Amy - your news has brought many many responses already this morning, evidence of your large sphere of friends in running-land. There is a lot of positive energy around here to help bring you both through this. I second the recommendation to hear more from Dr. Dale on early identification of cardiac disease - especially in the absence of any particularly worrisome symptoms and in light of primary care doctors who may be too busy to look very carefully at seemingly healthy older athletes. What kind of screening make sense, and how do we learn to ask (insist) on it? Oh - I did 5 slow 'n steamy miles this morning. I've been scarce around here since I aborted my 14 miles on Sunday at only 7.5, and then went on to be sick for a few days.

Good Morning! DG – nice run! High HR, though. Do you ever try taking it manually, just to compare? What about your resting HR – have you taken that recently? I thought about Aamos and DH on my run today, as I’m sure I was pushing my HR to maximum, and thought about the fact that if I collapsed, no one would discover me for quite some time up there on the river bikeway. The river trail was flooded in both directions, but I still had about a 2-mile strip to run out and back on. Here’s what I did today: 2 mile WU (3 x 1-mile at 5K effort) with a 2-minute walk in between – mile paces 7:33, 7:32, 7:38. Plus CD jog home makes 7:75 miles total. Some right knee pain at the end was of concern, but it seemed to resolve itself during my CD. Other than one mile last week, these were my first 7-minute miles in 2008. Last fall my 5K pace was roughly 7:24, but right now I can’t even put together a single mile at that pace, let alone 3.1 miles. (sighs, stretches and cracks knuckles) I see I have my work cut out for me. Happy Thursday!

Aamos, you and DH are in my thoughts and prayers. Wishing him a speedy recovery.

Peter NC I notice that in the summer my HRM is more likely to irritate me. I wonder if it is because the sweat allows it to slip causing more rubbing? You live in a warmer climate than I do so maybe the problems is exacerbated. One solution, one that you may think it is not worth the trouble, might be to try using medical tape to hold the elastic band in place. I am not sure how much you like the HRM but it could be worth a shot. About the various questions regarding medical checkups for blockages and many other potentially fatal diseases: The evidence regarding the net benefit for of these tests for otherwise seemingly healthy people is dubious at best. It is one reason the full body scan business has basically petered out. The problem with testing, absent any symptoms, is that you are very likely to become the victim of false positives. That is even though you are fine the test will indicate that you are not. Once the test flags something you will then undoubtedly go through a more invasive procedure to verify the result. The more invasive the more risky. To see how big a problem this can be imagine you get a false positive on a test only 1 time in a 100 when you do it. Also, suppose you have 10 tests done "just in case." That means 1 in 10 healthy people will have a false positive reading. Now suppose the followup test can itself cause serious injury just 1 time in 10,000. That means about 1 healthy person in 100,000 will be made worse off by going through the battery of tests. What about the benefits? Imagine the test never produces a false negative, meaning it says you are fine when you are not which is something almost no test can accomplish. Now suppose knowing you have the problem results in a 100% cure rate. If both these nearly incredible statistics hold, the disease needs to occur in more than 1 in 100,000 seemingly healthy people. There are very few diseases like that. Not that there are none, but not many. All of this is made worse if the false negative rate is not zero, and if the cure rate upon finding the problem is not 100%. My wife and I have both been through false positive cardiac readings. Fortunately, in our cases the tests involved only our time with little risk to our health. But, it easily could have been worse. Enough statistics! Today's goal was 1.5 mile wu, then 14 @ MP, and finally 1.5 mile cd. I am slowly but surely getting back in shape. The 14 mile part was at a 7:31 pace, just a few seconds per mile off what I did last winter in the same run. Of course, this is "Garmin" pace and no doubt several seconds faster than reality. But, the comparison with last winter is Garmin pace versus Garmin pace so hopefully it is a reasonably good test of relative fitness. Good runs all. Enjoy the day.

best wishes to you and your dh amy.

Temps to hit 90 for a few days. 15min stretch with 1x4 planks on pavement 1.38 walk 6.00 11:40/145 0.62 walk {{{Amy & DH}}}, JJJ

Amy, please know that you and your DH are in our hearts and prayers today and on the days ahead. Keep us posted when you can when the surgery is over. 4 naked (no watch, no music, no HR monitor) miles this morning, I may visit the track this afternoon with our traveling PT who is a marathon runner.