The RunRunLive 4.0 Podcast Episode 4-312 – Randy Pierce – Mountains, Dogs and Inspiration
(Audio: link) [audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/epi4312.mp3]
Link epi4312.mp3
Intro Bumper:
Chris Russell, a man barely alive…Heh, heh.  Yes I am old enough to have watched the 6 million dollar man when it premiered in 1977.  
Well Hello my friends.  Welcome to Episode 4-312 of the RunRunLive Podcast.  This is Chris, your host, and I’m glad to see you.  Won’t you come in, grab a towel and sit with me for a bit while you cool down from your exertions of the week?
It’s been a busy spring for me.  At the end of April I capped a worthy training cycle by running my 17th Boston Marathon.  6 Days later I fulfilled my role as titular figurehead (i.e. Race Director) at the 24th annual Groton Road Race.  Last week I spent a couple days in the hospital to have a special bionic powers installed.  
I prefer to think of it as an upgrade rather than a patch.  They didn’t fix a bug in my heart, they upgraded me to Chris 3.0.  Now I’ve got super powers, similar to Peter Parker, or Steve Austin.  
This week I rolled out to Phoenix at the crack of dawn Monday for a conference, bopped over to Denver to meet a guy for dinner last night and grabbed the Red Eye back to Boston.  (It was on the way). 
As I write this I realize how ridiculously busy that sounds, and I was a bit tired this week, but it’s not unusual for me, as you know by now, I run pretty fast in my life, so to speak.  There’s nothing here that coffee, running, meditation and denial can’t fix. 
I don’t want to make this about me, but I guess some of you might be interested in the exercise induced A-fib that I have/had and the procedure to have it fixed.  From what I’ve learned this condition, or this related family of conditions, where athletes develop anomalies in their heart beats, is very common.  
Typically they treat it with drugs and tell you to stop being such a type A butt-head, but there’s a whole range of pharmacological and surgical solutions as well.  
In my particular case the A-fib manifested when I went long or hard, basically any time I loaded my heart.  It developed over the course of 2-3 years and got worse enough for me to figure out something was up and I got a real diagnosis in January.  
It manifests as an irregular heart beat in my case and in exercise this means you lose efficiency and power.  The worst case scenario is that your blood pools in the heart chamber causing clots and stroke.  
It is caused by anomalous electrical signals that originate in the sheathing of the pipes of the upper right chamber of the heart, in my case. 
The procedure that I had is known as cryoablation.  They snake a catheter up through the big arteries in your groin into that chamber of your heart.  I suppose it’s a bit invasive but they don’t crack your chest open, which is a plus.  
When they get the catheter into that chamber of the heart they use a balloon with liquid nitrogen in it to ‘ablate’, in this case freeze the tissue where the pipes come in.  In this way they create a dam of scare tissue that block the signals from getting into the heart muscles and, best case scenario, cure the A-fib. 
So…yeah…that’s what I did last week.  They did all the blood tests, ekg and Catscan on Monday and then I went in Thursday morning for the procedure.  I was a bit of an anomaly myself in the hospital.  Those hospitals, as it turns out, are chock full of sick people.  
The nice nurses got me naked and shaved me up.  My wife finally got to have my back hair shaved like she’s been trying to get me to do for years.  I don’t remember it, but when I woke up they had given me the personal manscape as well.  
I know in the mens’ magazines this is sexy, but on me it’s like Golum on a bad hair day.  The entire area where they went into the groin artery was shaved up leaving Mr.s Happy with cute little Furor mustache.  
I was under for the procedure.  Out like a light switch.  I woke up in the aft