Tuesday 8 November 2016

42 Runs Later... joining the parkrun 100 club

The response to my first blog post a year and a bit ago was fantastic.  Surviving cardiac arrest was like a weird dream and all sorts of thoughts had gone through my head, so putting them down on a blog post was a helpful experience on its own.  But the reaction I got blew me away, with well wishes coming from all over the globe.

Since that post, my life has gone back to relative normality, so I haven't posted since.  I didn't feel that dwelling on what happened would help me or my family.  Instead, I've tried to get on with my life as it was before - I'm thankful that other than six-monthly check-ups at the hospital I've done pretty well at getting back into the old routine.

However one vital part of that routine will forever remind me of what happened on 1 January 2015, and it's something that I will always be grateful for and I've not once considered giving up now I'm back to full health.  My cardiac arrest happened at my 58th parkrun; a weekly 5km run round a local park on a Saturday morning.  I had discovered parkrun in 2012, and soon it became an important part of my week.  Shortly before New Year's Day 2015 I'd worked out that all being well I would join the "100 club" later that year - a small(ish) group of people who have completed 100 runs, that parkrun recognise with a free running shirt to mark the achievement.

The unfortunate events of 1st January meant that for a while it looked like I would never make it to 59 parkruns.  Six months of rehab however got me back to fitness, and I successfully completed my return to parkrun on 8th August 2015, in a not-too-shabby time of  28m47s.  Since then I've been back as often as I can, and on 5th November 2016 I finally reached that landmark and completed my 100th parkrun.  My cardiologist had given me the sensible advice to take it easy on my return to running and said that it would be unlikely I could ever run as quickly as I did before the arrest.  However as I've felt stronger and stronger over the last few months my times have been improving - and 3 of my last 4 runs have been quicker than my "pre-cardiac-arrest-personal-best"!  In a neat piece of unintentional timing I finished my 100th run in 23m31s, exactly four minutes faster than that ill-fated run on New Year's Day.

Every time I go back to parkrun I'm reminded of the fabulous people at Hilly Fields who kept me alive - it was only their amazingly quick thinking and teamwork to perform CPR on me for over ten minutes that gave me the chance to pull through and get back to running.  I'm delighted to see that even in the short time since it happened, parkrun as an organisation have taken steps to encourage the presence of AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) at their events - these fantastic machines massively increase the chances of survival from cardiac arrest and are surprisingly easy to use!

I plan to carry on with my routine and will be back at parkrun at next Saturday.  The next landmark for me is 108 runs, as that will be 50 "bonus" runs since being given my second chance.  Do parkrun do a t-shirt for that?!




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