I don’t know you, but I’m glad you’re still here. Best of luck with your recovery.
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Sorry to hear about the heart attack. Life can certainly remind us we are all mortal and only have today. There a lot of great responses. Most based on the hope and examples of getting back to it in the future.
It might be good to remember why most of us do this. We are all chasing that “Feeling” most won’t understand. It might be a great race (you came in 15th, rather than 25th! ) or a great workout, smashed FTP etc etc. The future workouts might change but there probably is many other things in life that you can look at to safely get the feeling again. It’s not so much the work, but what it means and what you take from it.
We are lucky to be here today and be able to do whatever brings us joy.
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Take care of yourself and all the best for the future!
I’d be jumping on that eBike bandwagon like others have suggested.
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Stay strong my friend!
Sorry to hear about the heart attack, best wishes for a full and speedy recovery!
Would a Coronary Calcium Scan (where they scan the heart) have found the blockage?
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Maybe, guess it depends whether the blockage was caused by a chronic gradual build up over the years or a more acute clotting due to injury/damage. It will be something I’ll be asking about as it might be a good idea to have such a scan to see how the other arteries are faring.
Al.
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Talked to my doctor about getting this test last week. My cholesterol is very high, but I eat mostly LCHF, so it was expected. The Calcium Scan should show with a high level of certainty whether my cholesterol numbers are something to worry about. The test in non-invasive and just takes a couple minutes. Cost is just a little north of $100. Seems like this may be something that more of us old dudes should have done.
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And there was I thinking I didn’t qualify as an ‘old dude’ quite yet!! 
It’s a great share - hope you do well in recovery!!
-Mark
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Wow, thanks for posting. I’m sure it was frightening.
This kinda plays off the concerns I had. I was doing HIIT and hard biking, and was having a hard time catching my breath at times, and was wondering if I was training to hard.
I went to my general doc, and he looked me over and listened to my heart, and said that I sounded fine, but scheduled me for a consult with a cardiologist. They had me do a stress test, that I failed, and after a pitched battle with the insurance company, had me do a CTA. What they found was a ‘normal heart’, but a smaller than normal vessel in my heart. I was basically exercising as hard as that plumbing could provide blood. It’s congenital, I was born with it, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it, and everything else looked ‘perfect’. They told me to keep doing what I was doing. But the one thing that bothered me, up to that point, was finding information on training level. Was I training too hard? What was too hard? Should I be doing something differently? I felt like I was fumbling in the dark. It seems like, to me, it should be easier to get information for people that do exercise a lot on how they are doing, and if they are in danger of pushing too hard.
Maybe there isn’t any way to make information more available, and maybe we all should have a trainer to watch over us, but I just kept feeling like I needed more of a clue what was happening. I’m glad I went through the physician/cardiologist route and maybe that’s the answer, but how many can afford that, and have access to that level of health care.
In the back of my mind, I guess I always dreaded the possibility that a physician would say ‘You are over training, and you need to stop for a while’. It’s such a part of my life, and I have been hooked on those endorphins, and the feeling of working to near exhaustion, and to give it up would be, well, torture.
But I may have to get over it. I now face a hip replacement, so I find myself sitting thinking what the heck I’m going to do with my time until they give me the okay to ride again. It’s going to be hard not to get depressed, and that’s probably more in my mind than the surgery itself. I try to take as little time off ‘training’ as possible, and having to take 6 weeks off is going to set me back so much. I mean, at my age, that’s going to really be hard to come back from, I fear.
So I can feel your pain, and for sure hope for the best for you. My wife says ‘life is full of changes’, which sounds crass sometimes, but I guess I get it. I just want to put off the ‘you need to back off exercising’ for as long as possible.
justal mentioned chest pain. I had some pain on hard workouts. That is part of what drove me to call the general doc. They did order an enzyme test that didn’t show any markers, which was a relieve, but that’s not completely reliable apparently.
