Cycle touring Ireland 2025 with Afib update

A preview of some of the detailed cycling tour videos I filmed over the summer in Ireland and will edit and publish in the next months, Aong with an update on how my cycle touring with Atrial Fibrillation has been going – its not been easy with two more episodes both apparently triggered by cycling. But I think I worked out what I was doing wrong and will adjust future plans on that basis.

I’ve been using my Apple Watch to help me understand what’s going on with my heart but this isn’t any sort of product placement just my honest opinion

You’ll find more about my initial cycling experiences with Atrial Fibrillation at https://youtu.be/j4r_bm0uiEQ

It’s the end of the summer. Uh, so welcome back to the channel. I’ll now be getting down to editing some of the cycling footage I’ve accumulated on my trips over the summer months. So, as you know, the big drama um this summer unfortunate one of that was I had to cancel my intended trip to the Pyrenees, which was going to be a month long and very short notice because it turned out I had a heart condition I didn’t know about uh called atrial fibrillation. Uh and later on in the video I’m going to talk about how I’ve been dealing with that, what I have found out about it and uh how I’ve got on cycling with it. Um just sufficient to say at this stage that uh not everything has been consequencefree. I kind of made some pretty basic mistakes and I’ll talk about what those are. But for the rest of you that might be interested in the details of that, h I’m just going to talk a little bit about what’s going to be coming up over the winter. Uh, so obviously I had already done that trip around on Urella 1 around Kerry Coast and then up through Limmerick. I’ve already put one of those videos up and I’m going to be putting up the rest of them. Uh, then later on I wanted to do a route that was relatively flat. Take it easy on the heart essentially. So what I did was a long one of cycling out from Dublin along one of the canals, the Royal Canal in this case, then cycling up to Shannon Pot, uh, and then cycling down to Shannon Harour and then back along the Grand Canal. So I’ll have my account of that trip, which I did over five or six days. And then um, apart from one or two day trips, which I’ll put stuff in about as well, uh, I’ll also have the trip I did following Eurovella 1. Again, I want to do the whole Uvel one route in Ireland and then perhaps go overseas with it. We shall see how I do. Uh, and that started off in Siggo, uh, coming down through the Ox Mountains along the, uh, Mayo coastline and then down via Bell Mullet and Eerys, uh, to the Akal Greenway and that back to Westport. Uh, so those are all going to be good in themselves. Now, I’ve made some changes to the way I’m going to be doing things. So if I just talk about those briefly for those familiar with the channel. H so one of those is related to the heart issue. So one of the things I need to do basically is try and be a bit less ambitious in terms of what I do. So both in terms of distances and perhaps intensity of hills. Um I will talk about the details of that in a moment. But one of the changes I made for both the Shannon and the Mayo trip is I started doing a lot of micro stops. Uh, and that’s basically where I stopped as I passed things that were kind of interesting and I shot some vertical video about that. I think you should be able to see just behind me one of the hazards of the canal toe path which is two swans and load of signlets which you have to go right around the and what I did then as almost as I went on along a little bit later is I was posting those to Tik Tok. Uh, so if you have a look at my Tik Tok account, also called ebike touring life, you’ll find loads of 60-second snippets about campsites, places I at, uh, historical landmarks, all that sort of thing along the way. Now, I’ll be editing those segments into the longer YouTube videos for each day. Um, so you don’t need to go over there and have a look at them unless you’re mad urgent to do it. But that’s one of the things I’m doing to try and, you know, get myself to be a bit less ambitious and to take breaks. Uh I I was kind of terrible for doing 60 70 kilometers without any sort of break whatsoever. Just take it into my head to keep going. Um I experimented with posting those to my Instagram account as reals and to Facebook, but my impression with both of those setups is they don’t really like you posting multiple videos a day. Um that doesn’t really work. Uh, so I did that a bit for the first couple of days of the canal, then took the hint and stopped doing that. And what I’m doing instead is any video that’s particularly popular on TikTok, I’m then posting it uh there as well. But I’d be doing that over the winter and with the few days between them. Anyway, that’s just the kind of where you’ll find the different types of content on the channel. My intention with the long form videos is to keep it here on YouTube and although the ones also I put a lot more port into uh mostly afterwards. Um I mostly come back from a trip and then I research the additional information about the places I’ve been and actually I found some really interesting stuff about um the Ural Kerry route which I I’m is the one I’m currently working on. So the first of those videos should appear within I think the next week or so. Um, and the second one will appear quite soon afterwards. I’m changing the nature of the video package story. I’m not quite sure what the right word is. What I had been doing up to now was I’ve very much been doing it as a dayto-day diary. So, it will start in the morning at me waking up at wherever I’m camping and will end up in the evening at wherever I stop. Uh, and often because particularly if I’m wild camping, you often do that in quite out of the way locations. So that kind of me meant