Health Baseline

Setting a Baseline for My Personal Health Journey

For just over a year now, I have been noticing some very worrying heath issues. It started in December 2024 when I had serious asthma for about 5 weeks straight. Coughing almost constantly, out of breath regularly and resulting in me withdrawing from the Lorne Peer to Pub swim that I was actively training for. Eventually the coughing subsided but I was left with an issue that persisted. Even the mildest amount of physical exhertion like walking would quickly result in my heart rate spiking (often to over 130bpm), becoming out of breath and sweating profusely.

After multiple doctor’s and specialist visits, a slew of medical tests, my cardiologist eventually settled on a diagnosis of “hypertensive heart disease”. I have had high blood pressure for a few years now, and my Doctor and I have been trying to treat it with blood pressure meds, which were helping a little, but my blood pressure was still too high. We added more blood pressure meds, but it still wasn’t coming down into the 120/80 range it needed to be in for my body to start to heal effectively.

The one factor I hadn’t been able to change to date was my work stress. I was a Principal Consultant in the Digital Practice of Versent, and had been feeling burnt out for quite some time. After returning from 8 weeks of long service leave, and feeling the effects of that stress return within 3 weeks, I realised that I had to make a drastic change. As such, I resigned, and have now embarked on a 6-12 month career break in order to focus on getting my health under control. I have a 9 year old son, and have decided that in fairness to him, I need to live for at least another 20 years. I feel that if things continued the way they were going, that 20 years may have been out of reach.

This is my first week of this journey, and to start I want to baseline a few key metrics in order to track my health journey. I will have other posts where I will talk honestly and openly about the things that led to my current health status, but for now, I’m going to let numbers do the talking. There are 2 key metrics here, blood pressure and weight (and by extension BMI). Blood pressure is difficult because it goes up and down throughout the day so I will offer range from the past week.

I would also like to baseline the original signs that alerted me to the issues originally, i.e. my heart-rate when performing light exercise. My methodology will be to choose a few different exercises and look at my heart rate on completion. My favourite form of exercise is swimming, and although I am not currently at my peak fitness wrt swimming, I am also not at my worst. There are a few things I’d like to track with my swimming:

(taken after my swim on Tuesday 13th January)

Another metric I’d like to baseline is the short uphill walk I regularly do, and regularly notice my heart rate spiking that is just outside my house, along Villiers Street from Courtney Street to Flemington Road. Of course, there could be confounding variables at play here (e.g. temperature and humidity etc…), but this is something Ifeel I should be able to do without raising a sweat, or stopping because I’m out of breath.

I also would like to measure my heart rate response on the step machine in the shared gym in my apartment builing.

In the spirit of baselining, I should also look at my current activity levels. Having a Garmin watch, I can easily track a number of telling metrics.

Another metric I can capture is Intensity Minutes (how many minutes per week I do some kind of exercise).

This should be enough to start my journey. I may find other metrics along the way, but for now, this will do.