I ran a half marathon in December and had heart surgery in July.

Over the past 5 years I’ve clocked up…

• 3,520 kms running in 310+ hours
• 11,991 kms cycling in 450+ hours
• 541,450 m swimming in 190+ hours
• 320+ hours in the Gym
• 20+ hours competing in sprint Triathlons (see footnote)

In fact, over the past three years, that’s accelerated. In 2021 alone I ran 1,145kms and cycled 4,418kms despite residing in Melbourne – the most locked-down city in the world.

2021 also coincided with me turning 52. On that day I weighed 72.6kg and had 7.1% body fat (according to my Garmin scales).

A week and a bit after that birthday I ran the Melbourne Half Marathon.

The ‘cheapskate’ photo of finishing the Melbourne Half Marathon in December 2021.

I ran the 21.1kms in 1 hour 38 mins and finished 869th overall out of 8,175. That put me 35th in the Male 50-55 age group. I was pretty happy with that and felt like I could have run it a couple of minutes quicker.

So it’s been a fair shock to the system that just over 6 months later I was in hospital having urgent surgery to deal with serious heart disease.

Post Angioplasty on July 4.

Risk factors? Nil.

I’ve never smoked. I don’t have diabetes. I don’t have a family history of heart disease. I’ve been having blood tests since I turned 40 to keep an eye on my cholesterol, which has always been firmly within the recommended range. I drink, but it would be less than 3 standard drinks per week on average. I am 178cms tall, and while I don’t have Ronaldo’s 6-pack abs, most people would consider me very lean.

Over the Christmas break, I got sick. Just a couple of days where I felt average. I exercised throughout because I’m a bloke and like so many amateur athletes I push too hard sometimes. I ran a little and rode some great hills around the King Valley.

In the weeks afterward however, I started to feel a bit odd while exercising.

I couldn’t get my heart rate up as high as I was used to. I could max out in the mid 180 beats-per-minute normally, but was struggling to get my heart above 140. I started to feel a little achy across my upper back and sometimes in my jaw after running just 3 or 4kms.

But none of it felt particularly like a heart issue. I didn’t have pain in my chest or running down my left arm. I was still able to exercise. I did a calf muscle in January, which restricted that, and re-injured it after a month of rehab – setting me back further. So when I finally came back to something like full training I put some of what I was feeling down to a loss of fitness.

But still there was that back & jaw ache.

So I decided to see my GP.

She was seemingly not overly concerned. She had my full medical history, so there didn’t appear to be too many red flags. To be sure, though, she suggested I have a cardio stress test.

After almost a month waiting I took the cardio stress test in May. I didn’t feel particularly bad during the test. It only lasted about 10 minutes, and usually that’s just the start of any exercise routine for me (I was regularly running up to 3 hours at a time in 2021). But the cardiologist suggested there was something odd in my ECG for a minute or so. Everything looked okay once I completed the test. But still, there was a moment when things looked just a little off, so he suggested a CT Angiogram.

Another two weeks of waiting and off I went for my first ever CT scan. Immediately following the test I was given the news that I had heart disease. I was stunned. I headed home trying to digest this news. Within an hour I was called and asked to come back for another test – a CT Perfusion test, seeking to gain further insight into how serious my situation was.

What followed was a series of calls and appointments with my GP and a range of cardiologists. I was asked to undertake an MRI as well, as my situation was unique enough that one of the consulting cardiologists hopes to write a paper on me.

On Monday, July 4th I was admitted to Sunshine Hospital for an angiogram that was expected to be mostly a planning day. I’d been told the Angiogram was the “gold standard” test, and that it would reveal the right option of treatment from one of three likely scenarios;

1. Things weren’t as bad as feared, and medication and other lifestyle changes might be enough
2. Things were about as bad as suspected, and that further surgery for one of more stents to be implanted would be required
3. Things were worse than expected, and open-heart bypass surgery may be required.

I was wheeled into the theatre as the team explained what would happen. I had a cannula in my left arm where a mix of drugs would calm me and provide some infection control. In my right arm they inserted another cannula along with a catheter that would serve a range of duties. Initially they fed the catheter up to my heart and injected dye visible on the live x-ray machine – a screen I guess was roughly 75″ diagonal.

When the first series of images were taken of my Right Coronary Artery it revealed a blockage that was restricting the flow of blood by 90%.

The second series of images of my Left Anterior Descending Artery revealed a 70% blockage.

At that point the team informed me the wanted to insert two stents. That involved sending the stents collapsed around a small balloon up the catheter guide-wired until it reached the blockage. The balloon was then inflated to expand and place the stent.

Recovery will take a few weeks at least, but I’m hopeful I’ll be back to running, swimming and riding like my old self within a couple of months.

Why me?

The night following the surgery I was visited by one of the Cardiologists at Sunshine Hospital. She asked me a bunch of questions.

