The Trouble With Spending 40 Years Becoming Bulletproof
For most of my adult life, I regarded illness as something that happened to other people.
This was not a scientific position. It was simply the inevitable consequence of spending forty years exercising.
Spend enough time around masters rowers and you start to notice a peculiar trait. We don’t think we’re immortal. That would be absurd.
Instead, we convince ourselves we’ve negotiated a special arrangement with biology. We behave like men who have mistaken a collection of race medals, a Garmin watch and a resting heart rate in the low forties for a legally binding contract with nature.
The rest of the population gets older. We train.
The rest of the population develops health problems. We compare resting heart rates.
The rest of the population spends Sunday mornings reading newspapers. We spend them rowing through freezing rain before sunrise and then spend the rest of the day talking about it as though we’d crossed the Atlantic.
I was no different.
I trained ten to twelve hours a week. I raced. I won often enough to convince myself there was a direct relationship between effort and outcomes.
This turns out to be precisely the sort of thing people believe shortly before life has a quiet word.
Like many rowers, I measured everything.
Distance. Training load. Heart rate. Power.
I was the sort of person who believed that given enough data, enough discipline, enough science and enough training, almost any problem could be solved.
A faster 1 or 2k seemed a reasonable solution to most things.
Leaking roof?
Train harder.
Career problem?
Train harder.
Global instability?
A couple of long threshold sessions should sort that out.
I’d spent years collecting evidence that I was indestructible. Unfortunately, most of that evidence had been gathered by me. It’s a philosophy that works remarkably well.
Until it doesn’t.
The First Lesson
The first episode of atrial fibrillation arrived in 2021.
My experience skipped straight past inconvenience and ended in surgery.
Which was unfortunate. And unexpected.
I’d spent decades doing all the things we’re told are supposed to prevent this sort of thing. I wasn’t overweight. I exercised. I looked after myself.
My heart reviewed the evidence and carried on regardless.
The surgery worked.
Nine months later I was training and racing again. Which I naturally interpreted as evidence of my resilience. Looking back, it may simply have been evidence that I hadn’t learned anything.
I treated the whole experience as a temporary disruption. A mechanical issue. Replace the part. Service complete. Carry on.
The possibility that the rules had changed never really occurred to me.
I preferred my version of events.
The surgery worked. Modern medicine, I concluded, was astonishing, and I was probably invincible.
Looking back, I may have misunderstood at least one of those things.
The Last 250 Metres
The second episode arrived at the Swiss Rowing Championships in 2025.
Not in a hospital. Not during a medical examination. During a race. Specifically, the last 250 metres of a semi-final.
This is normally the point where rowing becomes wonderfully simple. The pain has already arrived. Your lungs are on fire. Your legs have started negotiating with lactate. Your life choices are under formal review.
All that’s left is one question.
Can you find another gear?
Usually, I could. This time I couldn’t.
The power simply disappeared.
No drama. No warning. No flashing lights. Just nothing.
As though somebody had quietly removed half the engine and neglected to mention it.
Something felt wrong and I backed off. In a race! Which is roughly equivalent to a Labrador losing interest in a tennis ball.
I crossed the line confused rather than worried.
The final was worse.
Athletes I’d beaten the previous week started moving away from me. Not because they’d suddenly become faster. They were exactly the same athletes they’d been seven days earlier. The difference was me.
This was deeply unsettling because I’d already spent a week explaining to anyone who would listen why they weren’t actually as good as I was. It turns out the body occasionally has opinions on these matters.
I kept waiting for the response. The lift. The surge. The familiar gear that had always been there before. Nothing arrived.
Then came the double scull final.
Five hundred metres into the race I stopped racing altogether and started paddling lightly. I remember looking at the water and thinking a thought that had never entered my head before.
Something is seriously wrong.
My heart felt constrained. Suppressed. As though it wanted to respond but couldn’t. For the first time in my sporting life, I genuinely wondered whether it was about to explode. I got off the water feeling flat. Lacklustre. Confused. And withdrew from the remaining races.
And then it happened. Again. The AFib returned.
There are moments in life when your internal monologue becomes remarkably sophisticated. This wasn’t one of them.
The entire thought process could be summarised in a single word.
Bugger.
That was my nightmare. Because the first time you convince yourself it’s bad luck. The second time you start wondering whether this is now the new normal. Whether you’ve entered a completely different chapter. And whether your body forgot to send you the memo.
The Most Uncomfortable Statistic I’ve Ever Read
Afterwards I started reading.
