Heart, hips and the New York marathon

In partnership with

This Sunday, while most in Australia will be tucked up in bed, I’ll be crossing the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge to start the New York marathon. While it’s not a trail race, it’s a bucket-list event for me, and one I’ve been trying to get into for years.

It’s also a family trip for us, my sister-in-law Heather lives here with her husband Stuart and daughter Izzy so my wife Caron and youngest daughter Charlie have made the trip over. It will be great to have their support as I wind my way through the five boroughs.

We arrived a week before the race and spent a few days in upstate New York enjoying the fall colours. It’s a glorious time of year to be here, and so different to autumn in Brisbane, where there is barely a deciduous tree to be found anywhere.

It is colder than I was expecting though. I did check the temps before I left, but somehow 16 degrees in New York feels colder than 16 degrees at home. And given the marathon involves getting to Staten Island for the start, then waiting around literally for hours before you set off, at least for back-of-the-packers like me, staying warm is an important part of race-day strategy. So I’ve had to do some rethinking (and visit some op shops) since I arrived.

So while I’m now confident I’ll be warm enough while I’m waiting in the Orange Village of the starting precinct at Fort Wadsworth, that’s about the only thing I feel fully prepared for. My prep for this race has been pretty diabolical!

My atrial fibrillation (AF) has been the dark cloud that’s hung over everything I’ve done since I was diagnosed in May. I’ve written a lot about this in previous pieces, but here’s a quick recap…

I was referred to a cardiologist in May because I had a slightly high calcium score. He cleared me of any artery/heart damage, but diagnosed me with AF. I was blissfully unaware in was even in AF because I had zero symptoms. While AF is pretty common, symptomless AF is less so.

The doc had two key pieces of advice - 1) We need to fix this pronto, and 2) As long as you feel okay, keep running. He identified two steps in fixing the AF. The first was a cardioversion, which effectively involves putting you under a general anaesthetic then shocking your heart in a similar fashion to a defibrillator.

The idea is this shocks your heart back into normal rhythm. I was warned that the prospects of success are lower for people who’ve had persistent AF, and that advice applied to me - the docs shocked me twice and my heart remained stubbornly out of sinus rhythm.

Meanwhile, I kept running. I ran the Ultra-Trail Australia 50k race in the Blue Mountains in May, the Sunshine Coast half marathon at the start of August and the Sydney Marathon at the end of August. I didn’t set the world alight with any of these performances, but that had nothing to do with my heart.

Then, in mid-September, came phase two of the medical interventions to try to fix the AF - a cardiac ablation. Again, I was warned the success rate for this procedure is lower for people in persistent AF and again my heart struggled to get back into a sinus rhythm.

It seems that I’m no longer in AF, but my sinus node - which sends the electrical signal to the heart to tell it to pump - has been asleep for so long it’s taking some time to wake up. The upshot of that is my resting heart-rate is now very low. As I sat down to start writing this, it was 36 beats per minute.

Of more concern was the effect on my running. After the ablation, I wasn’t allowed to run for a week, but when I set off for my first post-procedure run, I made it all of 60m before I was bent double, gasping for breath.

Things didn’t improve so I was back in to see the doc. “This is unusual,” he said. “Your sinus rhythm is shit,” he also said. By this stage I’d been able to run 5k a couple of times, and while it was a struggle, I was at least able to breathe. The doc said it would (hopefully) incrementally improve. But most importantly, he said there was no danger in me running the marathon.

So, things were not exactly going to plan, but with three weeks to go I had some hope of getting into some kind of shape before the race. Then, the ring finger on my left hand got infected. Not sure how, maybe I picked up a thorn from the garden.

However it started, it didn’t end well. It was clearly getting progressively worse, so I went to ask advice of the pharmacist. He sent me to the GP who sent me to emergency who sent me to a hand surgeon who operated under a twilight general anaesthetic. All for a splinter in my finger.

I came out with stitches and a massive bandage pinning my ring finger and little finger together. And orders not to run for at least a week. So, I’m officially taking a new strategy into this marthon, one I’m calling Completely Rested and Pathetic Legs. Or CRAP legs for short.

Hips don’t lie

Speaking of crap legs, I’ve finally decided to do something about the chronic issues I have with my hip flexors, especially when I’m running long distances on the road. This has been an issue for me for years, but most recently made the Sunny Coast half a painful proposition. And they were so bad by the time I got to the Sydney Marathon that they hurt from the very first stride.

So I took myself off to see exercise physiologist Paul Peglar at START training in Brisbane. I’ll write more about this in a future piece, but it was really interesting hearing him walk through my physiology and what was going on biomechanically.

It was a bonus that he had two students in the room with him, and he was quizzing them on what they thought the key issues were, so I was getting a lay-person’s commentary. Essentially, after a bunch of manipulations, tests and a quick gait analysis, they diagnosed that I was quad-dominant which means my hammies and glutes need beefing up.

I’m now on a strengthening program to address those issues. It’s probably too early to see meaningful results in New York, but if I can stick to the program I’m hopeful I can put painful hips behind me.

So, anything could happen on Sunday. But before that, there’s a whole festival of events to enjoy. I’ve been selected, by random draw I presume, to take part in the “Parade of Nations” in Central Park on Friday evening. Then I’m running in the Abbott Dash to the Finish Line 5k on Saturday morning.

I need to collect my bib and check out the expo, which looks like a commercial festival of all things running. And I need to plan what I’m going to do for post-race celebrations too. Lucky I’ve been focused on hydration for these past few weeks.

I’m here with a RunFun Travel group, so there are a stack of other excited Australians to swap notes with ahead of and after the race. While the massively disrupted prep for this event has been pretty disheartening (boom, boom), I was never here to run a PB.

I did manage to get in an 8k run out through Queens towards Flushing Meadows, home of the US Open tennis. I was trying to keep the pace to 7 minutes per kilometre, which I managed. So that augurs well.

The New York Marathon was always about the experience for me - a once-in-a-lifetime event. And I intend to soak it up fully across the entire weekend.

Upcoming Events

There are way too many events for me to list everything that’s happening around the country, but here is a selection of upcoming races (with a bias towards South East Queensland).

The Running Calendar website is a great source if you want a comprehensive understanding of what’s available around Australia.