As I'm sure y'all know, I've spent pretty much the whole summer trying to get my thyroid levels back in range. They were too low in June, so my doc upped my meds. Still too low at the end of July, so he upped the meds again. Then, by the end of August, I began to suspect that my levels were too high; blood tests confirmed that one thyroid hormone was at the top of the range, which is apparently too much for me. I skated a couple of weeks "high," and let me tell you, after skating many workouts with low thyroid levels and a few with high, I'd any day, hands down, much rather try to workout "low" than "high."
When your thyroid levels are low and you try to workout, you feel like a slug. No energy, low heart rate, no snap or mental drive. For me, though, once I stopped working out I usually felt fine. It was only this summer that I had a couple workouts, when I was "low," that I was so tired afterwards that I collapsed into a two-hour nap. Usually, hypo workouts ended with a glum trudge to the car for the drive home, but no lasting ill-effects (at least not physical ones).
Working out with high thyroid levels, though, is brutal (at least for me). I get very hot very fast; my heart rate is high, my legs are wobbly, and I feel generally craptastic. And it doesn't end when I stop skating. No, the high heart rate, the overheated-ness, and the craptastic continue for hours after the workout. In addition, my legs feel like I just did a first-class high-volume high-intensity workout, when all I did is skate a few laps or a few trail miles. Ugh. I therefore repeat: For anyone who is thinking that thyroid meds might be a performance-enhancing substance...they most emphatically are not. At all. You have the "sweet spot"in the range (where all you normal-thyroid people live), and then you've got crappy above and below that.
So, after finding out that my levels of one thyroid hormone were at the very top of the range, I asked my doc for permission to lower my dose of the faster-acting thyroid med. Remember, this is the one where I split the dose into 4 smaller doses per day. In the past, I had to "time" this med carefully with my workouts: 2 doses, one hour apart, 4 and 3 hours before the workout/race. By the end of this June, I was taking 3 of the doses together before a workout with no effect (the drug is prescribed to be taken just once a day, but most people don't tolerate that because it works quickly and then has a short half-life). The last couple workouts, I've been taking less of the med overall, and making sure I don't take it (single dose) any closer than 5 hours before a workout, to try to reduce the horrible "high" workouts.
And...my last two workouts went well! Yesterday's oval workout was pretty decent, but today was particularly good--a trail skate with my sister Energizer Bunny, to tune us up for the North Shore Inline Marathon that we'll be doing next Saturday. We ended up getting a nice draft from an (unknown) fellow who started out behind us, passed us, and then was kind enough to let us enjoy the draft for the next few miles. I had to work hard to stay with him (EB blew by us for the second 3-mile lap; she's much more serious about the upcoming marathon than I am!), but I felt great. No sluggishness or tiredness. No overheated high heart rate craptasticness. It was awesome, and I'm really hoping that my meds are, indeed, finally just right.
And I hope like heck that they stay that way for a while!
Random photo of the beautiful John Rose Oval yesterday, during my "just right" oval skate.
No comments:
Post a Comment