I realized that if you were interested in cycling from one city to another, you know, or one town to another, my roots often they start after the first one and and end before the next or you know, they don’t really do that. So instead, what I’m going to do with the EV routes is cut them into this town to that town. So h I did Ken May to Waterville as the first one lined up. I’ll now do uh waterfill to Korgan and then I’ll do Colorgan to either inch or dingle. I’m not quite sure whether to do those as two separate days or a single day. I think that will make them much more useful to people who are finding the channel maybe are going on holidays or want to do a tour themselves and it will give you more digestible components of going from one place to another. You’re far more likely to be cycling between two towns. Uh so that’s the other change I’m going to make. Um, I’m also going to do a lot of content about, as usual, about um, gear. Uh, I had made a number of purchases over at the start of the summer, a handlebar bag, uh, a new backpack pan. I’d done initial reviews of some of those, like the backpack pan, uh, giving my initial impression, but I’ll do more in-depth ones based on having now used them for what, it’s probably about 30 35 nights. um of traveling. So, obviously that gives you a much better idea of what actually does work and what doesn’t work in reality. Uh and I’m also going to do some experimentation around some of my camping gear. Um if you followed me on the Tik Tok, you’ll know I weathered recently a very heavy storm in Siggo uh with 80 km an hour winds. Um and that actually was quite an interesting experiment in terms of how to properly put up my MSOR hub. So, I’ll be able to talk a bit more about that. uh and and a few other incidentals like that as well. But anyway, that’s that’s some of the content on cycling you can expect to come up. So, on to the atrial fibrillation. Uh this is something that actually affects a fair few science cyclists. As I said in my previous video, tragically, it turns out that doing any sort of endurance sport actually increases your risk of this particular heart condition. Um, and the other problem I discovered the hard way is that it can also be triggered by cycling. So, I got my diagnosis. Um, I had to cancel the Pyrenees trip, but I was kind of very much, well, I’m not giving up cycle touring. I really love this. Uh, I’m going to need to work out what the parameters can be uh around it. And one of the things I decided, and this in retrospect is probably an error. Uh, however, with any of this, this these are my kind of opinions. I’m not a doctor. Definitely talk to your own doctor about it. Reality to the Irish health system is it’s actually actually very hard to get to talk to a doctor or a consultant uh at any sort of frequency. Um, so my next follow-up appointment now isn’t until December, I think it is. Um, so that’s ended up with me doing some experimentation on my own and some of it turned out to be not as clever as I thought I was being. One of the things I decided to do was okay, the beta blockers they have me on. Um, they mean that that that stops my heart uh rate going up to very high levels. So what I decided what I’d do is I’d come off the beta blockers when I was cycling providing I wasn’t hadn’t had an an episode of atrial fibrillation recently. And I used my watch to track that. What they do is they limit the maximum ratio heart reaches. Uh and that my I found they limit it to about 130 or so. That’s about where’ll peek at if I really push it, which I shouldn’t be. Um whereas normally if I really push it then 165 170. Uh so that basically limits your ability to go up hills quite so easily. So that’s why I had made the rather foolish decision that I would just come off them because what I hadn’t really twigged was I was thinking about that heart rate limiting in terms of when you’re actually in an AIB episode and that obviously stops you damaging your heart because it’s trying to beat it 150 times a minute uh when you’re just sitting in a chair. Um but actually it also has a bit of a preventative function as well. Uh which is because AIB can be triggered by intense exercise and that the trigger there is is the increased heart rate. Uh if you limit the heart rate to lower levels then that reduces the chance of that being a trigger in itself. Now it doesn’t eliminate it importantly. Um you know you’re still effectively getting into a zone five just at a lower level. And ideally, apparently what you do is you get a sports cardiologist to hook you up to a a treadmill or equivalent and then get you and then put you through a set of stress exercises while monitoring your heart. And so they give you a new set of what zone 1, two, three, four, and five are. A lot of us don’t have access to that sort of thing. Of course, um uh but yeah, you so basically it’s they’re going to be a bit lower, but anyway. So yeah, that that particular genius idea of mine um of coming off them wasn’t actually a genius idea at all and possibly I wouldn’t have had both my second and third AIB episodes uh if I had stayed on them. So, as I said, not medical advice, but a bit of an anecdote about what went wrong for me and why, if you’re in a position to, you’re far better off talking to a doctor about how to handle this sort of thing. And that seemed like a good idea, but actually wasn’t. Now, I got away with it on that first trip, the Shannon trip. The only negative thing I had was about day five of that. Uh I did get a high heart rate warning in the evening, but it didn’t turn into atrial fibrillation. It just lasted two hours and then it went away. Um however, the Mayo trip uh which was more strenuous because there were more mountains involved in it. Uh about day four or day yeah day four of that um I again got a heart rate warning. Day five, I was getting the train back to