I expected reassurance. What I got was something considerably more annoying.
A recent study of former elite rowers found that around one in five had atrial fibrillation. One in five! I’ve sat through enough rowing club dinners to know exactly what one in five looks like.
The same study found rates were substantially higher than in comparable non-athletes.
Which feels deeply unfair.
You spend years freezing on lakes, destroying ergometers, missing family breakfasts and voluntarily entering head races that feel like being slowly strangled by your own lungs.
And your reward is discovering there may be consequences.
There is increasing evidence that while moderate exercise is enormously beneficial, decades of high-volume endurance and threshold training may increase AFib risk.
Exercise is good.
Lots of exercise is very good.
A lifetime of obsession?
Apparently that’s where the conversation becomes more complicated.
Recovery Is Its Own Sport
The second surgery worked. The medication worked. And then began the part nobody talks about.
Recovery.
I’d assumed recovery would behave like training. Follow the programme. Trust the process. Improvement follows.
Simple.
Instead it behaved more like assembling flat-pack furniture after three glasses of wine. Nothing happened in the correct order and there always seemed to be parts missing.
The first surprise was discovering that AFib doesn’t politely confine itself to races. It follows you home.
For years I’d been very pleased with my resting heart rate. Like many endurance athletes, I’d quietly viewed it as evidence not merely of fitness but of superior character.
Then I found myself lying awake at two in the morning watching my pulse sit somewhere between 90 and 100 beats per minute. While supposedly asleep.
It’s difficult to relax under those circumstances. Especially when your heart appears to be recreating a run up a set of stairs. Which was disappointing because after decades of training I’d expected my heart to spend retirement behaving like a reliable village postmaster.
Instead it had become the drummer in a heavy metal band fuelled by a double vodka Red Bull and several regrettable life choices.
Then there were the surges.
I’d be sitting quietly reading, answering emails or performing some equally unathletic activity and suddenly my heart would decide this was the ideal moment to rehearse for a sprint finish.
Not because I was exercising.
Not because I was under attack.
Simply because chaos had entered the chat.
The experience wasn’t painful. It was unsettling.
For forty years I’d trusted my body completely. Now I was watching it the way you’d watch a washing machine making unfamiliar noises.
Not panicking. Just standing nearby wondering whether this was about to become expensive.
The medication helped. Of course it did. That’s why they prescribe it.
But nobody tells you that some of these drugs don’t leave the building the moment you stop taking them. You imagine they’ll depart politely like unwanted relatives after Christmas.
They don’t.
They linger.
The anti-coagulants reduce stroke risk.
The heart-rate regulators stop your pulse behaving like an escaped Labrador.
But if you’ve spent forty years measuring progress in watts, split times and race results, they can also leave you feeling as though somebody has removed the V8 from your sports car and replaced it with a lawnmower engine.
Everything still works. Just not with any enthusiasm.
My power disappeared. My heart rate sat wherever it pleased.
I became breathless doing things that previously qualified as warming up.
I put on weight. Not huge amounts. But enough for every photograph to appear to have been taken by a photographer who actively disliked me.
Training fell from ten or twelve hours a week to three or four hours of cardio and a couple of strength sessions. And I discovered something rowers hate.
Recovery doesn’t care how badly you want it.
The Long View
The hardest adjustment hasn’t been physical. It’s been psychological.
For years I measured success in speed, rankings and medals. Suddenly I found myself considering a possibility that would once have sounded ridiculous.
Maybe success isn’t winning.
Maybe success is remaining healthy enough to keep turning up.
A few years ago I’d have dismissed that as the sort of thing people say when they stop winning. Now I’m not so sure. Will I race again?
I hope so.
Perhaps next year I’ll do sprint races.
The irony would be magnificent. Spend a lifetime training endurance only to discover that shorter, less sensible races might be the future.
For decades I believed every problem could be solved with more training.
More volume. More work. More effort. More science.
It turns out that after forty years of trying to become bulletproof, I’d merely become a very fit man sitting in a cardiologist’s waiting room wondering why nobody had mentioned that biology eventually reads the small print.
That philosophy gave me friendships, experiences and a few medals I remain embarrassingly proud of. It also left me standing on a Swiss regatta course at the age of 55 wondering why my body had suddenly stopped following instructions.
What I do know is that after a lifetime of treating my body like a dependable employee who could always be persuaded to work overtime, it has finally arrived carrying a letter from Human Resources, a representative from the union and a list of demands longer than a Henley regatta programme.
And, rather annoyingly, it appears to have a very strong case.