“Do you smoke?” (No) “Ever?” (No)

“Do you have diabetes?” (No)

“Do you have high cholesterol?” (No.. I’ve been having tested since I was 40)

“Do you exercise?” (Yes) “Much?” (Yes, running, swimming, cycling) “Like triathlons?” (Yes, and half marathons)

“Do you have a family history of heart disease?” (Not really. My dad had a stent inserted when he was in his 70s)

During this exchange, she looked more and more perplexed. Which is exactly how I’d been feeling. Why me?

But I’m not as unique as I think. There are lots of fit, relatively young people who have heart disease.

What does make me unique?

What does make me unique, however, is that I went to see my GP about those little aches.

I’ve been told by several cardiologists that the first time they usually see people like me is after a heart attack, and often only after a fatal heart attack.

People like me – relatively young, relatively fit and male – usually ignore the warning signs. We push harder when things seem a bit wrong. We push the aches to the side. We keep our concerns from our partners or friends for fear of being told it’s a “man flu”. We wear the time between GP visits as a badge of honour.

And so, people like me, head out running one day and don’t come home.

Listen & Talk

Hopefully, there’s someone who reads this who listens a bit more closely to their body, regardless of their risk factors. And if they start to feel ‘off’ in one of the classic heart-related symptoms they head to their GP for a chat about it.

Mayo Clinic – Heart Disease Symptoms & Causes

• Chest pain, chest tightness, chest pressure and chest discomfort (angina)
• Shortness of breath
• Pain, numbness, weakness or coldness in your legs or arms if the blood vessels in those parts of your body are narrowed
• Pain in the neck, jaw, throat, upper abdomen or back

Listen to your body. If something doesn’t seem right, talk to your GP.

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Footnote: That’s not everything I’ve ever done, just what I can definitely measure since purchasing a Garmin Fenix 5 in late 2017. I was riding and swimming regularly for a long time prior to this, although I wasn’t anywhere near as committed.

The Falcons were beaten by three opponents in Super Bowl 51.

They only lost one Super Bowl, but they were beaten by three different opponents.

1. The Patriots
2. The Clock
3. “The Patriots”

That might seem like only two opponents, but let me break it down…

What’s wrong with our sports writing? What, not why.

For a while now I’ve been lamenting the state of the average sports writing in Australia. This has come about as I’ve become more and more exposed to the US sports writing scene. As with most things over the past 15 years or so, the Internet has disrupted our ability to consume content from International sports. As a younger man I would regularly make the trip into a specialist newsagent in Melbourne (anyone remember McGills?) to scan the pages of US papers that were, by the time the arrived, often more than a week or two out of date and to flick through the latest Sports Illustrated (always for the articles.. no, really.)

Now I can not only watch my sports of choice online (MLB and NFL), but I can also read the latest reports moments after the game is won.

But it’s not just ESPN where I can get the scores. It’s everywhere. I can get play-by-play on Twitter, scenes from the post-game Gatorade bath on Snapchat. It’s a-la carte and pervasive.

We live in a world where everyone has seen the highlights moments after they happen, has read the post-game press conference answers from the coach as he utters them.

In Australia the average sports article still acts like this isn’t the case. Most often we are treated to a Readers Digest match summary. The writer condensing the play-by-play into something with more structure and adding some comment along the way.

To a new generation of media consumers this offers nothing. Nothing new at least.

A decade ago I began working with the Essendon football club on its digital offerings. One of my regular tasks was to attend the post-match coach press call. At the time those press conferences were not broadcast by the major media. At first it felt like I was part of the true inner sanctum. But very quickly I formed another opinion. The media who attended asked questions that to me felt incredibly dull. They would ask questions that I eventually realised, were asked to elicit a response so that the writer could enter a quote into the story they had effectively already written. A story that was crafted as the game unfolded, mimicking the play-by-play.

There was no real investigation of why something happened. Just what the coach thought about what happened. Anything else might have required rewriting the whole story that was sitting on the journalist’s laptop waiting for a quote before it could be filed.

And that’s the rub. Talking about ‘what’. Not ‘why’.

Fry knows what happened. He’s not sure WHY it happened though.

Perhaps it’s just a function of deadlines, and the fact that long-form sports writing doesn’t appear to have a profitable outlet unlike in the US. So as a result our writers dissect what happened over and over again, but rarely explore why it occurred.

As the Bulldogs took their first AFL flag in 62 years we’ve been offered huge amounts of writing on how Liam Picken turned the game, on Tom Boyd earning his paycheck and on ‘Bevo’ handing his medal to the injured heart and soul of the current list.

Compare this, and the reams of similar writing throughout the AFL season to this article by Bill Simmons. I’ll wait here for a while…

Grantland – Tom Brady and Peyton Manning Are Cheating

Okay? Do you read it beyond the headline? All the way to the end? I’m patient… go on, go back and read it!