Dublin and that evening in Dublin and basically over dinner, I realized my heart rate was was fluttering, the classical atrial fibrillation symptom. And when I ran the ECG and the watch confirmed I was back in AIB. Um, now I had blamed that on having a couple of points the night before uh because my initial focus was was, you know, zoning in on alcohol is the bad thing that caused this. Um but uh an experience two weeks later after that episode had passed, I went out with a hike for a friend up um Tom Lee in in the Dublin Mountains. Now that’s not a mad strenuous hike. Uh but on the way back from that, I um I I was cycling back and I I was crossing the Phoenix Park and there’s a steep hill uh just at St. Mary’s in the Phoenix Park if you know it. It’s not it’s not a very long hill. It’s probably only gone up 60 m. It probably is is pushing about 12 to 15% at the steepest parts, but I was on my manual bike um and I had already done the height. So although that hadn’t been strenuous, I was obviously I was still tired from that and I felt it in my muscles the next day. Uh and when I got to that hill, I decided to I just push it and see how fast I could go up it. And obviously got got quite out of breath. Uh subsequently I realized my heart rate had peaked at 171 which is kind of above what somebody my age should really hit. And then the problem was it just didn’t come down again. It stayed oh came down a little but it it it stayed up around 130. Um now I was off the beta blockers again at that point. That’s that’s the that’s the other thing. Um and I next day I kind of went into atrial fibrillation again. Uh next day I was kind of going that’s really weird and I was trying to work out why it had happened because I hadn’t drunk anything that day and then I cycled into work the following day. The aib had gone down again and then it came back again just after the cycle in and again I noticed my heart rate had gone up going up a hill uh and didn’t come back down again and then I went oh maybe exercise is actually a trigger. Now this is a really dumb thing to say because actually yes it’s a trigger if you once you look into it it’s a trigger but what had happened was in terms of exercise I had fixated in on the endurance being a cause of it endurance exercises and whenever you look up exercise and a generally would find advice that tells you not to stop exercising that you still need to exercise and all that because obviously the average medical problem they have is somebody who maybe wasn’t getting enough exercise in the first place because that can be a reason you get it. Um, and so the last thing they want is that person not to exercise at all. However, when you’re actually in an API episode, you shouldn’t be exercising. Rather comically, the stuff I found online said, “Yeah, you can do lighthouse work, but yeah, lighthouse work, not going out to do loops in the park or, you know, up mountains or any of that sort of thing as I’ve been doing.” Uh, and it, from what I can make out, uh, essentially you want to avoid zone five. So, if you know the five heart rate zones that are used for kind of intensity of exercise, zone five is like you normally you should only go into that for about a minute or so anyway. You don’t want to be in there for any long period of time. It’s essentially going up and above your maximum heart rate for your age. Uh so that makes sense. You should avoid that. But I had gone into zone five doing that hill and it normally wouldn’t matter because it’s a short hill. You’re up it in a minute. So that that would be fine. Um but also actually zone four is a bit of a problem as well. Now the problem with zone four is that’s just intense exercise of any sort at all. Uh and the the kind of the simple way that the thing I found to set it was that if you’re doing exercise, you should be able to have a conversation with somebody as you’re exercising. So that should be your actual intensity. And obviously I was going quite a bit above that. Um, so at that point, because my Apple Watch had given me a few high heart rate warnings before I ever had before I got the AIB warning, um, I went back on the watch and found out the date and time all those happened. And then I went to my, uh, uh, camera on my phone camera and I went back to my photographs and I had a look for photographs around that time or early on that day or the previous day. And when I did that, I discovered that almost every single high heart rate warning had been where I had cycled up a steep hill earlier that day. Now, there were often proper steep hills. Uh windmill hill in Y, for instance, if you’re a cyclist in Ireland, that’s kind of a famous one that they use for Iron Man competitions and things like that. Uh but that was a consistent pattern. Um, there was one of them where I hadn’t been cycling, but it had been a very hot day and I’d been moving a load of breeze blocks around because I was helping friends who were doing a construction project. So, again, that’s a fairly strenuous activity. Um, and there was one that actually could have been alcohol related, which is I went to the Red Roses for me um Poges and Friends concert in Dublin last year and I drank a fair bit of whiskey at that concert. Uh, so I think that might have been one I could blame on the alcohol, although I was also doing a lot of dancing. So, who knows? What I have been able to do is use my Apple Watch to track uh what hearts state I’m in in quite a bit of detail. Um, that’s been very useful in understanding things and also because one of the major problems with AIB is you may not know you’re in it. Uh, and that’s, you know, one of the risks that would be associated with coming off meds for instance. Um, so once you’ve diagnosed this, you can set your watch so that what it does is it monitors you all the time and at the end of each week it gives you a percentage time