Twenty years today and all is well. Here's the text from an article I wrote for the local road runners club.
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Twenty Years A Pioneer
by Jack Berkery
Twenty years, two decades, almost a full third of my life and a long, long time in anyone's estimation. That's how long I have survived past my due date, but more than survive, I have thrived. This coming July it will be 20 years since I got an aortic valve replacement. For those who have not been club members that long, I wrote about it in the Pace Setter in 1991 when it was first installed and again at 5, 10 and 15 year intervals, so now it's time for another quintennial update.
If the heart valve had not been replaced, I may have lived about 5 more years, 10 if I was careful, but 15, possibly not and 20, no chance. In those twenty years I've celebrated 30th and 40th wedding anniversaries, gotten to see all our children grow into responsible adults, three of them educated all the way to a doctorate, enjoyed spoiling the bejeepers out of three grandchildren with more on the way. All of which could have happened without me to witness, but medical science allowed a more positive alternative. And then there's running. I was a runner for many years prior to the open heart surgery and determined to remain one after. Fortunately I did.
I had a heart valve defect since early childhood. Damaged by Rheumatic Fever at the age of 5 and again at 10, the heart murmur kept me out of sports, the military and most any type of exertion for the first couple decades of my life. The first time I encountered limitations was in 1963 at age 15 when I tried out for the high school cross country team. The sports team doctor shunted me aside and said no competitive sports, not now, not ever. It was assumed in those days that such heart problems could only get worse, so the prescription was to take it easy for the rest of your, perhaps short life. I can remember a conversation between the family doctor and my mother when he told her I could live a normal life until some time in my 40s but thereafter things could get dicey. No, it wasn't upsetting at all. To a kid, 40 is so ancient as to be beyond comprehension. He was right though, since it did begin to fail at age 42 but on the other hand he was wrong since by that time there were options that made it far from dicey.
At age 18 I was called up in the draft as the Viet Nam war raged and they needed tens of thousands of new recruits each month. At the initial physical I was actually passed and expected to be sworn in any day. The selective service physical was a cattle call with hundreds of young men being shuttled through several examination rooms and given only a very cursory examination, so it was easy for a thing like that to get missed on the initial exam. More or less walking through the door constituted acceptance. Little did I know though, that my own family doctor sat on the local draft review board. The moment he saw my name, I got a 4F classification, unfit for military duty. I guess since a few of my friends later came home with scars, missing parts or in body bags, that was somewhat fortunate, but getting an official US Government designation as unfit is damaging to a young man's ego. It weighed heavily on my psyche thereafter. I still have that draft card somewhere, could never bring myself to throw it away.
Somewhere along the line the medical community came to the realization that even defective hearts could benefit from a good workout. I don't remember when I heard about that and I'm certain no one told me to revise the "take it easy for life" strategy. I simply decided at some point that I was not going to be a sedentary type any longer. Exactly when I began to run on a regular basis escapes me now. I have memories of running around Prospect Park in Troy in 1972 and around the neighborhood after moving to a new home in 1973. I also recall, in one of those famous where were you when moments, that I was just returning from a run when I found out President Richard Nixon was resigning. That was August of 1974. Running was an on again, off again thing for a few years and I wouldn't have called myself a real runner until I entered my first race in 1978.
1978 changed everything. I had turned 30 and finally I was no longer the sickly weakling I had been forced to be as a youth. I could work out as well as anyone. By then of course my doctor was well aware and approved of the exercise, which was more than running. It was also daily sit-ups, push-ups, cycling and occasional light weight lifting. Mostly running though. I just took to it like a fish to water. It turns out that I have poor strength, very little speed but stamina to beat the band. Being sedentary through the teens and twenties I never knew what type of athletics I might be cut out for. At age 30 I discovered it.
That year was the 100th anniversary of GE where I worked and there were many different celebrations. Among them was a fitness challenge. A jog-a-thon, not a high intensity or high mileage thing, just a challenge to get in shape by the fall when they scheduled a 10K road race. I started keeping a running log and averaged just over 3 miles a day which as it turns out is still about the same amount I continue to run today. Over a span of decades though, it accumulates to some fairly impressive numbers. The logs which I continue to keep and still retain now total nearly 35,000 miles. The circumference of the earth being a mere 25,000 makes it sound even more significant. All on what most distance runners consider very modest training.
