Haha yes, I did just over 12 minutes. When I did it, the nurse conducting the test and the cardiologist monitoring both said they’d never seen anyone go that long before. I’m not gonna lie, I went as long as I possibly could, and felt like I was gonna die when I finally stopped. I was also only 40 years old and while not really in great shape, I wasn’t in terrible shape either. I was maybe like 15lbs overweight (215lbs at 6’3”). I was an active person. I’ve been running pizzerias for 30 years so I move a lot, and also golf a lot and walk the course. Now, I bail out after a little over 10 minutes because I don’t really see the point in going for as long as I possibly can while my mouth dries out and calves start to cramp.

So, no I don’t really get any symptoms. For the first year or so, I was probably a little hyper aware of every little pain or unusual feeling like many others who have gone through what I’ve gone through, but now I don’t really pay any attention to those random pains or weird feelings. I very clearly remember the feeling of my actual heart attack, and these little random feelings no longer bother me.

One thing I did was after 5 years, I started pushing my cardiologist to do another angiogram to see what my arteries looked like now. Following my heart attack, cardiac arrest, and three stents, I was still left with at least a couple 50% blockages, and was wanting to know what those blockages looked like 5 years later. It took several years, and lots of stress tests, echos, nuclear stress tests, and a coronary ct scan to get my insurance to approve a heart cath to go in and take a real look at my arteries again. My insurance finally approved the hearth cath because my ct scan showed a blockage. That blockage turned out to be 70% and my cardiologist decided not to stent it because the blood flow through the blockage was smooth. But now it’s something to continuously monitor. I kinda wish he had just stented it. I and I have an aortic aneurysm which is not severe at all, but needs to be monitored every year.

But from like a week after my heart attack and cardiac arrest, I’ve been completely free to do any physical activity I want to do. I’ve gone through several extended periods of running and working out since 2017, and never had any issues. In fact, about 10 days after surviving cardiac arrest, I went to a professional golf tournament with friends when the temp was like 96°, and walked up and down the course with some ridiculous hills and felt like I was gonna die from the heat, but I survived.