Fit But not Healthy

I read a book with this title a couple of years ago by a physiotherapist Vanessa Alford who was an exceptional fit endurance athlete in her youth and then went onto compete at Commonwealth and Olympic games in the running sport of marathons. While it appeared on the outside that she was fit and healthy, she was battling some internal issues and hence the name of the book, Fit But Not Healthy.

How many of us are fit but not necessarily healthy? In my case I thought I was and one of the main reasons I exercise is I do have a history of heart disease in my family with both my father & grandfather dying at a very young age from heart disease. So it was a real shock to me when I hit the wall 2km into a half marathon 3 years ago and had to embarrassingly walk the next 19k’s as my heart rate was pumping along at over 200 beats a minute.

Practicing what I preach I immediately went and got checked out by a cardiologist and found out that because of the amount of intense endurance physical activity I have been doing over the last 10-15 years this had remodelled my heart and I had developed Atrial Fibrillation (AF). This messed with my head a bit as I thought I was doing what I was doing to help my heart, not hurt it! My cardiologist advised that a lot of mostly middle aged men are now being diagnosed with AF due to the high uptake of endurance based activities we have embarked on in recent times. He joked that “you know what happened to the first person to run a marathon…. He died as he crossed the line”.

So I had to come to realisation that I too am not 10-foot tall and bullet proof and that my competitive long distance running career may be over and I was advised to take it easy and to not get my heart rate up too high for long periods of time. Fit yes. Healthy? Of course.. Just no more can I dream of that sub 3hr Marathon. I was never that fast anyway!

As health professionals our job is to help people by using exercise as medicine for both physical and mental wellbeing (to be fit and healthy). However we are also trained to realise that sometimes by being fit and pushing it a little bit too far we can put ourselves into danger from a health point of view. So Unless you are Philippedes and need to get that message from Marathon to Athens no matter what, consistency, patience, enjoying your exercise and doing what you can, not what you can’t is the key to being fit and healthy!