walking without meds

I did a lap around my park again tonight at about the same time as the previous session (I didn't walk last night). I'm about to take my meds, so the difference this time was walking without medicating first. Otherwise, I'd fasted all day, like last time, and I went out around 12:30 a.m., like last time. Meds were the only change.

Conclusion: probably not a good idea to do what I did. I'm glad I did only 1 km.

I can sense there's a blockage, maybe one or more blockages, somewhere around my heart. It's been a year since the heart attack, which I assume is enough time for the other blockages, which had been at around 30%, to fill in (the docs had said there were two or three more). Whatever might be happening, I could feel some pressure in my chest and some breathlessness coming on. Earlier in the evening, I'd felt peppy and happy because I'd been having a ball porting over my comma material to the nasty Substack publication, and I guess I'd hoped that the endorphins or other hormones might contribute to a problem-free walk. No such luck. I mean, I'm feeling fine now: I'm sitting in a chair and typing this nonsense because the symptoms I described have gone away almost immediately. 

But I'm wondering what this might mean for a longer walk. Am I now cursed to stop walking and take a break every ten minutes? I used to be able to walk, in cooler weather, from my place to Hanam City without stopping once. During my most recent nighttime walks to Hanam, though, I've stopped multiple times, and now I'm wondering whether I'm doomed to stop even more frequently from now on. Luckily, if I do do my Four Rivers walk this coming fall, I can protract my schedule by adding a few more rest days and taking slightly longer than a month. I can also re-plot my route so that I walk shorter segments where possible. I don't know how I'm going to handle some of the scarier hills along the way; I imagine I'll have to pause a lot more often, and for a lot longer.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to have to take my meds before I walk. At this point, I think it's safe to say the meds are a huge factor in my performance. I now need to see whether I can take my meds and walk the modest 9K out to the Han River. If tonight's walk was any indication, my next nighttime walk ought to be fairly cool. But I don't know how long the cool nights might last: it's still August, after all: cool nights are more of a late-September thing.

Righto—taking meds now.