In a previous post I alluded to the fact that I had some other health issues that I needed to deal with separately to addressing my weight, that other issue was my blood pressure.

It’s 1995, I’m 15 years old.

I first took my blood pressure as a teenager because a family friend had a personal electronic blood pressure device which I thought was pretty nifty. Each and every time I took it over the following 5-10 years, it was 120/80 like clockwork.

Fast forward to 2015, I’m 35 years old.

Historically, I’d have been the person that’d say that they’d never had a headache in their life but at this time I started periodically getting really severe headaches. To give you an idea of how severe:

• my head would start to literally pound with my heart rate
• participating in a conversation was very difficult
• I couldn’t concentrate on anything work related
• I’d see stars in my vision, which meant focusing on things became hard
• I would need to leave work

Panadol didn’t help, it was like I was eating a lolly. The only thing I could find that’d help – laying down and sleeping for an hour or two. I’d wake up with the remnants of a bad headache but not what I now know was a migraine.

By the time I’d had two or three of these migraines, Claire had told me to go to the doctor. Of course, I didn’t do that and I waited for a few more to arrive and then eventually went because I’m an idiot. That doctor visit was interesting to say the least, it went something like this:

Doctor: Hi, how are you, what can I help you with?
Al: I'm getting bad headaches periodically.
Doctor: <starts taking my blood pressure>
// More chat-chat, back and forth questions and answers
Doctor: You have high blood pressure.
Al: Oh really, it is normally 120/80 - what is it now?
Doctor: It's 190/110, if it was any higher I'd call the ambulance.

It just got real.

The doctor was immediately uninterested in my headache and focused on addressing my high blood pressure. He prescribed me a short prescription of Valsartan 100mg. After about a week, it wasn’t having any impact so it was increased to Valsartan 250mg. After several more days, it’d come down a small amount but not enough so it was changed again to a composite drug of Valsartan 100mg/5mg Amlodopine and just like that my blood pressure started to come back down to a normal level. Over those weeks I visited several specialists to have my eyes tested (not for vision but other issues), had heart checks done, kidney checks done, several different blood tests and they all came back clear.

Fast forward to 2020, I’m 40 years old.

I’ve been living in the USA for a few years, my medication has changed from a combination of Valsartan/Amlodopine to Losartan/Amlodipine as the former isn’t available but it’s still working as expected.

In speaking with my doctor, I’d said I wanted to try and reduce or go off the medication as I never used to have high blood pressure. The doctor was amenable to trying since I’m 15kg lighter than when I first moved to the US, fitter than when I was 20, don’t eat any material salt in my diet and my blood tests are clear.

The test was to halve the medication and see how my body responded over the course of a few weeks. Unfortunately, it didn’t respond as I’d hoped and my blood pressure went up to around 135/90 initially but didn’t come back down as my body normalized with the lower drug volume.

Normal	systolic: less than 120 mm Hg diastolic: less than 80 mm Hg
Elevated	systolic: 120–129 mm Hg diastolic: less than 80 mm Hg
High blood pressure (Hypertension)	systolic: 130 mm Hg or higher diastolic: 80 mm Hg or higher

In speaking to my doctor about that, he said it could be hereditary and you’re just out of luck. Not exactly what I was hoping to hear, but I guess you win some, you lose some.

Thankfully, living with high blood pressure has mostly been an inconvenience to be fair. I take medication each night, check my blood pressure pretty regularly to make sure everything is on the straight and narrow then see my doctor a couple times a year.

One piece of advice, check your blood pressure even if you don’t think you need to as you often can’t feel high blood pressure. In my initial doctors interaction above, he asked me how I felt at the time and I felt completely fine when in fact I was far from it. The risks of high blood pressure are real, it can lead to severe complications in brain, eye, heart and kidney organs but for most people it can be easily managed.

I’ve always considered myself a fairly active person, certainly throughout high school I couldn’t sit still and was always doing activities whether it was riding my BMX, mountain bike, motorcross bike, swimming, running, tennis or martial arts. At that time I was very lean and weighed in at a fairly svelte 89kg.

Fast forward to university and it look a clear downward trajectory, a whole lot less activity, limited structured sport, poor food choices and the addition of alcohol. I think everyone would agree, not a great combination. Between 1998 and 2004, I was going to the gym regularly and put on a lot of muscle but my overall health wasn’t in a good place with my weight ballooning to about 115-125kg at my heaviest.

Once leaving university, over the next 10 years it came down a little and plateaued at 110kg but I had some other health issues (more on that in another post) to contend with.

When I moved to Seattle at the beginning of 2018, I’d committed to myself that I was going to get my general health in order. Since I wanted this to be a forever change, I was going to make small, incremental adjustments that I felt I could sustain long term.

With that in mind, I used the most basic of plans:

1. Remove or dramatically reduce obviously bad food from my diet
2. Start moving again

For the first point, that meant I was going to remove things like soft drink – I’d been regularly consuming Coke for as long as I could remember but it just needed to go. For the second point, consistency was my main initial goal – I picked running because you can do it any time, you don’t need a partner or team and you don’t need to get in a car to go somewhere to do it.

