Health Hacking: Mexico City (Premium)

There are a few things I meant to discuss in What I Use: Mexico City (Premium) but didn’t. Key among them are some health-related topics.

So let’s dive in.

Altitude

Since it was a primary concern both before and during the trip, it’s weird that I didn’t discuss the effects of Mexico City’s high altitude in my previous post. Sorry about that.

The thing is, I have a history with high altitude. In February 2005, I visited Colorado and almost died from High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE). You can read all about that little escapade in That Time Google Saved My Life (Premium), but for purposes of this discussion, I need to be careful at high altitudes now and I’m supposed to take a drug called Diamox whenever I travel to a place that has an altitude of 10,000 feet or more. Mexico City is a bit under 7,400 feet, so I didn’t bother.

But it’s still breathtaking, literally. And since you’re required to wear a mask in this city at all times because of COVID-19, the effects of that altitude are exaggerated. Walking up a flight of stairs, even just walking, can be very tiring. And this is a weird thing to admit, but there were moments when I was struggling and getting worried about some kind of relapse when my wife would blurt out something like, “I think we need to rest,” and it was a bit reassuring. She’s in great shape, so it wasn’t just me.

Our general rule when visiting a city is to hit the ground running and we did that on this trip: Despite driving to and sitting in the airport for much of the morning and then flying for 5 hours last Thursday, we still walked 16,000 steps the day we arrived in Mexico City, and we walked 20,000 steps the next day. I suppose this is understandable in the sense that we’d not traveled internationally in almost two years and were excited to see a new place. But maybe we could have taken things more slowly. By Saturday, I was exhausted, and I ended up taking a two-hour nap during the day, and we only walked about 11,000 steps. Mexico City is gorgeous and there’s lots to see, but I had kind of run into a wall.

Heart rate

Feeling the exhaustion each day, and experiencing being winded during any uphill walks or stair climbing, I started keeping an eye on my Fitbit Versa 3, as the watch face that I use displays my heart rate alongside the time and some other metrics. I don’t actually do this at home. Fitbit tracks my resting heart rate, which is usually 66 beats per minute (bpm). And when I’m on an elliptical at the gym, I will sometimes look at it to see if I’m in an active zone, which for me can be between 115 and 135 bpm generally. And what I saw was concerning.

My heart rate while walking around was usually around 110 bpm, and if we were just sitting or resting—maybe eating lunch or drinking coffee—it would only settle down to about 80-85 bpm. Worse—to me—my resting heart rate rose every day we were there. It was 66 the day before we flew, as noted, so right on the money. But it hit 68 on Thursday (the day we flew), 71 on Friday, and then 73 on Saturday. By the time we flew home, it was 78 bpm.

Would it have just keep going up, or would my body have finally adjusted, letting it level out and then drop? I wasn’t there long enough to know.

Sleep

Sleep is another related metric. I have sleep apnea and sleep horribly as it is, and it’s gotten worse since the pandemic and that little insurrection no one seems to want to talk about. But my sleep quality worsened yet again in Mexico City as well. My sleep score in Fitbit varies by week, but looking back over the past several weeks, it looks like I usually land around 77-78 (out of 100). Last week, my score was 70, and I had one night where I hit only 58, and I feel like that was warranted that night. I’m not sure what I could have done about it, but this is another case of not being there long enough to know whether being there longer would have triggered improvements. It’s an unknown.

Stomach

The final related issue is gastrointestinal.

Thanks to my love of meats that many in the United States would find strange to disgusting, I feel like I’ve been training for Mexico’s street food scene my entire life. I see tacos made of cabeza (“head,” meaning all of the meat bits in the head), tongue, eyes, brains, and what have you, and I want to dive right in. But as it turns out, even someone with my history can have trouble with this kind of thing. And it doesn’t help that you shouldn’t drink the tap water and can’t always tell whether the water you drink, imbibe as ice, or indirectly consume via washed vegetables or whatever is safe. Mexico City is really big on bottled water. But mistakes happen.

Anyway. There were episodes. Episodes in which I needed to, you know, maybe get back to the hotel quickly or find a los baños­—or, as they’re called in Mexico City, sanitorios—now rather than later. Maybe I was a bit too aggressive with that stuff. And maybe it was just some water I was unaware of. I don’t know. But I soldiered through it. And for those who are less, um, experimental than me, like my wife, no problems.

Final thoughts

We’re going back to Mexico City in August, so I have several weeks to prepare for and try to circumvent these problems the next time. I’m going to ask my doctor whether taking Diamox or something similar makes sense, for example. And I found out literally while writing this that there are settings for the CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine I use when sleeping that relate to high altitude; I never even imagined there was such a thing, and that should help. As for the street food, I don’t know. I can’t say no to that, but maybe some daily dose of Pepto-Bismol would be beneficial.

On the next trip, we’re also going to visit some places outside of Mexico City, including Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, and Querétaro, and those cities are all a bit lower in elevation, in the 6,000 to 6,700-foot range. So maybe they won’t be as formidable. Regardless, I think we’ll take things a bit slower next time and not push ourselves so hard. We have generally traveled with the idea that we’d come back to a place, but this last trip was so long in coming, I think we lost that perspective at first.

We’ll do better next time.