the most room for improvement.

The Aquabike is a fairly new introduction to the world of multi-sport competition.  One reference I found said that it became official in 2010.  The race consists of a swim and a bike, with no run following, and it's really kind of ideally suited for someone like me, or for someone who was once a triathlete that can't run anymore due to injury, or anyone really, who wants to give it a shot.  It is not, however, heavily competed.  At long course nationals in November, the Aquabike is a 1.2 mile swim/56 mile bike. There are 18 slots for age group world qualification in each age group at nationals, and there were 10 people and 13 people that finished the race in the 40-44 and 45-49 age groups last year.

This comes as a bit of a double edged sword for me. I'd like to qualify for worlds, and then go on to compete at them and race (as an age grouper) for Team USA, but I also like to have a challenge. For anyone who doesn't know, this level of competition, at least to qualify, is a hell of a lot lower bar than anything regarding anyone qualifying for a USA national team at the elite level.  But it's a good goal for me, and something I think would be fun to pursue.


So, the primary goal is always to go out and have a good time doing it.  Secondary to that is qualifying for worlds, and then the third level goal is seeing how high I can place at nationals.  Beyond that, I have another goal in mind that the measurement of my success is going to be something like--did I race a time in the Aquabike that would have put me in the top 18 at the end of the bike in the half iron distance triathlon?  That event is a lot more heavily competed, and while people do go a bit slower on the bike than they would if they didn't have a run to do, the difference is not as large as you might think it is. Don't get me wrong--if I don't race faster than that theoretical 18th place time, and I still qualify in the Aquabike, I'm going to take that and be happy as a clam. I'm just going to think better of the effort if I do go faster than number 18 off the bike in the triathlon.

So, that's it! It's what I'm doing in November in Miami, and then hopefully again in May in Spain. And if you want to get into Aquabike--come on out!  I'd love to see this discipline of multi-sport grow.

And I'm not done running--I'm doing the Long Beach half marathon the month before this race in Miami--and I love running...it puts my head in a zone that no other sport does.

Being an athlete does not make you immune to age.

As most endurance athletes do, I have to
supplement salt due to heavy sweating during
long workouts.

I've known for a very long time that there would eventually come a day when my blood pressure would rise, and stay risen, and, in all likelihood, require life long medication to control it.

I'm not a hundred percent certain that's where I'm at now, but I am now on a blood pressure medication, as I was for a short period of time in my 30s. Back then, it turned out to be this transient issue, that might have been due to stress, or a temporary reduction in my training regimen, or whatever it was at the time. If anything, I've grown to understand that medicine is not an exact science, but can sometimes be a series of trials guided by scientifically backed studies and principles. I will never know what the root cause of that temporary spike was in my 30s, but I do know that I've been predisposed to this sort of thing all my life.

Blood pressure tends to rise with age due to a number of factors, some of which can be controlled through "lifestyle changes" (ie. diet and exercise, and stress reduction), and others that cannot be avoided. Structural changes in the body essentially amount to increased artery stiffness which may or may not be associated with heart disease.

My blood pressure has consistently hovered around 130/80 to 140/90 since as far back as we could find medical records on me (back to age 7), when I first had to have this conversation with my doctor shortly after I got out of college. We decided to watch it, and about 10 years later, I wound up with my first round of BP driven higher by a number of factors--job stress was quite high at the time, and I was at a relative downturn in my athletic training. I was swimming and beginning to train for what would be the first marathon I completed, but I was in denial about that marathon--I thought I was calling Brian's bluff when he said he wanted to do one, and I half-heartedly went through the training plan and got to the start line--I walked the last 8 miles of that marathon.

During that time, I had a number of appointments with several cardiologists and a nephrologist.  It was when I discovered that I have a PFO with atrial septal aneurysm, which sounds a lot scarier than it actually is.  It's a flappy opening between the atrial chambers of my heart, and a weak wall that moves with every beat of my heart.  The combination of the two is considered not common (2-3% of the population is estimated to have that, while the PFO by itself is probably present in 20% of the population).  Long story short--I had to have a TEE (trans-esophogeal echocardiagram) to diagnose the thing, and I do not recommend this procedure to anyone--having an echo machine shoved down your throat while you're conscious and being told to move around and strain your abdomen is not a fun way to spend an afternoon. I carry an increased risk for stroke because of this, and take daily aspirin to reduce that risk.

In any case, I thought my blood pressure was related to this structure, until I was told otherwise--kidneys control your blood pressure, not this structural heart abnormality.  I went on blood pressure meds--at first a diuretic, and was told to limit my salt intake, and watch my diet, and do all the things cardiologists are trained to tell their patients that they assume are sedentary and don't sweat out all that salt all the time.  I cramped up and become unable to train, and I would sweat profusely under the easiest of workouts, and then cramp up some more.  I came to the conclusion that a drug that left me unable to exercise was probably going to have worse consequences in the long term than what it was treating me for.  My first cardiologist suffered from a bit of a god complex--I couldn't get a word in edgewise to ask about details like this, so I left him and went elsewhere.  I wound up on a drug called Atacand, which worked for a while, and then overdid its job, and my doctor cut down the dosage, and then cut it down some more, and then some more.  I eventually came off of it, and my blood pressure stayed in the normal zone for me.

My guess is that the way my first cardiologist treated me is not uncommon--a very common issue that causes BP increases in people as they age is an imbalance in electrolytic salts that increases BP, and a diuretic is appropriate in these cases. They see a guy in his 30's, assume that's what it is, and write it off as an everyday common occurrence. It also turns out that sweating 5 or 6 days out of the week does the same thing, and combining the two can be disastrous. At the time, maybe my temporary increase in BP was due to a salt issue--I was on the upswing of a training plan that turned into the very active triathlete lifestyle that I have now. Maybe it wasn't--I won't ever know for sure. What I do know is that exercise can help to ward off blood pressure increases because of salt issues, but it doesn't make you immune to other causes.

I got a good reading the other day
Hopefully, it will stabilize there!

Increasing inflexibility of the arteries is something that happens with age--in some people, it's later in life than others. Ignoring it is the biggest problem, because increases in blood pressure are associated with significant medical events (heart attack, stroke, kidney damage to name a few). You are not immune to this just because you work out all the time.  So, if you're not having physicals on a regular basis, get on that. And if you're not seeing a doctor you can have conversations with about all of these things, find another one.

Exercise can (and does) help. It's just that it's not a guaranteed cure--in my case, it probably staved off the inevitable for a good 20 years or so. Maybe I'll need to stay on this drug for the long term, or maybe I'll have a similar reduction over time like I did in my 30s...I'll work with my doc on that one.

Stay healthy, and live long!