That basic plan got me from 108kg when I moved to Seattle down to 93kg. I certainly feel a lot healthier than I did was I was 108kg or worst yet 115-125kg that is for certain. Despite removing some obviously bad things from my diet, don’t for a second let me convince you that my diet is clean because it isn’t – I still eat a lot of food that I probably shouldn’t such as pizza, burgers, Thai or Indian.

Good progress but there is more to do, so will keep experimenting to see what works for me.

Since I started learning to run again in June, all of the my jogging to date has been in the gym during my lunch hour. By the time I walk to the gym, get changed, stretch briefly, allow time to cool down and get changed again – it leaves me with approximately 40 minutes of exercise time.

I started out doing short test runs of only 1km, increasing to 2km and have since increased my lunch time running distance to a maximum of 6.5km. I noticed that I seemed to be struggling to get past that distance in my allocated time and figured that I needed to learn to run further, sustaining my energy output for longer, to be able to expend more energy in a shorter period of time by running faster.

That lead me to getting up early on the weekend a fortnight ago and embark on a 7.5km run around my neighborhood. I plotted out my running path using Google Maps to provide an estimate of distance and set out at sunrise and returned roughly one hour later.

Considering it was my longest run to date, I think I handled it reasonably well. I learned a valuable lesson along the way, take notice of the road names and make sure you enable terrain view in Google Maps. Without realising it, one of the roads I ran had the word ‘mountain’ in it and I can now confirm with absolute certainty that jogging up a 10% incline is really hard work!

Following on from the relative success of my 7.5km jog, last weekend I decided I’d see if I could go a little further but making sure it was a little flatter this time and ended up jogging 9.2km. I was definitely feeling the run towards the end but to my surprise, Runkeeper reported that I had a fairly consistent pace of 6:40s per kilometre.

I’m fairly happy with how I’m progressing at the moment, nothing too crazy or daring – just slow steady progress. I figure if I just keep working at it and before I know it, a 10km run will feel casual like a 3km one does now.

During my time at the gym most lunch hours on the cross trainer, I kept eyeing off the treadmills. I’ve been apprehensive about stepping on the treadmills as historically I’ve had a shin muscle issue with walking fast or jogging that’d cause my shin muscles to become completely fatigued, to the point where I can’t even lift my toes to walk heal first.

A little while ago I decided that I’d give the treadmill a go and to my surprise my shins appeared to be fine. A few more attempts at different intensity levels and they still seemed to be okay. I haven’t done anything to specifically address that issue, however since I’ve lost the better part of 10kg now – I wonder if that wasn’t contributing to the problem all along.

After feeling confident that my shin muscles weren’t going to immediately pack it in, I thought I’d go for a short jog and see how everything held together. I started off with a whopping 1km, a tiny distance by virtually anyone’s measure but nothing was hurting. I did that a couple times over the next week and still no pain. Instead of increasing the speed or incline on the treadmill, I left it flat, increased the distance to 2km & still didn’t have any pain after doing it a couple of times.

Between the second week of June and the end of the month, I jogged ten times across the month during my work lunch hours ranging in distance from 3km to 6km. Each time I go for a jog, I try to increase something, whether it was total time jogging, increasing speed, even if it was just for a particular interval. Given I’m at such an early stage of fitness with my running, I don’t think it matters too much what is increasing, just so long as something is improving or not going backwards.

My next goal is going to be a 7km run at lunch.

Recently I wrote about how my weight had increased since leaving high school back in 1997, reaching an estimated peak of 120-125kg and in more recent times hovering around the 110kg mark.

After not doing anything about my weight for such a long time, sitting by passively letting my weight control me, I’ve made some great progress and I now weigh in under 100kg for the first time in over 10 years!

My weight loss progress started about this time last year when I began weighing myself semi-regularly and keeping a log of it in a speadsheet. However, it wasn’t until the start of 2011 that I made a conscious effort to not only measure but to actually take action and do something about my weight. That action was a Surfers Paradise gym named Anytime Fitness, which is located in Circle on Cavill near my office.

I deliberated long and hard about whether or not I could make a Surfers Paradise gym work for me by going during my lunch hour. Over the years, each time I’ve used a gym on the Gold Coast it has always been either before or after work, so I was sceptical about the prospect of exercising during my lunch break. However it wasn’t possible to go in the morning as Claire likes to go walking & going at night would mean that I wouldn’t see the kids before they go to bed. My only option was lunch time and I was going to make it work for me, because it was time for a change.

Between January and April I did nothing but weights at the gym and by pulling my eating back a notch, I managed to lose around 5Kg of weight and put on a bunch of muscle.

During May I began introducing a small amount of cardio into my weekly workout schedule, primarily high heart rate cross training. That turned out to be really successful and I lost another 1-2Kg of weight, but more importantly I felt a whole lot fitter on the squash courts.

Directly beside the cross trainers are a bunch of treadmills, which I’d been eyeing off for a while. In the past when I walked or jogged, my shin muscles would get incredibly fatigued and it’d stop me from exercising. In the second week of June I thought I’d change it up and went for a walk and to my surprise, my shin muscles didn’t complain. I did that a few more times to make sure it wasn’t a one off and so far my shin muscles haven’t complained.

Onward and upward!