That first race was a one time only event which was never repeated but the second one I entered, the Stockade-athon is still my favorite because I have now done it 27 times. That's one accomplishment that I'm quite proud of, simply being able to make it to the starting line that many years, the majority of which were after the heart surgery. Many more races followed of course. I prefer to train for a good hard mile on the track or 5K road races. I've done hundreds of races in these 5 decades and continue doing sometimes 30 or more a year. No marathons though. The reason for that was early on, when I first began getting in shape my wife, who is a far greater worry wart than most, made me promise to avoid marathons. I kept my word and have been quite happy not to subject myself to that abuse.
As a stocky guy I've never been an especially fast runner, never broke the 6 minute barrier for the mile, never faster than 20 minutes for a 5K, but I was consistent throughout my 30s and into the early 40s. One particularly eventful stretch was from 40 to 41 when I ran several all-time personal bests at distances between 2 Km and 15 Km. There were never any age group awards for me, the local talent was far too deep to penetrate that far up in the pack, but I was ecstatic to continue to run PR's into my 40s. There was a 43:04 10K and a 67:03 15K, times I'd give me eye teeth for these days and most 40-somethings would consider very respectable. I was on a tear for those two years, training and racing at peak performance and feeling superbly fit, strong and confident. Then it all came crashing down.
It was 1990, age 42, at the top of my game, I had done all the right training, performed well in all the right tune-up races. I was primed for the Stockade-athon which was by then my 10th appearance and expecting to be able to at least match the previous year's personal best of 67 minutes. Oh, it did begin fine with a pace close to 7 minutes per mile through the first four and just over 35 minutes at mile 5. Everything was working, flowing smoothly, but by the time I reached mile 6 I was towing an anchor. The last third of the race became a hard slog and I finished several minutes slower than anticipated.
Just having one bad race wasn't the issue though. That happens from time to time for any number of reasons. The problem was I simply could not recover from it. The rule of thumb for recovering from a hard race effort is that it should take about 1 day per mile raced before you feel up to 100% again. For a 15K that should be 9 or 10 days, but I did not feel normal after two weeks, three weeks, a month, feeling tired and washed out from even a short easy run. That's when I, OK, my wife, made an appointment with the Cardiologist. I had been seeing this doctor for many years and we had discussed the fact that I'd eventually need a valve replacement, but it was always far off in the indefinite future. He said more than once, "You'll know when it's time before I will." It was time.
You know, the brain is an odd thing. It can be aware of an impending situation for 30 years and have been presented with all the facts well in advance but until it's time to face the action, nothing registers in a serious way. This was as if it was the first time I had to deal with the eventuality of life changing open heart surgery. The leakage and back pressure from the damaged valve had increased to a dangerous level, significant enough that it could fail in the near future. Even if I were to return to a sedentary life, it was probably good for only about 5 years. I was told to stop running until the surgery could be scheduled, which I did, mostly. That was a year of anxiety and apprehension. The surgery was scheduled for July and this was only January. I had way too much time to think about it. It was a year I'd rather forget.
I didn't run for the next 7 months but stayed in shape by power walking for 3 to 4 miles a day, then I snuck in a one mile run the day before the operation. Just one. Just in case it was my last. I had no idea whether I'd ever be able to return to it and wanted to remind myself of what? I don't know. Perhaps I was saying "Wait here, I'll be right back as soon as I can." The procedure was uneventful as far as I knew. What I remember from that day was telling the OR staff I wanted all my blood back. Those were the days when there was a danger of the blood supply being tainted with HIV. There were no reliable tests for it then, so it was advised, if you were strong enough, to put away your own blood to be re-transfused after surgery. I was able to put up 4 pints in 4 weeks and still had the strength to run that one mile. That was one benefit of a healthy lifestyle I had never figured on. So, upon being wheeled into the OR all I could think to say was give it back. They did.
