OPINION:
BOSTON
Alberto Salazar has had nearly as many lives as a cat.
He almost died in 1978 after running himself into the ground in the Falmouth Road Race and again in 1982 after a grueling two-second Boston Marathon victory on Dick Beardsley under a hot sun.
Then on June 30, 2007, at age 48, he suffered a heart attack that changed his life.
Before a large crowd of sports medicine experts Saturday at the American Medical Athletic Association’s Sports Medicine Symposium, Salazar followed a presentation by his cardiologist with lighthearted humor.
“Every time I come to Boston, I’m around this area surrounded by physicians,” said Salazar, who won three straight New York City Marathons from 1980 to 1982.
Nothing’s funny about a heart attack, but credit Salazar for speaking openly about his cardiac life since departing the hospital nine days after he was admitted.
It’s scary to think a former world-class runner, who said he once tested in the mid-1980s with the highest cardio output the testers had ever seen, could die from a heart attack.
Salazar recounted his horrific postrace collapses - including Falmouth in 1978 when he collapsed at the finish line with a temperature of 107 and was read his last rites prematurely, and at Boston in 1982 when he collapsed at the end before being taken to an emergency room and given six liters of water intravenously.
But he dismissed his hard-charging past as a contributing factor at all in his heart attack.
“I didn’t look at the No. 1 factor: genetics,” said Salazar, also in town coaching headliner Kara Goucher in Monday’s marathon. “Both my grandfathers died of heart problems at a fairly young age [52 and 70]. My brother has had five stents. It’s really something that runs in my family.”
In fact, his father has had a couple of heart attacks and other siblings have high blood pressure, as his mother had before she passed away. Salazar also took blood pressure and cholesterol medicines for more than a decade.
He said he had many warning signs as many as eight months prior - sore neck, shortness of breath climbing stairs, nauseousness - and his physician, a marathoner herself, ordered an EKG that was fine. He had the heart attack before he could get the recommended stress test.
“I think [the heart attack] was the best thing that ever happened in my life,” Salazar said. “I’m a stubborn guy, and some days I need a real kick in the head. This was a life-changing thing. I don’t worry about things like I used to. And I don’t push too hard.
“But I can’t say that I don’t think about it ever happening again.”
The only side effect: a loss of short-term memory.
Salazar’s speech followed that of his cardiologist Dr. Todd Caulfield, who discussed the difficulty treating him after a heart incident.
“Athletes want to continue to compete no matter the risk,” Caulfield said. “There is a big subculture of athletes out there who have had heart problems; they even have a Web site. … What do you do? Tell them in five minutes that they can no longer run or provide them education and monitoring.”
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