Running for My Life

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, four months, 24 days and 11 hours after nearlydying from a heart attack, I finished a 5K race.

It was my daughter’s idea, part birthday gift, part incentive, part recovery celebration. She thought I could do it; I wasn’t so sure, even though the cardiologist had said my heart had healed.

5Ks, I thought, is a lot of Ks. I had neither run nor even walked that far since the heart attack. But almost from the moment of my discharge from the hospital, I’ve been pushing myself, working toward becoming the person I had been before that crushing pain in my chest. Working, I guess, toward being someone who could complete a 5K.

Two days after the discharge, and against the advice of my family, I held a book launch event for my new book. Within a week after the discharge, I was walking in my neighborhood, briefly at first, then for as long as I could, sometimes even up the occasional hill. I was—still occasionally am—a bit out of breath from the exertion, but I walked on.

A week later, I was walking briskly enough that the alarm of the personal defibrillator I was wearing, a life vest, would frequently go off because the electrodes had been jostled by the energetic movement. Within a month, I was attempting some light jogging, at first only for a few seconds and then for maybe half a minute.

Two months after my near-death experience, I began cardiac rehab, first walking on the treadmill, then walking and jogging, then walking less and jogging more, then even less walking and more jogging.

Before the heart attack, I had run many 5Ks. But that, I knew, was a different me. Was I really ready for these 3.1 miles, for reasonably intense exercise on a warm day in an environment that wasn’t controlled, where there was no cardiologist on site to watch over me?

The beginning was, at best, inauspicious, as we arrived late to the course. While we fiddled with our race bibs, the starting gun went off, the runners began running and then disappeared around the first turn. My daughter and I were unsure where to go and started running in the wrong direction, until bystanders shouted, no, no, the course is over there.

Yes, I was rattled.

As we headed off, finally, in the right direction, I told myself, again and again, take it easy, there’s a long way to go. Slow it down. I tried to remember the racing mantra my cousin—the one who regularly runs marathons—had told me: the first rule of a race is don’t die. (The second rule is don’t hurt yourself and the third is do enjoy yourself, and the fourth is do the best you can, but I was concentrating on rule No. 1.)

And from the start, to my surprise, I was able to run for longer than I had done since my heart attack. When I eventually had to stop, for brisk walking breaks, the breaks were short and then I was back jogging again. The 1-mile-marker arrived unexpectedly soon.

I should have been more confident at this point; instead, I kept thinking: I have more than two miles still to go and I’m already a little bit breathless.

But I kept going. I’d see a tree or a pole way up ahead and I’d say to myself, OK, just make it to that point. Keep jogging until you can get there.

And then, almost suddenly, we hit the 2-mile marker, and I was, yes, feeling pretty much OK. The jogging, in fact, was getting somewhat easier, the walking breaks somewhat shorter. And there, finally, was the 3-mile marker.

I knew I could make it now. The finish line was just around the last turn.

“Let’s run faster,” I said to my daughter. We crossed the finish line together, at what I thought was not a bad clip. My daughter was smiling, because she knows to smile for the cameras at the end of a race and because she had been right about doing this. In the picture, I look like I am grimacing, but really, I wasn’t.

It turned out that four months, 24 days and 11 and three-quarter hours after nearly dying from a heart attack, I came in second in my age group in a 5K race (and you know, please don’t ask how many runners were in my age group. It really doesn’t matter much, at least to me.).