Folks like us who have been healthy athletes our whole lives rarely believe that something like a heart attack is in our future.

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"They know f_ck-all over at Slowtwitch"
- Lionel Sanders

Ya, that used to be the case, no more. I have had 6 friends my age or younger die from heart issues during mostly swimming, one biking and one running. It is forefront in my mind all the time now when training, or racing. Of course I had my episode a long time ago, so I was kind of on the front line of this swimming phenomena. Time tempered my anxiety, but these all too frequent events keep it right at the edges of my psyche now..

The only lasting effect of my "event" is that I'm a much nicer person now. I appreciate everything I have now and if I happen to die in the middle of my next race I hope I'm at least FOP!

Don't get spooked by other folks and their misfortune, you don't know if they ignored the warning signs or what. In the end you can only control your own outcome.

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"They know f_ck-all over at Slowtwitch"
- Lionel Sanders

Of course - had they not been active - would the heart attack have happened years earlier?

I think you are also a bit "older" so it just be the age of your friends and the older you get, the more likely you are to die.

My Grandmother tells us about how she is the only one left her age. She has lots of stories about her friends who are no longer with us.

This is something I worry about quite a bit, probably more than I should as I'm only 45. Last year I had an echocardiogram (TTE) and this year we did a stress test. Both have come back normal and my doctors says I'm fine, but I still worry. Not a debilitating amount of worrying, but worrying nonetheless. As much as I like and have learned from this website, it's also one of the main reasons I know about heart events/deaths in triathlon. So it's kind of a double edge sword as I'm sure its reading about them that causes my worrying.

Oh my gosh. How sad. This one hits close to home.

Of course - had they not been active - would the heart attack have happened years earlier? //

I would say most probably not. If they were just normal people doing normal things, they would be alive. They all died at extreme exertion doing some sort of sport. Of course they survived 1000's of those extreme episodes before the one that got them, so I pretty much attribute it to the one single event that killed them, not some underlying factor..

Monty I don't think you are looking at this correctly. Extreme exertion doesn't kill you by itself, you get fatigued and slow down or stop and live to do it all again. Now if you have an underlying issue it's a different story. The problem is that for many people the first symptom they have of cardiac disease is death. I didn't know that 4 years ago so it wasn't on my radar. I felt fine had no risk factors to speak of, I'm an athlete so no worries right?. Yet I found myself essentially dead on the floor with no pain or even shortness of breath to add to the drama. Just lights out - done.

My denial even extended up to the point of wheeling me into the cardiac cath lab. It wasn't until after when my doctor played the video and I saw the dye they use to trace the blood flow. The before and after looked like a Liquid Plumber commercial. As a contractor I could understand that!

So my theory is that there's a whole bunch of folks walking around with solvable problems (baby aspirin and statins) but they're too bone headed like me to pay attention. My Garmin tells me I now have a VO2 max of 52, top 1% for my age! That's why I have to be nice to everybody now, a burden for sure but I'll live with it.

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"They know f_ck-all over at Slowtwitch"
- Lionel Sanders