Greg O’Brien wrote an article on EZIA Athletic Club, highlighting how we are focused on improving peoples lives. He is an accomplished writer and has an inspiring story of his own which is part of the reason we formed a strong connection with each other. Read about his courageous life journey from this recent Runner’s World article “Outrunning the Demons”, and how Greg has used fitness to combat and overcome his personal challenges.
Outrunning the Demons
In my bewildering, terrifying race against Alzheimer’s, quitting isn’t an option.
Reposted with permission from Runner's World:
The demons were chasing me.
I could hear their screeching howls through the canopy of oak and red maple trees that enshroud Lower Road in Brewster, Massachusetts, on the Lower Cape. They were gaining, ready to pounce—I had to sprint to avoid capture at sundown. I felt them closing in as the spring afternoon gave way to dusk and a spectral fog crept over me, first in misty sprays that tingled, then in thick blankets that rose slowly from the base of my neck to my forehead, penetrating my mind and disorienting my senses. Alone, I was soon enveloped in fear and paranoia.
At full gait, I flew past Brewster’s community gardens and its impenetrable stalks of corn, dashed by a forest of moss-covered locust trees bent in grim serpentine forms, and then sprinted in a panic past the ancient cemetery where baby Rhoda Mayo was buried in 1783, Dean Gray in 1796, and Reverend Otis Bacon—who “fell asleep in Jesus,” as his gravestone declares—in 1849. Where was Jesus now?
The demons kept advancing as the blazing red sun sank into Cape Cod Bay, doused like a candle. Faster and faster they chased, and faster and faster I ran. I was 61 that day, two years into my diagnosis, and with every ounce of my will, I made it home. But I knew the demons would be back—with a vengeance. My life, once a distance run, has become a race for survival. That’s the way it is with early onset Alzheimer’s. It’s like a death in slow motion, like having a sliver of your brain shaved every day. Alzheimer’s stole my maternal grandfather, my mother, and my paternal uncle. Now, at age 65, it’s coming for me.
Before my diagnosis, I ran six miles a day along the back roads of Outer Cape Cod—running at least one of them at a six-minute-per-mile pace. Not bad for a guy then in his late 50s. I ran for the simple love of it; the solitude was soothing, and I enjoyed listening to the caw of herring gulls, the chirp of peepers, the cry of black-bellied whistling ducks.
After my diagnosis, the doctors told me that I had to ramp up my running. Physical activity—particularly in late afternoon—helps reduce the end-of-day confusion and restlessness common in dementia patients. Known as “sundowning,” such symptoms are caused as light fades to black. This can also be a time of greater rage, agitation, and mood swings; like dandelions, we behave differently at night, our heads closing up tightly as the sun goes down. So every day before dusk, I ran from the demons of confusion, anger, and ongoing depression.
THREE YEARS AGO, the demons finally chased me inside. Those country roads I loved eventually left me terribly lost in confusion and fear. My mind—afflicted by the amyloid plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s— could only focus on what it arbitrarily assigned as fearful, and all I could hear were the chilling hoots of a barred owl. My mind grew dead to the song of shorebirds.
I retreated to the treadmill at Willy’s Gym in nearby Orleans, where I held the railings so I wouldn’t lose balance. The monsters followed me there, too, taunting me with loss of self, greater rage, and thoughts of suicide.
One damp fall evening, the rage was crushing. Determined to outrun the fiends, I defined survival that day as a personal record for a mile, and asked a young woman at the gym counter to clock my run.
“No one will believe this,” I told her. She obliged.
I held the railings, looked straight ahead, and imagined the run of my life. I was going to beat the demons, kick their ass. At the half-mile mark, my timer—the slight, honey-blond coed— informed me my time was three minutes, five seconds. Not fast enough, I thought. My pursuers were gaining. Not today, I kept telling myself. Not today!
A minute later, the woman, concerned at my pace, asked, “Mr. O’Brien, should you be doing this?”
“My dear,” I replied, panting, “You’re asking me the wrong question. The question is: Could you be doing this when you’re my age?”
She cheered me on. “You run like Superman,” she said. At the stroke of a mile, my time was five minutes, 20 seconds, a PR. I beat the monsters that day, and impressed a young woman.
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive.
YEARS AGO, I thought I was Clark Kent. As an old salt news reporter, I coveted the role, even wore at times a trademark blue T-shirt with the iconic Superman shield under a Brooks Brothers dress shirt. But these days, I feel more like a baffled Jimmy Olsen, the fictional fledgling photojournalist for the Daily Planet. And on days of muddle, more like Mr. Magoo, the cartoon character created in 1949 who couldn’t see for beans and was too obstinate to admit it.
These days, I get lost easily and don’t recognize people I’ve known all my life, including, on two occasions, my wife. What was once familiar is now fleeting, and my memory is a progression of blanks analogous to someone shutting lights off in my brain. Close to 60 percent of my short-term memory can be gone in 30 seconds—names, numbers, places, thoughts—though the long-term memory survives in part, as it does for most with early onset Alzheimer’s. It is dispiriting to lose a thought in a second, 86,400 seconds a day.
My days all begin the same, in disarray. At first light, I must focus on the 5Ws: the who, what, where, when, and why of my life, and that’s just on the way to the bathroom, where on doctor’s advice I have begun labeling the toothpaste and rubbing alcohol in large, handscrawled letters. I have often attempted to brush my teeth with liquid soap, and on two occasions gargled briefly with rubbing alcohol, which doesn’t have a pleasant, minty taste.
After that, I go deep into my lists—my notes for every element of the day. I rely on my MacBook Pro laptop, replete with prompts and reminders—my portable brain, as I call it—and I continually email myself cues from my iPhone, as many as 40 to 50 a day, reminders of deadlines or the dates, times, and locations of appointments. (Sometimes I poke fun at myself, emailing: “You’re doing pretty good, in spite of the fact you’re such a dumb-ass!”) My life has become a strategy of labeling, listing, confirming, and reconfirming. I have a playbook, a script, a backup for everything, because I have a formidable enemy—my mind. It used to be my best friend. Now, I don’t see any chance of reconciliation. Illegitimi non carborundum, as I say: Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Still, I often fly into an inexorable rage, like when I hurled the phone across the room, a perfect strike to the sink, when I couldn’t remember how to dial; or when I smashed the lawn sprinkler against an oak tree in the backyard because I couldn’t recall how it works. I have pushed open the flaming hot glass door of the wood stove barehanded, melting my skin into second-degree burns, simply because I thought it was a good idea. I cry privately, the tears of a little boy, because I fear that I’m alone, that nobody cares, and that the innings are starting to fade.
Some days are exceedingly terrifying, filled with hallucinations and delusions. These false impressions of objects, events, and sensory perceptions like smell, taste, or sound are caused by changes in the brain common in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. As they were for my mother, I find the hallucinations most troubling: those spidery and insect-like creatures that crawl along the ceiling—sometimes in sprays of blood, sometimes in a platoon—then inch a third of the way down the wall before floating toward me. I brush them away almost in amusement, knowing, for now, that they are not real, yet fearful of their representation of cognitive decline. On a recent morning, I saw a bird in my bedroom circling above me in ever-tighter orbits, then precipitously it dove to my chest in a suicide mission. I screamed in horror. But there was no bird, no suicide mission, only my hallucination. And I was thankful for that.
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