Reflecting on Health, Life, and Death

My life changed forever on July 13, 2022. At first it seemed like any other day - I worked out, held meetings, ran errands - but while walking up a simple set of stairs at 6pm, my body did something very unexpected: my chest began tightening and aching.

For a moment, I figured I just swallowed something wrong. I sat at the kitchen counter, drank a glass of water, and waited for the pain to pass. But after 5 minutes, with my chest feeling like it was caving in on itself, I realized - thankfully quickly - I was having a heart attack.

A rush of pain enveloped me and I fell to the floor, closed my eyes, and rolled side to side. But I couldn't just lay there - I had to act. I grabbed my phone and called a friend. Between groans, I sputtered "this might sound crazy, but I think I'm having a heart attack." He met me a few minutes later on the way to the hospital to give me aspirin - the first thing to take during heart attack symptoms - and then I drove to Foothills Hospital in Boulder.

I spent the next 48 hours in the ICU and advanced cardiac care, where the medical team took great care of me and my STEMI. But my journey had only just begun. Preparing to discharge me on July 15, my cardiologist looked me in the eyes and told me something I'll never forget: "This will be the hardest thing you've ever done - harder than rowing across an ocean."

In a lot of ways, my doctor was right. I like to process setbacks - and life in general - through exercise and movement. But now, my heart needed rest. Because for more than hour on July 13, blood flow to my heart was cut off. And on the bottom of my heart's left ventricle was an area the size of a quarter where cardiac tissue died. My doctors agreed - if I worked out as normal in the coming weeks, the increased blood pressure could tear open the damaged part of my heart, killing me instantly. And if I were to even go on casual walks, it could affect how my heart "remodels" - putting me at myriad risks later in life. I needed to just rest.

I was furious. Suddenly, doing the very things I love to do - the very things that have always kept me healthy - could kill me? Why did this happen to me? People often tell me I'm the healthiest person they know. I felt so frustrated and disappointed by my luck; it didn't make me feel better at that time to reflect on how much worse things could have been. I was just so let down that my heart was permanently damaged.

I shared with my close friends and family what was going on, but I chose not to tell my mom, because I knew how much it would stress her. I decided to wait until I cold hide the sadness and disappointment in my voice. Once I was ready, I reached out, but didn't get a hold of her. She was in her own process, that she, too, was hiding. And on July 26, she passed away in her apartment.

The next day, I flew to New York where she lived. Airport staff pushed me to my gate in a wheel chair, and in my mom's building I took the elevator up 1 floor rather than walking up the stairs. And so began the challenge of arranging my mom's affairs, sorting out her belongings, and processing her passing -- all while keeping my heart rate under 90 BPMs. I began appreciating my doctor's warning: this would become one of the hardest periods of my life.

In the weeks that followed I experienced some dark moments. I often felt angry about my health and misfortune. I kept wondering, how could this happen to me? After 15 years of developing an intimate and trusting relationship with my body - training it to become stronger, more resilient, more capable of anything I asked - suddenly it failed me.

And I felt sad that my mother died alone, that we didn't speak for weeks before she passed. Although others close to her assured me I did the right thing not telling her about my health, I still felt bad about how she died. And I was also taken aback by how different it was to process my mom's death, versus my father who died in 2016.

Back in Colorado, I looked up statistics about patients like me: 36% of men who had heart attacks don't survive the next year. Some studies show 50% of men pass within 5 years. While reading these figures, I reminded myself these figures absolutely do NOT apply to me. have zero risk factors, and other than this one wild anomaly, I'm in amazing health. The average age for a heart attack is 66, and I'm just 35. And whereas most heart attacks are due to cardiovascular disease, my medical team agree my heart attack was likely caused by a blood clot, not plaque.

As the weeks passed, my doctors told me to begin moving again, but I found myself hesitant. I missed walking in the woods, but I worried what might happen. What if I have more symptoms and I'm far from my car? I trusted myself to recover from one heart attack, but if I have a second one, it would be devastating.

