The race I didn’t run

This Wednesday was cold and rainy, and I ran/walked 1.5 miles on a treadmill. For anyone that knows me, that seems like an unremarkable sentence. After all, I’ve been on an exercise and weight loss journey for almost ten years now, and running races up to marathon length since 2014. It’s almost a standing joke that if any of my friends from work want to find me during conferences that their best bet is to go outside early in the morning and wait until I run past.

But as with most things, context is everything. What makes this run noteworthy is that I ran on that treadmill in a cardiac rehab facility, hooked up to a heart monitor, surrounded (and cheered on) by a crew of doctors, nurses, and exercise physiologists who have become a big part of my life over the past month.

This story begins back in July — I went out for a Saturday long run in late July and about two miles in started to notice a bit of discomfort in my chest on the right side. It went away when I slowed down, but it felt enough like an asthma attack that I made an appointment with my family’s doctor. When I got to the appointment he listened to my heart and lungs, took an EKG, saw and heard nothing out of the ordinary, but adjusted my asthma medication upward in any case. At first it seemed to help, but it didn’t eliminate the discomfort. So a week or two later I went back to my doctor, and we set up a plan to first rule out any heart conditions by seeing a cardiologist, and then move on to more likely causes, such as my asthma or acid reflex. At that time, he also advised me to stop running just in case. My last run was August 3.

I then met my cardiologist and told him about my running and diet, together with the fact that my chest only bothered me while running. He listened to my heart, took another EKG ( which was picture perfect) and said he also thought it was probably not my heart, but we should do a standard series of tests to be sure.

The first couple of tests also showed absolutely nothing. The first set of images was clear, and the team had a hard time making me get my heart rate up to the target for the treadmill stress test because I was a runner. As a result, we were all laughing and joking about my love for Disney races as I went in for the last round of imaging.

My cardiologist had already left for the day when the results of the last test came back. Thus, it was one of the other partners in the practice that came into tell me they had found a worrying spot on my left anterior descending artery in the final image.

This was a shock to me — going from “we’re ruling this out” to “something’s wrong” in 10 minutes. But the conclusion was that I should come back for a heart catheterization in a couple of weeks. The thought was that this would reveal what was wrong, and if I did have the beginnings of a blockage, they could insert a stent and fix it then.

So, in late September I went in to an outpatient operating theater for the catheterization procedure. The thing about that is that you are awake through the procedure, but they don’t tell you results in real time as they want to spend some time reviewing the detailed images that the procedure produces and don’t want to cause any unneeded stress during the procedure.

The results that my wife and I were given when I returned to the recovery room were not at all what we expected. I didn’t just have one blockage, I had multiple. As my cardiologist informed me, that wasn’t something they could fix with stents — that would be “too much metal” in one heart. My only option was a heart bypass operation.

So how did this happen? I had been doing everything right — controlling my cholesterol and blood pressure with diet and exercise and (relatively low) doses of medication where needed. It turns out the answer is genetics. Both of my parents had experienced heart attacks, and cardiac disease was also prevalent in my aunts and uncles on both sides of my family. Some studies have shown that for certain genetic risk factors that even with “doing all the right things” in terms of diet and exercise, you can still have a 50/50 chance of experiencing arteriosclerosis that needs intervention.

I had lost that coin flip. So in mid-October I went in for a sextuple bypass operation. I had never even heard of that procedure (sextuple bypass) before it happened to me — there are four major arteries and branches on the front of your heart that most people hear about, but there are also two arteries on the back of your heart which can also experience blockages.

The surgery went very well, and recovery has gone smoothly and quickly — way faster than normal as I kept meeting recovery milestones early. One of those milestones came just a few weeks ago — I was able to start cardiac rehab, and begin exercising again in earnest. That’s how I met the amazing team that has been helping me get back to exercising, and letting me know when I can push farther, and when I should hold back (and sometimes when I’m not pushing enough!)

It seems that my running had been the saving grace. My heart muscle was perfectly healthy. All of the exercise I had been doing prior to this event had forced my body to build up other pathways around the blockages to supply oxygen to the heart muscle, so I was in the best possible condition to recover once the blockages were bypassed. Essentially my running had helped hit a “pause” button on progression toward a heart attack.

So that is how I ended up finally, after more than three months of being away, returning to one of the most common and beloved activities I had done over the last ten years. My rehab team, my heart surgeon, and my cardiologist are all confident that by early next year I’ll be back to running daily, and see no reason why I shouldn’t be back to running marathons next year. I’m still not yet cleared to run outside of rehab, but we hope that should happen (and I should graduate from rehab) relatively soon.

Which brings me to the title of this piece. You sign up for races several months in advance. One of my favorite races, both due to the scenery and the location (the midway point is about a mile from my house) is the American Tobacco Trail ten miler. Some of my friends and colleagues from work have been on the organizing committee for this race, and the group of runners in it have always seemed like a close knit and supportive family. When I signed up in the spring, I was looking forward to this year’s race because it came just after my 55th birthday — it seemed like a good way for me to celebrate part of my milestone birthday.

Instead, I spent that day celebrating that I could slowly walk the quarter mile to our mailbox with my wife and make it back with just a short rest in the middle. That half mile walk was close to the start of the recovery journey that has been highlighted by the milestone I opened this article with. I’ve been slowly increasing the distance I walk every day, week by week. The next big step came today — one of the rules I’ve set for myself is that when it comes to race shirts you don’t wear it until you’ve earned it. Today, I completed a continuous ten mile walk, earning me the shirt I can now proudly wear. I may not have run that race on the race day, but I have run my own.