it thinks you spent in AIB. Now that’s not going to be a perfect figure. So one of the weird things is will never say zero. It will say 2% or less. Um, and then of course what you can also do is you can run the ECG function on the watch at any time which will tell you whether or not you’re an AIB at that particular moment. So whether or not you’re you know if you’re suspicious basically you can run it. Now initially for the first few weeks I was doing that a lot. I was running it probably at least twice a day and more so if I was either if I was in recently in AIB. Uh so that gave me some pretty good data on um how long the episodes were, the sort of pattern of coming in and out of them, the relationship between the high heart rate warnings and AIB and then all the historic data which has given me a a much better understanding I think of what the drivers are in my particular case, how long episodes are likely to last h and all that sort of thing. Um so yeah not a product placement by any means but I I definitely have found that very useful to have the data uh in terms of what is happening with me at any particular moment and what the general pattern is from the cycling perspective. What I can say is the Shannon one seemed to work uh on the the one in high heart rate incident I had was towards the end on a relatively hilly day. So yeah the idea of avoiding hills I think would probably work out. Um the Mayo one caused a problem. May one though once I get the videos up that was a pretty in it was a proper intense gone back to my old style old ways trip even though I said I wouldn’t. So for instance the first night I ended up camping at a haunted ruined lodge up in the Ox Mountains in torrential rain um in you know again in kind of high winds and I only got about two hours sleep that um insufficient sleep is a trigger as well. Um, and then yeah, I I was camping. I met a friend in Bad Castle. Had a couple of points there. Uh, and that was the first high heart rate warning. So, a combination of a lot of cycling and I think I three points that day, which is probably one too many. Um, you know, so that that kind of that seemed to be a fairly obvious cause, but I kind of was getting away with it, if you know what I mean. Um, so what are my plans for the future and what might be useful advice for people cycling? Well, as I said, I’m going to try and break up my rides, uh, so I do more stops. I didn’t I in Mayo, I kind of didn’t do a great job of doing that. That may be part of the issue. Um, I’m going to try and make the distances shorter. I mean, I would often cycle 100 kilometers a day, sometimes more. My most was 155. Um, I’m probably going to do less wild camping because I often don’t sleep very well when I’m wild camping. Um, so I’m probably going to uh do more things where I’ll wild camp in spots where there’s a particular attraction to that spot. It’s beautiful, great sunset, that sort of thing. Uh, and less as a way of saving money. I’ll spend more time looking for campsites, basically to that. Um, and the other big change I’m probably going to do is I’m going to look at buying a new electric bike. Everything is an excuse for buying a new bike. H. However, yeah, if if you’ve watched the review of the Super Delight um that I I got the loan over for a few days to test out, you’ll see me testing that out in a very very steep hill. And you’ll see that on my current bike, I have to stand up and I’m pushing on the pedals to get up that hill. So, it’s got a a relatively weak motor for hills, only 45 Newton meter torque. But on the Super Delight, I’m sitting down and it’s much much less effort. And that’s got 100 I think it’s 100 NM peak uh motor. Um so basically although the thing I really like about Hills is the way they test you. I need less of that sort of testing. So that’s going to be one of the changes is I’m going to get a bike that’s got a more powerful motor. Not in the sense it gives you more speed, but in the sense that it gives you more torque and that helps you get up hills a bit easier. So yeah, that’s that’s kind of my plan for the future. I don’t want to give up. I am going to have to change the way I do things a bit. Um I think probably that Pyrenees trip is off the books for good. You know, realistically, uh atrial fibrillation doesn’t go away. It tends to get worse and the more you have it, the more likely you are to get it again in the future. So, you know, you want to avoid episodes for that reason. So, possibly the Pyrenees was a little bit too ambitious. I mean, um, yeah, I was going to be doing 2,800 meters of a sentence a day, kind of crazy amounts. Uh, so that that’s for somebody younger and healthier that can do that, but I should be able to do a number of trips. Otherwise, I what I’m thinking of actually doing next summer as a kind of lengthy trip outside Ireland is going to Normandy. I’ve wanted to do the kind of D-Day beaches uh, and then the battlefields uh, for some time, and there’s lots of cycling routes around that. It’s relatively flat, so it’ll probably be a suitable trip. So, that’s where we’re going with the channel. There’ll be lots of content coming for my cycling around Ireland this summer. I think all all my all the trips I did here this summer were great. I would I’d recommend any and all of them. Uh, basically, and in the future, I’m going to be finding out what it is that I actually can do. uh cautious experimentation and you’ll be coming on a bit of a journey with me in terms of what works and what doesn’t work in terms of living with atrial fibrillation and cycle touring and what you can do and what you can’t do. There’s where we’re going. Uh I normally end this with saying and and someday I hope to see you on the road, but this this is more true than ever because it will mean I’ll be I’ll find ways to keep myself on the road and to keep touring. So, thanks for watching.