Cardiac Athletes

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of stories highlighting just a few members of the global network, Cardiac Athletes. (© Cardiac Athletes 2020 |All Right Reserved) Three runners/cyclists are included in this article. Their stories contain some descriptions of their cardiac event. If you recognize any of these symptoms in yourself, or a loved one, please seek immediate medical attention.

When a Massachusetts runner had a heart attack after a 10k in August 2016, he thought maybe his running days were behind him.

He’d lost consciousness repeatedly in a friend’s driveway, but surmised he had heat exhaustion…

“Your skin is made of paper and your bones are made of glass,” — my friend Bridget, after taking me to the ER again.

Some of my earliest memories center on my tendency to drop things, break things, and trip. It took me years to understand my spatial relationship with the world. I have never been able to navigate easily. I fall off my bike, I trip up stairs, I go from running to flat on my face.

This has been diagnosed by medical professionals with a variety of explanations, mostly centering on anatomical structures that cause me to have…

My aunt lived in her own museum. She framed every bit of her life for display. Her 1939 first grade penmanship award, her 1937 vaccination record, a tiny clipping of her doppelganger in Life Magazine that someone sent her in 1960, were all framed and hung.

I am now the keeper of this varied documentation. Some of it is as interesting as a letter to her parents from her Air Force commander, thanking them for allowing her to enlist. I laugh at this, because my aunt never sought permission from anyone, and I imagine her reaction to it. I have…

Hair Parts

If you lived in the mid 1980s and wanted to be the biggest-haired girl of your local mall, you took drastic measures. One way to make your sprayed hair wings look larger was to bi-level your sides. For those of you wondering what the hell that is, allow me to educate you, while you gaze in the mirror at your middle part.

Get ready to be wowed, because it looks like this:

So I need you all to stop arguing about parts, center or middle, or otherwise, that aren’t even necessary. Because you will see there was a time in…

The real estate market is burning up like Madonna’s love in 1983. People seeking more space and private entrances have basically shot themselves out of their pre-pandemic environments as if they are T-shirts in a cannon at a sporting event. Many have landed far from their former territory. Towns in Vermont have reported such an influx of people unfamiliar with their village lifestyle that they needed to make large signs explaining the ways of their small town world to these newcomers.

People moved into tiny enclaves from the big city, hopped across state lines, and even across the continent. These…

Running

Not falling means I get to run another day

I woke up to the third dingy morning in a row. It was overcast again, still snowing and the road looked like an ice chute. The plows had been by, but left that thinnest skim of ice that results in pedestrian self-doubt every step of the way.

I love running in fresh snow but I do not love falling in fresh snow. And I especially hate falling on ice-slicked frigid pavement. …

Winter

As we meander into the second late winter of quarantine, I have nowhere to turn my natural, irrational ire. I can no longer muster outrage for the same things I did last March. I’ve sputtered out. I can’t reasonably be annoyed by life’s little aggravations, when there is so much going on. Complaining while healthy in a pandemic is bad form, even for the chronically negative personality type.

So where to turn? To snow obviously. I now have redirected my misguided, and possibly clinical tendency to be angry, to precipitation. It keeps coming, I keep moving it, and it blows…

I can’t find my running hat right now. I’ve looked everywhere.

I could replace it for about $10. But that’s the easy solution to what must be much more complicated and ultimately, much more rewarding. I must search.

One fall, I lost an earring. I knew I had it on when I walked into the restaurant where I waitressed. I remembered pulling at it when I yanked my hair into a ponytail at the start of my shift. It was the very early ’90s and I loved my gold Claddagh mini-hoop earrings. They were really the only jewelry I owned…