While pushing through chest pains to finish a running race might not be the wisest move, Glenn Davies did it and now has quite a story to tell.
To be clear: Davies, 51, suffered a heart attack during the May event, although he didn't know it at the time. What he did know was that he had a dull ache in his chest after the first loop of a 5K race in Huddersfield, England. So he slowed to a jog for the second loop, he told SWNS in an interview posted Wednesday on YouTube. When the pain persisted, he walked the rest of the way. "I was determined to finish," he said.
Noticing his pallor and shortness of breath after the race, his wife took him to a local hospital. An electrocardiogram didn't reveal any problem at first, but blood test results 12 hours later determined that Davies had indeed suffered a heart attack.
"Bit of a shock, to say the least," he told SWNS. Davies, who has two stepsons, said he considered himself fit with four half-marathons under his belt. He has never smoked and his family has no history of heart disease.
According to the Huddersfield Examiner, he was immediately transferred to a coronary care unit where surgeons inserted two stents after discovering one of his arteries was partially blocked.
But Davies is nothing if not determined. On Sunday, he ran his first "official race" since the May incident -- the Kirkwood Hospice 10K -- and thankfully it was far less eventful. "I was actually relaxed, which was surprising," he said. He finished in a net time of 1 hour, 1 minute and 51.8 seconds.
“I would be lying if I said the heart attack hadn’t changed me but with time I can’t see why most things I wanted to do before can’t still be achieved,” he reportedly said.
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