The recovery went fairly well, or so it seemed. I was walking a mile every day from the first day I came home, eventually working up to 3 miles after a month. It was at 6 weeks that I tried running again. I didn't make it as far as 100 meters before gasping for breath. It didn't progress much beyond that for the next several days. Explaining this to the Cardiologist a bit later, he expressed no surprise. "It's because they collapsed one of your lungs in surgery." What? Wait, no one told me that before. I was operating on reduced power for 6 weeks and no one had warned me of it. Oh, it'll re-inflate in time. What you need to do is keep running and that'll bring it back faster. It was another full 6 weeks before I could finish a whole mile non-stop and every step of it, every day was a breathless struggle. Once I reached that point though, I knew everything was going to be all right. I ran a 3 mile race on January 1, 1992 to start a comeback 5 months post-op. By the following summer the weekly long runs were back up to 9 or 10 miles and I even ran 10K on the track.
I still had one major issue. As far as I knew, I was the only one to attempt to return to athletics after this procedure. This seems a bit ridiculous now since I can get on line and find probably hundreds of others, but there was no world wide web back then. The Internet was small and accessible to only universities and research institutions. Being a computer scientist at GE research, I had been on line for several years by then and was well acquainted with the Usenet news groups that existed. I searched in vain for others in the same situation finding only one or two contacts after a couple years and each of us felt we had been an experiment of one. If not completely unique, I was certainly a rarity, consequently I had no advice or support on how to proceed or what to expect. I trod very carefully.
The problem with being a pioneer is that there is no road map to tell you which way to go, no trail blazed through the wilderness, no bridges across the rivers. Each direction one takes could lead to grand new vistas or disaster. You never know until rounding the next bend. I tended thereafter to be very conservative in my approach to training and racing and always had the nagging feeling that what I was doing could be, shall we say, a game changer. I continued training about the same 1000 miles per year as previoulsy but seldom trained or raced hard. I entered about a dozen races the year after the surgery and every year after, give or take a few. The one I most wanted to return to was the one that threw me, the Stockade-athon where I struggled so badly. I had to show that beast I wouldn't back down. I've now run it 27 times, 10 before the valve replacement, 17 since. I think, just maybe, I've made my point. But I was still alone, still uneasy, still searching for others in the same boat, still uncertain of what or how much I could do.
Fifteen years later, fifteen thousand miles later, more than a hundred races later, having passed through the 40s and then 50s, I found what I had been looking for. I don't remember how I found it or what made me go look for it after all that time, but some time in 2007 I was surfing the web and happened upon a forum called ValveReplacement.org. These were people who understood all I went through, all I had wanted to know back at the start. They were all newbies compared to me, so I gave them the benefit of my long experience as well. And there was even some discussion of running and fitness where one of the guys told me there was another forum a bit more hard edged called CardiacAthletes.org. Those were really my kind of people. Those were the ones I had been looking for all those 15 years. It turned out that I was indeed a pioneer since none of them had heart issues that went that far back and although there are people online with older valves, none had taken up or returned to athletics as far back as I had.
In 2007 I got a new attitude. I dropped 40 lbs and started training seriously again even returning to doing intervals on a track. I ran with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. Now approaching 60 I was under no delusion that I could return to the competitve shape I was in at 40, but it was worth the effort to see how much could be regained. The biggest change though was that I stopped viewing myself as a cardiac patient. I stopped thinking that I was handicapped. I was just another runner, nothing special.
The most pleasant surprise came in May of 2008. As a newly minted 60 year old I ran yet another 5K road race. With over 300 such races in my past and never a trophy, I left before the awards were announced as usual. Later I checked the results and discovered a third place trophy was mine for the taking. I sent an email to Josh Merlis. "Who, me? You can't be serious." He wasn't kidding. That was the first of 5 or 6 trophies that year, a couple 1st place, a couple 2nd and 3rd, and more the year after that and the year after that. I haven't become so jaded as to be blase about receiving a trophy and hope I never do. It's still a thrill even when I get one merely for being the second of two or third of three. You see, by this age much of the competition has fallen by the wayside. So many runners who were my betters through 5 decades are now no longer racing or not even running at all. I'm happy to have lasted this long, to be able to toe the line one more year, artificial valve or not. The implanted device is almost incidental to me now. I seldom think about it and hardly even know it's there. My greatest award was twenty bonus years and I hope I've made the best of them.
