Part 1 – Atrial Fibrillation and Endurance Athletes
Part 2 – the Good Years
Part 3 – Now the drugs don’t work, they just make you worse
Part 4 – Exercising with a beta blocker
Part 5 – Mini Maze procedure and recovery
Post my 2nd ablation in September 2019 I weaned off the drugs by the end of Oct 2019 and slowly built-up exercising.
My first activity 3 weeks post ablation was a 30 minute Zwift gentle spin, my HR max was 106bpm.
I built up through October and started playing hockey again in November and continued to build up exercise. Looking back at strava I was running up to 19km by Feb 2020 and my heart rate all looks normal, going up and down as expected.
I cut out competitive triathlon and stopped doing TT races on the bike. I continued to race on Zwift when I could and still played competitive hockey and ran for pleasure.
This seemed to keep me in sinus rhythm until Sept 2020 when I started getting more episodes, so I went back onto flecainide and bisoprolol.
I’ve been on 50mg flec twice daily and 1 or 2 x 2.5mg bisoprolol since then.
After discussing all this with the nurses they tell me that the beta blocker is more for rate control, as on regular flecainide with organised atrial arrhythmias a beta blocker is indicated. The flecainide can organise atrial fibrillation into an atrial tachycardia but it has no effect on the AV node, therefore is no rate control.
Part 3 will discuss what happens when the drugs no longer work….
