Jeff Clark

Jeff is a professional, over-the-road driver

Running and weight control

I have heart disease. Heart disease has taken three grandparents, my dad and my brother, Chuck, without warning. My mom and my brother George survived heart attacks. Statistically, the odds are about 4-to-1 that a driver away from home won't survive a heart attack. Am I scared? You betcha! That is why I run.
     My heart disease is hereditary. Trucking doesn't help. Running does. Running is also an early warning system and a stress test.
In 1988 I flunked my first DOT physical with high blood pressure. In the spring of 2007 I was not running very well. I complained to my former doctor. I could only run 6.75 miles in an hour. In the fall of 2006, I had run 7.33 miles in an hour. He replied that if I could run 6.75 miles in an hour, that I was fine. I wasn't.
     Sixteen miles into a marathon, I knew there was something wrong. My chest hurt. I was having trouble catching my breath. My heart rate would not slow down when I walked instead of running. At that point I told a volunteer that I was OK, but that I would not be able to finish. He wisely called for help. There was a doctor who was volunteering with the Boy Scouts about a mile from where I was. He came within minutes. He insisted that there was something wrong. I insisted that I was fine. I had never dropped from a race before and was not pleased. He was right. Even if you think that there is no serious threat, treating chest pain as a serious threat is the right thing to do.
     A few minutes later an ambulance took me to the local hospital. They treated me there for about an hour. Then I was back in the ambulance for a ride to a bigger hospital. They ran dye through me to check for arterial blockage. A heart surgery team was waiting. They found the problem. All of my arteries were about 50 percent blocked. The problem could be fixed through medication, diet and exercise. I was thankful to have found the problem early.
     I asked the heart surgeon if I should quit running. He looked at me like I was an idiot. Every married man knows that look. He said that running slowed the progress of the blockages. Without running I would not have known that there was a problem. Maintaining a heart rate about 140 for a few hours makes an excellent stress test. Many of my fellow truckers are driving around with far worse blockages than I had. They are unwittingly waiting for those arteries to block completely. That is a heart attack, and in our case, likely death. Fight heart disease. Take a walk.      
     That's it! My twitter account is twitter.com/marathontrucker.