Jack of Harts

We got my mom home yesterday morning from her surgery and hotel room stay, and then I went straight to the Mayo Clinic for my date with a stress test.  What is a stress test, you may or may not be asking?  Simple.  First they take my weight and height, find out I’m overweight, and then they take me back to the stress test room.  They shave my Wookie chest so they can attach electrodes for reading my heart rate, they put a blood pressure collar around my arm, and then the put a mask over my face so they can measure how much I’m breathing.  Then they put me on a narrow and short treadmill, and start it slow.  When I say it’s easy, they start ramping up the speed and hill amount until I start saying it’s getting to be a bit of work.  They keep pushing it up as the minutes go by until I start feeling like I’m going really fast.  And the whole time they are asking me to tell them when it gets to be really hard.  And they are taking my blood pressure every minute.

That was actually the hardest part for me.  I learned to race walk with my whole body when I was in the Junior Olympics.  I don’t just walk with my legs.  I pump with my arms to get more speed, so every time they took my blood pressure, I had to hold one arm still, and hold onto the rail with my other as I tried to keep going as fast as I had been with my whole body working.  That was tough.  And then I said “this is it” when they asked me if I was near my maximum effort.

I felt like I was race walking down the straight away towards the finish line and was thinking I can’t keep this is up much longer.  And they said “good, keep that up a while longer.”  At which time, my eyes bulged, and I knew they were serious.  And I kinda wished I’d said I was at maximum a bit earlier.  But they were two attractive girls, I’m a man, and I’m not about to admit that I may have just bit off more than I can chew.  So I knuckled down, went to maximum sprint breathing, and started pumping my arms as I leaned into the fastest race walk I can managed right now.  I’m real interested in finding out just what I did there.  When I was young, I could race walk at 10 miles an hour, which was really good.  Most people don’t jog that fast.  I don’t know if I matched that, but by God I felt like I was on the race track again right then.  The only issue was, I didn’t have a finish line.  I couldn’t see it.  I didn’t know how much longer I had to hold it, so I never put it into that one last gear I always used at the very end.  The one that I knew would leave me unable to breath, see, or otherwise operate after I crossed the line.  I kept that in reserve, but I could feel my body getting closer and closer to hitting that line of “do not pass go” anyways.  It’s a little nerve wracking sprinting without knowing where the finish line is.

And of course, they needed a blood pressure reading in the middle of this.  Once again, I stopped pumping my arms, held one still for the pressure reading, and felt my legs burning as I tried to keep up the sprint while the fingers of one hand held onto the bar tight.  I really didn’t want to fall off the end of that far too short treadmill for someone who grew up learning how to lengthen my stride to the maximum ability of my legs to bend.  They told me I was real close to the end of that treadmill.  I’m not sure I want to know just how close that was.

Stress test?  Yeah.  Stress test.

But then, mercifully, they told me I was done, and slowed the treadmill down.  They said they got a good read on me in that seventh minute, which made me happy.  I spent the next several minutes huffing and puffing as they brought me down to a slow walk and then had me sit down on the nearby couch.  They tracked my heart rate and blood pressure as I came back down off the racing high, and got back down to normal life again.  And then they let me go.

Most of a day later, my legs are still burning just a little bit.  It’s been years since I put that much sustained effort into a race walk.  And of course this is after a year of two prolonged no-exercise times caused by an appendix bursting and then five broken ribs.  Thank God I’ve been exercising on my trampoline over the last month.  That gave me the endurance to manage this little stress test.  But it was a nearer thing then I think I’d like to admit.  I really need to keep up my work on the trampoline.  I’m better than I was, but I still have room for improvement.  And that stress test just showed me what I need to work towards.  Because if they strap me into that again in the future, I want to go faster.  I want to beat whatever marks I made in this test.  I want to be better than I once was.  And I want it more than once.