A new record by more than a second! Another post in the cholesterol soga

Date	Place of exercise	Duration (minutes)	Classic Sprint	Pull-ups	Dam Sprint	Start time
5 May	Park	35	52.21		1:43.14	07:24

           After a couple days of rain, this was another beautiful day. My second try at the dam sprint, I shattered my earlier record by nearly a quarter minute. Such success is a tribute to my habit of taking it easy and sandbagging it on the inaugural run. I ran faster, but the legs were still painful. The thing is that they are more loose than recently. 

          At the point of the final sprint, I put out some effort and I actually felt like my toes were whisking across the broken pavement and potholes.  It felt good. The wind was breezing by my ears, and I was trying to keep an upright posture. The posture business is designed to maintain my shoulders in a backward fashion—a bit like an old Soviet statue of the fine up-standing communist hero. As I neared the finish, I was even thinking that I would break my record of this stage in my life. The post-Lipitor stage. Success! I beat the hold record by more than a second. As opposed to the records for the dam sprint, these are real records—not artificial because of small effort and poor performance during earlier sprints. The record today came after maximum effort and it betters another maximum effort of a few days ago. 

          Why post-Lipitor stage of my life? Last summer, I took some anti-cholesterol medicine designed to lower the amount of bad cholesterol in my blood. For the first month, I felt no real side effects, and my cholesterol level went down. The doctor looked at the results and said, “Ok. It’s working. Keep taking it.” 

          It wasn’t long before every muscle in my body became sore. My arms, legs, neck, everything. It was so bad that when I would go to the Classic Sprint mentioned in the graphic above, I would hardly be able to move faster than a slow trot. My times were longer than a minute. Then, in November, I remembered that one of the common side effects of the medicine is sore muscles. I had been struggling, trying to figure out the cause of my muscle pain. I stopped taking the medicine. 

          Now, 6 months later, my body is starting to behave normally. So, is there a connection between the medicine and my soreness? It’s unclear. How could the medicine take so long to leave my system?  My slowest time for the classic sprint was 1:10.38 achieved on 26 March—more than 4 months after I had stopped taking the medicine.

          The main thing is that I am feeling better. I’ll need more information before I go back on the medicine. The medicine—it’s called Atorvastatin—400 mg tablets. If anyone needs some, let me know, I have more than 300 pills that need to be used by August, and I’m not going to use them.