You run for 40 years.
Kevin Nortz / The Herald
You do 10ks, half-marathons, marathons.
You lift weights.
You do situps. Pushups. Pullups. Dips.
You eat healthy. You don’t abuse alcohol. You never smoke.
You do everything you can to take care of your body and make it last for a long time.
For the most part, it doesn’t let you down.
Only once were you in the hospital and that for a staph infection while you were training for a marathon in Ireland.
Other than that, a clean bill of health.
At 64, you still put in 35 miles a week on the roads.
It’s more a jog than a run, but at least you’re vertical.
You have some aches and pains, but nothing that you can’t tolerate. If you can feel them, that means you’re still breathing.
You have never taken pills, other than an occasional aspirin for a headache.
You had a dizzy spell a few months ago when you got out of the car at the grocery store, but you attributed that to not having eaten lunch. And you felt some pain in the chest area while you were out running a few days later, but that, you figure, was heartburn from the garlic you had the night before. Nothing to get alarmed about.
Still, just to be safe, it might not hurt to have a physical exam.
You go in to see your primary physician. You tell him about the dizziness and the chest pain.
He orders an EKG, and it reveals some things that concern him. A week later, they strap a 24-hour holter on you that will tell more about your heart activity.
The day they remove it, you get a call on your cellphone from your daughter. The cardiologist wants to see you.
When?
Today.
He is a calm man with some serious concerns. How serious? The holter indicates that early that morning, while you were asleep, you came close to having a heart attack. You wonder if he’s got the right guy. So where do we go from here? you ask. If you were my brother, the doctor says, I’d tell you to go into the hospital today.
An hour later, you do.
Fifteen hours later, you’re in surgery.
Forty years of running and what does it get you?
A triple bypass.
You can just hear all the three-pack-a-day, red-meat, bacon-and-egg, beer-guzzling, non-exercising crowd chortle.
See, what’d all that clean living and exercise do for him? Nothing.
A bicycle-riding, heavy-on-the-veggies, non-smoking friend laments, “If this can happen to Henry, what chance do the rest of us have?”
You tell him not to worry. The doctors say that if you hadn’t exercised all those years, you might have had a “lethal episode” 20 years ago.
This isn’t something you did wrong. It’s something that you inherited.
You had two things going against you, your wife, a nurse, says. You’re male and it runs in your family.
Now, you’re as good as new, she says. There was no damage to the heart itself.
Let’s pick out a race and run together, the surgeon says.
That was eight weeks ago. It seems like eight months.
No running. And perfect running weather. Sunny and hot.
No lifting. Nothing heavier than a loaf of bread.
No one-armed push/pull activities. You can’t even open a heavy door.
No driving for the first six weeks.
All right, what can I do?
You can walk.
Walk? You hate walking. It’s the most boring exercise there is.
But it’s walk or vegetate. You walk.
You start out going to the end of the lane. A tenth of a mile. An uphill climb coming back.
Forty years of running and – what’s this? – you’re winded when you finish.
What gives? You’ve just had major surgery, dummy.
Yeah, it does take something out of you, doesn’t it?
The prescribed exercise program calls for you to be walking 10-15 minutes per day during the first week.
You, dummy that you are, push it. By the end of the week, you’re doing better than a mile. It takes 25 minutes. You used to run better than three miles in that amount of time.
A runner passes by one day while you’re out walking. You want to reach out and trip him.
By week 2, you’re up to three miles a day. Week 3, four miles. Week 4, you do nine miles one day and realize that it’s way too much. By the end of six weeks, you’ve walked 170 miles. And barely broken a sweat.
I want to run, you want to shout.
One day, you’re walking along and all of a sudden, you begin to move a little quicker. An old man’s shuffle. The breathing is a little faster. A bead of sweat on the forehead. Then a trickle.
The arms swing a little bit. The feet move a little faster. Maybe a quarter of a mile.
There, that felt good.
Easy, cautioned the doctors. Don’t want to mess up the stitching. What? My innards going to fall out?
Then, the eighth week. The ease-into-the-run week.
OK, here goes. Lift ‘em up and let ‘em down softly. Gently. Don’t want my heart to fall out and go … splat!
Old man’s quick shuffle. Maybe a 12-minute mile. But oh how sweet it feels. The pulse races. The sweat comes quicker. The breathing is good.
You feel like a kid on a playground.
A 64-year-old kid 71/2 weeks after a triple bypass.
You run an hour one day without stopping. Maybe cover five miles.
You feel like an Olympic champion. Where’s my gold medal?
Life, friend. That’s your gold medal.
Life … thanks to doctors Sam Armstrong, the primary physician; Frank Sheridan, the cardiologist, and Tim Byrnes, the surgeon.
You’re good to go for 60 more years, they say.
Life.
Grasp it. Squeeze it. Cherish it.
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