And yet, I knew I had to overcome that fear, and on September 18, I did my first mini hike: 3 miles in the woods near Nederland, Colorado. It was a simple walk - but one of the most meaningful little jaunts of my life. Immediately, I began feeling better. And slowly but surely, my fitness began improving, and soon I was walking without stopping. By early October, I was back in the rivers fly fishing and running the rural roads near my house. Slower, more cautious, but just glad to be active again.

The real "test" came on October 13 - three months after my heart attack - when I visited the hospital to push my heart and see how it responds to intense exercise. And intense it was: a tube jammed in my mouth to test my gas exchange, ECG leads reading my heart rhythm, and the treadmill increasing its gradient every minute - while I ran as hard as I could until giving up.

The results were fantastic. After 90 days of total rest, I scored 48.6 on the VO2 max, placing me in the 80th percentile, among the top of athletic fitness. And an MRI showed evidence that my scar had decreased in size by 40% - something very rare in heart attack survivors. With this news, my doctors gave me the green light to resume training and fully returning to my active lifestyle. We're continuing more tests to better understand why I had a heart attack in the first place - and we think we're getting close to an answer. I may share more of that in the coming weeks.

Some folks know I've been planning an expedition that I had aimed to announce in late 2022. The timeline is shifting, but I will still do it in 2023. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I'd like to share a few lessons I've learned over the past 4 months:

1. Take care of your health! If i had been in poor health, July 13 might have been my last day. Instead, I recovered well and have a long life ahead of me.
2. Be adaptable. Until my heart attack I always viewed training as movement. But after my event, I needed to reframe “training” as “rest.” It was very frustrating, but by equating "rest" as 'training" in my mind - and taking rest very seriously, I recovered well.
3. Focus on the goal & use language intentionally. In the weeks after my event, I chose to decline almost all social invitations because I needed to rest. At first, I thought "I can't go, because I have a heart condition" - but that present-tense and wound-focused language imprints the idea that I'm suffering. Instead, I learned to say - in my head and out loud - "I’m RECOVERING from a heart condition." By focusing my language on recovery, I began to feel better emotionally, which is a big part of recovery.
4. Setbacks become springboards. When preparing my ocean row from 2017 to 2020, I faced countless setbacks. At first, they were frustrating, humiliating, infuriating. But over time, I realized each of those setbacks only made me stronger and made my expedition more impactful. And so, I'm learning to see my heart attack as a new springboard for inspiring others to live their best lives. Instead of seeing the heart attack as something that happened to me, I am starting to see how it can be a value for me - providing useful stories and insights to empower others in the upcoming documentary, my Tez Talk keynotes, and more.
5. Be honest and share. I've been lucky to have a men's group and friends with whom I can be fully honest, real and raw. If you're struggling with a wild setback, find your people and open up. Pretending the situation isn't hard doesn't help. As we say in the men's group, you have to feel it to heal it.
6. Come back to gratitude. This all could have been so much worse. What if I had a heart attack in the backcountry, the ocean, or when I didn't have health insurance? I'm incredibly lucky with how this played out. And my mother's passing could have been much worse, too. Even when things are hard, find ways to be grateful for how they played out; it could always be worse.
7. Don't push community away. While processing my heart attack and my mother's death, I didn't want to hang out with anybody or even be seen. I felt like since I was so down, I shouldn't go to events or see friends, because I'm not adding to the vibe. Many of us are our own harshest critics and treat ourselves differently than we treat others, and this summer reminded me of that. I want to see and support my friends while they go through challenging times, and it's up to me to allow my friends to do the same for me.

On that note, I'd like to thank a few of the people who've helped make this recovery possible. First, my medical team, such as Kevin Sprouse and Ethan Forsgren , amazing physicians me their personal cells and let me call them at any time. They've collaborated with my cardiologists and all the other team members, and I'm so grateful to have their care.

And within my community, I'm not sure how I'd have made it through this period without the brotherhood of my men's group, the care and Emilia, my film team Jonathan Woods , Julia Lull , and Philip Andrews of Working Tens - and so many more of you who have been by my side through this journey.

Thank you all. Here's to many more years of adventures and growth.