The thing that sticks out here is that Bill has taken a question from a reader that could have been a please-deliver-me-a-quote-so-I-can-file-this-and-get-home-or-to-the-bar easy answer, but the exploration becomes something much more interesting. Instead of just repeating Manning’s stats and quotes from his coaches he explores the rivalry between Manning and Brady and what does he come up with? That Peyton is a result of being a middle brother and son of a famous football dad, and that Brady grew up among sisters. Hands up if you saw that coming when you read the clickbait title? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

The writing itself isn’t necessarily brilliant, unless you are a fan of writing that feels like you’re sitting at a bar and both Bill and you are onto your fourth beer and he can really open up about something a little nuts without being shouted down (“I’ve got this idea…” [swigs beer] “Yeah, mate.. that’s right, that’s RIGHT!”). But it’s the ‘How‘ in this that sticks out like a lighthouse. He’s not just talking about what happened by just repeating stats and quotes. He’s talking about the unseen forces that have shaped two men and defined the NFL’s rise from big time sport to behemoth. He’s talking about a team widely regarded as the best team of the past decade as having faults and failings that have kept them from greater success BECAUSE THE QB HAS THREE OLDER SISTERS!

It’s a piece of writing that must have taken a decent amount of time to write, but much longer to formulate in his head. It’s something that must have been banging around in Bill’s brain prior to the email landing in his inbox.

And it ends with Bill giving his tip for the upcoming game. In the end it’s an amazing insight into NFL masquerading as footy tipping.

Do our media outlets allow for this sort of writing? Do they encourage it? Or has the slow decline of print shackled our writers into repeating the status quo? Sure, there are writers who go above and beyond, like Martin Flanagan, but Martin isn’t writing this sort of stuff often, reserving his best for occasional longer form and books.

There’s irony in that I don’t know enough to be able to define the ‘why’ for this. But I do believe that without a change that sports writing in this country won’t be the savior of the written media. But sites like Grantland and its newest incarnation The Ringer have shown that there’s another path that can be taken, and perhaps it leads somewhere more interesting and maybe even to something more prosperous.

And like the Dogs this past weekend, maybe the person to lead a team that has suffered for so long without reaching greatness is Bob Murphy. Look beyond the medal handed from coach to captain and read his pre-match article from The Age…

Our Western Bulldog Clan is uniting and the pain is fading

Maybe Bob will lead us all to the promised land. And when we get there we will all know why, not just how, we got there.

Census Fail… and the dangers of estimating traffic

It was all Australian’s had been hearing for weeks (other than the Olympics) – August 9 was Census night.

But on the night the biggest online flop in Australia’s history played out. The site first became unresponsive, then it failed all-together, including DNS becoming unavailable.  When the front page of the census.abs.gov.au was reachable it was almost always impossible to reach the pages that contained the 2016 census form.

The ABS itself had been batting away concerns around privacy, and in doing so had proudly announced it was ready to protect Australia’s privacy, and also ready to meet the expected demand.

Of course the knives were out immediately. IBM, who were providing hosting, became one target. The business that had won the tender to perform load testing also came under fire on Twitter.

So where was the fault?

What cost each Australian State/Territory is obsessed with.

Google’s autocomplete feature has been in the news lately. Most notably for the “Google Feud” game that allows you to play a ‘Family Feud’ style game with the top 10 responses to a given question or name. It’s addictive, and certainly great fun. But it’s also a bit unsettling to see some of the common queries Google receives.

With literally hundreds of thousands of google searches every minute, the depth of insight available on Google is staggering. No longer do you need to do expensive market research to gain some understanding of people’s habits.

The team at Fixr used this idea to create a really interesting map of the United States showing the most searched for item or service for each state. The results showed just how different the USA can be, with some states focused on cosmetic procedures such as breast implants, nose jobs and botox (Arkansas, North Carolina and Iowa) while others were a bit more interested in having a big night with a Keg of Beer or a Pound of Weed (Wyoming and New York).

It got me thinking – what about Australia?

With just a few states and territories, I thought it would also be easy enough to include the capitol city of each state or territory in the search process.

By typing in “how much does a * cost in (state/territory or capital city)” I was able to gather the data.

Google Autocomplete – Searching for cost obsessions in Australia.

The results are certainly interesting.  On the map I’ve shown the result where I used the state or territory in the search as the first result (e.g. “How much does a * cost in Victoria”), while the second result is for the capital city (e.g. “How much does a * cost in Melbourne”).

Cost Obsessions in Australia using Google Autocomplete

There are obviously some similarities. All the states had “Divorce” as their number one result, while the two territories were the odd ones out with the NT coming up with “Rego” and the ACT “Roadworthy Certificate”.

When drilled down to cities the results start to get a bit more diverse, but “Nanny”, “Taxi” and “Abortion” all make repeat appearances. Perth’s “Pool” is worth noting, as it stands alone as being less day-to-day or functional, instead being the only purely lifestyle result among the group.

Do any of the results surprise you? What would you have guessed your state’s result would have been?  Let me know in the comments section.