About my health condition (POTS)

In 2010 I was diagnosed with a condition called Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS).

When someone has POTS, their blood vessels don’t behave as well as they could when that person is upright, and their heart rate goes up to counteract this. It can result in quite a variety of symptoms.

There’s more information about POTS on the NHS website (UK).

I expect this will be the biggest obstacle I have to face for this project. The symptoms that are relevant are below:

• Cold extremities that don’t warm up on their own - this was the most noticeable symptom when I first developed POTS. It gets painful if I’m out in the cold. If I boulder somewhere below about 15C I’ll need to come prepared or at least not to be hard on myself if I need to retreat.
• Periods of general weakness - essentially feeling like I’m out of battery power and need to lie down. Crouching down for a while can get a bit more juice out of the battery because it seems to help my circulation.
• Specific weakness when I have my arms over my head for a while - guess this is a bit of a stressful position in terms of blood flow, as the blood has to go way above my heart. Obviously will need to watch out for this, and maybe choose problems where I can move quicker or where I have some good holds where I can hang my other arm down to recover a bit. I think this is going to put a earlier limit on how long I can train per session compared to when I didn’t have POTS.
• Fatigue - if I overdo things I can get a crash lasting several days where I can’t really do much activity at all. This doesn’t happen to me too often but I need to keep it mind if I increase my training.