Historically, I've never been an endurance athlete. I played soccer 
for my whole life, and baseball and wrestling and weight lifting and 
stuff like that. But it wasn't until I started to doing an endurance 
sport that these symptoms came on. Intermittently, I would get some 
real mild to moderate chest pains as my heart rate started climbing. 
But as time went on, it just got worse and worse. My chest would just 
start kinda tightening up. I would get shortness of breath. I had no 
clue what the problem was. I just knew it was serious enough to where 
I couldn't, I couldn't keep going. John has the most common genetic 
cardiovascular disorder that we see called - something called 
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. In the United States today, when you say 
someone has a cardiomyopathy, you think of a heart muscle that's not 
squeezing well. With hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, it's completely 
different. It's actually almost a heart that's working too hard. It's 
ability to contract is normal, but the muscle is thicker. The danger 
with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy arises from certain 
rhythm abnormalities that can occur with stress. As I started reading 
more about it, and learning more about HCM, I was really nervous that 
I would just kinda drop dead one day running around. At The University 
of Virginia, we've been recently accredited as, what's called a 
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy center of excellence. We can provide 
genetic counseling, exercise physiology, stress testing, 
echocardiography, electrocardiography, rhythm monitoring - anything we 
want to do right here in the clinic. And in John's case, we actually 
brought his training cycle in. To make sure that nothing unusual was 
happening when he was riding his bike at a pretty quick pace or 
pushing really hard. As it turns out he was really performing at a 
very high level. The followup of the patient with hypertrophic 
cardiomyopathy is vitally important. I see them at least every 6 
months to once a year. And we do surveillance analysis to make sure 
rhythm abnormalities aren't occurring or symptoms aren't being 
overlooked. You can't ever assume something is going to be static and 
unchanging. And so you have to be on top of it. John's situation was 
very complicated, and there were a lot of fluctuations along the way. 
A lot of things we had to talk through to get him into a comfortable 
place, where he was living and exercising and feeling good. Because 
he's got his children, he's got a family, that's the most important 
thing to him. And he doesn't want to do anything that's going to put 
that in jeopardy, and I think he's found a really nice balance with 
that. I have really - have maintained the same lifestyle as before the 
diagnosis. I just take a salt tablet, and drink about 2 liters of 
water 2 hours prior to an exercise. And that in essence would pump up 
the blood volume, which would enlarge the heart, and allow enough 
blood flow. Every time I've done that, I haven't had any symptoms. The 
treatment I've gotten here so far has been amazing. Everyone's been 
accommodating, and kind. Doctor Battle, he and I hit it off right from 
the start. I could tell he was really invested in me and recovering 
from this thing. He's given me my life back.