Saturday, March 16, 2013

I was really excited at the beginning of this week. I just completed a successful double up at Capitol forest, a 10 mile run Sat followed by a 15 mile on Sunday. Felt great after both runs and was ready to taper for Chuckanut 50K the next weekend. Monday morning I showed up at CrossFit and started my warmup. I immediately felt a tightness in my chest, a hard time breathing and broke out into a sweat. I sat down to catch my breath and survey the situation. This felt all too familiar to the old heart trouble but I didn't feel anything over the weekend of hard workouts and I couldn't decide if it was serious or not. I quickly felt better and continued on with my work out though we shortened it due to my episode. Over the next couple of days I did feel some mild discomfort in my chest so I decided to get things check out before my Saturday race. My cardiologist got me in on Wednesday for a treadmill stress test. I normally beat the test so I was at least hoping to get a new read on my maximum heart rate. But after about 14 mins. with my heart rate just around 145bpm, they started to ask me if I was feeling anything. I started to feel a slight tightening in my chest and they immediately shut the treadmil off.  Dr. Wark said I had a problem and we needed to do an angiogram. So Friday morning I showed up at the hospital at 5am for my 7am procedure. I ended up needing two stents in the same artery to fix my blockage. So now I have 5 stints and a triple bypass! The good news is that I can get back to training in a week. The bad news is I missed Chuckanut but this is a lot better than croaking in the middle of a race.

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