I’m a 63 year old woman training for Hyrox. An event that attracts very few women (and men) of my age. I signed up in June and I’ve now got 16 weeks to get as fit as I possibly can.

Hyrox tests the endurance and functional strength of its participants. The sled push of 75kg is what I’m doing in the image above. I don’t find it particularly challenging but my lack of aerobic fitness is worrying and I don’t seem to be improving.

I’m slow. Embarrassingly slow. I went on a training run with a few other Hyrox competitors a few weeks ago. I couldn’t keep up. It was humiliating. I felt as I was reinforcing the stereotypical negative view of the older woman. I will need to speed up a lot before I can join them again.

Then last week I did Parkrun which I haven’t done since before the first lockdown when I use to do it fairly regularly. I came in at 39.11.

6 minutes slower than I use to run it.

I need to speed up. What do I need to do? Is it even possible? It’s not as if I’m a novice to training. I train 5-6 times a week.

But I’m very aware that you are only as good as what you focus on. And I have tended to concentrate on strength training. My deadlift, adjusted for my age and gender, is ‘elite’. Although my upper body strength drops to ‘intermediate’. Fortunately Hyrox is all about the lower body.

I’m not sure how my ‘not completely normal’ heart limits my progress. It didn’t have an adverse impact during lockdown when I was doing a lot of high intensity zoom sessions. I was probably at my fittest. But my heart could have been further damaged by the thyroxine assault at the end of last year.

However, my resting heart rate is good (58 – 62 bpm), as is my recovery heart rate (52 bpm in 2 minutes). More importantly my cardiologist hasn’t placed any restrictions on my training. My heart would need to get a lot worse before he does.

But being told that you’ve no restrictions doesn’t shed any light on what can be achieved with a slightly damaged heart. Is the best I can hope for maintaining what I’ve got or am I am able to improve on my performance?

I’d love to be able to hand over my echocardiogram results to someone who would be able to tell me what I was capable of. In the absence of such a person I’ve been doing my own research.

My search term plus variations was ‘how exercise is affected by mild to moderate aortic valve regurgitation.’ Whilst this is not the only thing that makes my heart ‘not completely normal’ it is probably the one that has the most impact where exercise is concerned. I found a number of research articles that supported the benefit of moderate to intense exercise which was positive. So often in ‘opinion’ pieces it is suggested that I should be doing ‘gentle’ exercise. I’m not ready to hit the chair yoga yet.

I dug deeper until I found a research article on the effects of endurance training on participants with moderate to severe aortic valve regurgitation. This was very encouraging. It concluded that peak V02 was improved in those participants that underwent 12 weeks of endurance training compared to the control group. An increase in my peak VO2 should make me faster as my heart would be more efficient in getting oxygen to my muscles.

All good. So on paper at least it’s possible for me to get faster. As a consequence, and in discussion with my PT, I have modified my training programme to include more intense endurance training. Plus I’ve increased my recovery days to 2 active recovery days (short, slow run or swimming) and one passive recovery day.

Hopefully, I’ll soon be able to keep up.