I was in for a colonoscopy, and my wife said they came out, kinda panicked, that I had a really low heart rate during the procedure. She said, that’s just him, he works out a lot, his normal resting heart rate is in the 50’s. Convinced they weren’t going to kill me, they went back at it. Kinda funny…
But be safe. Listen to your body…
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Haha, talking of a low heart rate, I was constantly setting off the alarms on the monitors whilst in the hospital. My resting heart rate is around 38bpm but it sometimes drops to 31-32bpm when I’m asleep. It took me a while to convince them that it was normal for me. It did also mean that they were too concerned to give me some of the usual meds they give to heart attack survivors - usually they prescribe a drug that lowers HR so as to help it recover. They decided not to bother with it for me.
Al.
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For the CTA, I was prescribed a drug to lower my heart rate so the system could latch to my rate to get the images. They called the day before: ‘No pill, no test’. The day of, they had me strapped in, and the word came from the bowels of the room ‘He’s fine!’. I was grateful. I didn’t think I’d have been able to walk out if I had taken that pill. I heard ‘Wow, no one has ever not had to take 'the pill’ before.’ Another voice, ‘Look at his rate. He’s perfect!’ shrug
Stay safe, stay healthy, and keep those docs and nurses on their toes!
Cardiac CT radiographer here [in bot mode]- a regular calcium score CT scan can easily miss blockages caused by ‘soft’ plaque. A coronary angiogram (which at many clinics includes a calcium score done before the angiogram) provides much more detail since we use contrast media, more radiation, different scan acquisition parameters (axial vs helical depending on your heart rate and the scanner type), and potentially something called retrospective gating which means we acquire more data and can isolate part of the systole/diastole cycle (demonstrated through the ECG leads) in retrospect to generate images. This is in contrast to prospective gating which is when we only image the heart (expose, in radiation terms) at certain pre-determined parts of the systole/diastole cycle - very simplified explanation. The downside of retro-gating is more radiation but the sort of scanner used makes a big difference. And once the scan itself is done, we trace all of the cardiac vessels with software to generate a highly detailed 3D style image. The calcium score alone, however, yields only the axial slices (images of the heart taken as if you’re chopping through the body horizontally from front to back) and is nowhere near as reliable for demonstrating blockages other than bigger chunks of ‘hard’ plaque. Protocol varies a lot in different clinics and this is a very brief rundown but I hope this overview is useful to you when it comes to asking your doc for follow-up scans.
Medical imaging can be inaccessible and opaque and often patients aren’t empowered with information by their doctors.
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Beta blockers! We need low heart rates to get clear images (though the newest models of scanners are more versatile) and often need to medicate people so whenever I’m doing a screening interview and someone says they’re active or I spot a Garmin on the wrist, I know they’re unlikely to have a higher RHR than 60. Which means the scan is over more quickly and people are free to get caffeinated and have something to eat, too. Once again it pays to be fit.
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Golden info. Thank you.
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Having seen a number of instances of this sort of thing, and having read “haywire heart”, I do often wonder if any regularly training cyclist “athlete” should get checked out for heart abnormalities.
I’ve had a few scares in the last couple of years with AF and I have a nasty feeling that I’m heading the same way.
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Very useful indeed mpd - thanks. I guess they will have checked my other vessels fairly thoroughly during the angiogram they did while inserting the stents? My only worry is the fact that it was all an emergency rather than a planned procedure and there was another emergency patient waiting in the wings.
I think I’ll try to get hold of the angiogram images/report and ask a cardiologist to explain it to me.
Al.
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I was diagnosed with the leaky aortic valve when I was 30 (now 52). I had run two London Marathons and two Olympic Triathlons before being diagnosed.
Turns out it was hereditary. After my first London Marathon I bought a book about training with heart rate. I just couldn’t follow it. My heart rate would hit the prescribed zone to quickly. A jog was more like skipping, running was more like a jog. It was odd. Once I was diagnosed it made sense. My heart rate climbs quickly, not dangerously, and comes down slowly.
The condition doesn’t affect me day to day at all, but I do have regular scans ever two years. One day the valve will need to be replaced, but not soon. The only thing my doctor said was, don’t do heavy weight training.
I wish you well in your recovery.
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Sorry to hear about your story.
How much rest did you take in between your training weeks?
I wonder if you took enough rest (like a rest week every 3 weeks).
Thanks for sharing such a personal story @justal . Keep yourself active. No one knows for sure how things evolve, but based on your athletic background you have many reasons to expect good things. Your healthy and athletic life are savings that you will cash in this situation. Be positive!