My Whoop helped uncover a heart rhythm issue I never felt

108, 121, 123 … 156.

What the hell is that? In the span of two minutes, without pedaling faster, increasing the resistance or feeling anything change, my heart rate shot up 33 beats a minute to a number that is pretty close to my maximum effort.

I ride a Peloton about four times a week, sometimes more when life allows it, so seeing those numbers broadcast from my Whoop band to the Peloton screen as I warmed up for a ride late this past summer made no sense. I felt strong. I rode all summer, my resting heart rate had been coming down and my VO² Max was inching up. All good things.

Nothing felt different, but when I looked down at my Apple Watch, the same number was staring back at me. I stopped pedaling. About a minute later, my heart rate dropped and I started pedaling again and the same thing happened. After stopping again, it went from over 160 to the 120s, then the 80s and then into the 70s in the span of less than two minutes as I sat on the bike.

At first, I assumed it was bad data. Wearables glitch. Sensors get confused. It felt like when you drive past a house with a buried electric dog fence and your car radio crackles with static. But seeing the same numbers on two different devices made it harder to dismiss.

Everything was normal after that, but about 10 days later it happened a second time. That’s when I contacted my doctor.

She recommended I see a cardiologist and arranged an appointment for the following week. I brought the data from my Whoop with me. The cardiologist studied it before a nurse ran an EKG in his office that came back normal, but that didn’t end the conversation. He had me wear a continuous heart monitor for a week, stuck to my chest, and told me to go about my normal routine.

It fell off after five days, but that was enough. The data showed several short episodes of fibrillation, each about 10 minutes long. He also said I had arterial flutter, a related condition, but I never felt a single one of the fibrillations. By clinical standards, I was told, they were brief. Anything under 12 hours is considered short. That was reassuring. But it was also unsettling.

When the cardiologist explained atrial fibrillation, he described it as an irregular heart beat cause by the heart’s electrical system getting out of rhythm. As soon as I heard the phrase “irregular heartbeat,” my mind went to Hank Gathers collapsing on a basketball court in 1990.

My cardiologist was too young to know him. He Googled the name in front of me and then explained that what I had was very different from what led to Gathers' death. AFib, as it is often called, wasn’t going to kill me. But left untreated, it increased my risk of blood clots and stroke, so needless to say, he had my undivided attention.

I was nervous, but I trusted my doctors. They started me on medication immediately, and I took comfort in knowing this had been caught early. Medication could manage it. Blood thinners could reduce stroke risk. But for someone my age, 54, an ablation offered something else: an 85 percent chance of fixing both problems.

An electrophysiologist would run a catheter from my hip up to my heart, use computers to map its electrical signals, then cauterize the affected areas so the rhythm could return to normal.

It sounded scary, but they explained it was common, routine, and if everything went smoothly, I’d be home shortly after lunchtime on the same day as the surgery.

My wife drove me to the hospital on the morning of Dec. 2. The nurses and doctors were excellent, but I had to take off my Whoop for the first time since November 2019. Like so many things today, Whoop has an AI feature, in this case, a coach that provides guidance on what numbers mean, what your trends are and how you might want to modify your training. The AI Coach wished my well and said it looked forward to helping me track my recovery in the days and weeks ahead.

I don’t love anesthesia, but everything went smoothly. I went into surgery around 8 a.m., and by 2 p.m. I was awake and walking hospital hallways to get the remaining medication out of my system. Three days later, I went for a 20-minute walk. The next day, I was driving my car.

Something else happened, too. My numbers normalized.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is the time variation between heartbeats, measured in milliseconds. Generally, the higher the HRV, the better you have recovered from stress and workouts. Throughout the fall, my heart rate variability, as measured by my Whoop, had been unusually high. Like, ultra-marathon-level high. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a sign of improving fitness. It was my heart beating irregularly. After the ablation, those readings settled back into familiar ranges, showing me that the procedure had done what doctors hoped. A follow up visit to my cardiologist confirmed that things look good.

I’m back on the Peloton, I’ve resumed strength training and have started hitting balls in simulators again. But the biggest lesson in all of this isn’t that wearables diagnose medical conditions. They don’t. Doctors do that.

But today’s devices are more than step counters and message mirrors. Knowing my numbers and paying attention to them gave me something concrete to share with my doctors. I never felt sick. I never felt my body give me a warning. But the data told a story that my body wasn’t.

A wearable device is a great gift during the holidays, and many of them have cool golf-specific features, but learn your numbers and be sure to know what they mean. Feeling fine doesn’t always mean everything is fine. Sometimes, the quiet signals sending the biggest message.