He Ran a World Record Marathon With Heart Disease (ft. Archie Hunt)

Got it.

I mean, so this is actually to do with the heart condition, which I might butcher this, but it's called dilated cardiomyopathy.

Is that right? Yeah.

Can you explain what that is?

Yeah so right I to simplify it essentially I was born very early and so I just have an undercooked heart it's not been developed properly that's like the most simple way to put it and what that means in practice is that it's very inefficient and it's not very strong so the ventricles are quite thick and that means that it can't pump blood around properly it can't handle When the heart rate goes higher, it has a reduced amount of plasma that you can get around.

That means that you have less reserve.

Essentially, what it means is that you have less endurance in the heart.

Your brain will start sending signals to your body to stop quite early on.

um when you're pushing it and yeah essentially it just means if you google it it'll tell you that you wouldn't be very good at running is uh is uh like all the stuff that you need a heart to be good for for running it's not and so that's kind of that's it's quite annoying

i mean yeah so so what what made you think then with with something like that i'm sure doctors have told you the risks that you potentially have like what made you realize uh but knowing that your heart rate was so

i actually got diagnosed with so i've always ran but quite casually so for example when i was at school i'd sometimes just do a park run i'd go for a 5k but nothing structured i would just do it and i was always reasonably good relative to how much i was actually training like i wouldn't even call it training really um it was just like doing what i felt like doing um And then it was when I entered a half marathon, I then got diagnosed relatively around the same time.

So I was already training for this race.

And I was like, no issues have come about so far.

And in my head, the doctor that told me this, he did not look like he'd ever ran a day in his life.

He didn't look fit.

He didn't look like he liked exercise.

And I was like, I'm not going to hear this from somebody who doesn't actually know what it's like to run because you probably the only times you ever run it probably feels like horrendous because you are so unfit but you don't realize that actually if you are a bit fitter running doesn't have to be that stressful on your body like for example me now running zone I can run a zone one in the four minute k paces at like 440 so like that's not really doing much to my heart so I found a doctor who's a little bit more of an expert in this area and who's also quite active.

And he said, no, we can just monitor this and like have regular scans, checkups.

And the training has to be low intensity and you can't race too much.

And if you're going to race, don't do like too many 5Ks or anything because heart rate goes up way too quickly.

need something a bit more steady so yeah i i haven't done this just like i haven't like bucked all medical advice it is i i do do this under supervision and the interesting thing is that over the past two years my heart's gone a lot stronger so for example i used to take four different lots of medication now i'm down to one sometimes two because my heart is strong enough that i don't need all this extra stuff um my like levels of calcification strain HRV and all that significantly reduced over the past two years so like actually the way I describe it is like you've actually outran heart disease and I don't think that people had thought that this was possible before because I think if you're given a prescription of like oh, here's some pills that you can take.

It's really easy.

Or you can run in zone two every morning for two years for a long time.

Like, I think most people would probably just take the pills.

But I like running, so I still want to be able to do it.