offending vessel. “If there was ever a time to
call in my chips, that was it,” he says. “Luckily it
worked out, every step of the way.”
Every year in the US, about 735,000 people
have heart attacks. Few are world-class
athletes like Conrad. His episode could
have been caused by random chance, bad
genetic luck or perhaps a lifetime of extreme
demands on his most important organ. But he
pinpointed another possible cause: grief.
Five months earlier, he had trekked up
Tibet’s 8,027m Shishapangma with a different
team. This time, the mission was somber:
They were going to retrieve the body of his
best friend, Alex Lowe, who had died in an
avalanche in 1999.
Conrad had been with Alex on that
expedition and witnessed his friend being
swept to his death. The two had been so close
that Conrad later married Alex’s widow, Jenni,
and raised Alex’s three sons as his own.
On this recent trip, he carried his friend’s
body down the mountain himself. “Going back
up there and seeing everything was super-
emotional,” he told an interviewer from
National Geographic. “I was stressed, and I felt
my heart.”
I felt my heart. What man hasn’t at some
point in his life? When we go on a first
date, take a knee to propose, approach the
lectern to make a speech in public, or hear of a
loved one’s death, our hearts talk to us. And we
talk back.
This is why for centuries, before we even
understood how it does its primary job of
pumping blood, the heart has been a powerful
symbol of many things: love, emotion, intuition,
conviction (“I believe in my heart”) and truth
(“the heart of the matter”). Our hearts occupy
the centre of our emotional lives.
New research across a range of disciplines
suggests that these ancient myths may in fact
have some validity. Studies show that ourH
High on a Himalayan peak, just below
6,000m, Conrad Anker felt an unusual
sensation: He was tired.
For a typical 53-year-old, this would
not have been surprising. Conrad, an
acclaimed mountaineer, had been climbing
for seven hours since 2am, and was on his
sixth rope-supported section on the way to
the 6,895m summit of an unconquered peak
called Lunag-Ri.
That’s enough to whip anyone. But Conrad
was not just anyone. He was in remarkable
physical shape for a man of any age. Four
years earlier, he had become one of just
a handful of people to summit Everest
without supplemental oxygen. The man was
indefatigable.
But on this day, he stopped climbing and
sat down. He thought it could have been
altitude sickness. Then it hit him – hard. It
was much more than the altitude. “I just
couldn’t go on,” he says. “I was stopped in
my tracks.”
He turned to his climbing partner, David
Lama. “David,” he said, “this is not good.”
As an athlete, Conrad was acutely aware
of the state of his heart. “I can feel it when
I’m climbing, but also when I’m sleeping
or resting.” Just a few months earlier, he’d
undergone a battery of tests as he trekked
Kilimanjaro, a 5,895m summit. Everything
had checked out perfectly, so this sensation
disturbed him. “It was like a severe muscle pain
in my heart,” he says.
He and David turned back to the advance
base camp hundreds of metres below,
rappelling down the mountain almost by
instinct. When they arrived, Conrad began to
feel better and decided to tough it out. “I said:
‘Yeah, I got this. I’m just going to heal up.’”
Instead, the 26-year-old David made
the snap decision to call for assistance. A
helicopter happened to be in the area and
transported Conrad to a Kathmandu hospital,
where doctors discovered the problem: He had
experienced an acute thrombotic occlusion of
his anterior descending coronary artery – or, in
layman’s terms, a sudden heart attack.
The culprit was a piece of fatty plaque
blocking one of the main blood vessels to
his heart. The piece was small – the size of
a crumb. Nine hours after he first felt his
chest tighten, doctors inserted a stent in the
emotions can directly affect our heart health,
often in tangible, physical ways.
That may be why, for example, more people
seem to have heart attacks on Mondays than
any other day of the week. Cold Mondays
are even more dangerous. People who have
experienced a sudden acute trauma, such
as the death of someone close, can suffer a
physical change in the heart. When Conrad
said his friend’s death touched his heart, it
probably did.
Your heart is an amazing organ. It’s busy
enough with its main job – pumping blood –
but it can also act as a bellwether of the state
of your health, your level of fatigue, the role of
stress in your life (and, importantly for men,
anger) and, yes, the state of your relationships.
It keeps you alive, but it can also kill you unless
you learn to understand it and listen to it.
“We know that the heart is not just a simple
pump,” says Dr Mimi Guarneri, an integrative
cardiologist. “There’s a physical heart and
there’s an emotional heart, which responds to
the world around you. There’s also a spiritual
heart, which I believe is where the seat of the
soul is located, holding the truth about why
you came into this world and what you came
here to do as a human being.”
Most men are familiar with classic risk
factors like blood pressure and cholesterol, but
they tend to miss the mental, emotional and
even spiritual issues that relate to the heart,
Dr Guarneri says. That’s a tragedy, because
understanding the human body’s most
miraculous organ can improve and even save
your life.
Here are all the jobs your heart performs,
and how to keep it working to perfection.IT PUMPS
“The heart is the only organ of the body
that is in continuous motion,” says Stanford
cardiologist Dr Euan Ashley. About 70 times
a minute, 100,000 times a day, the four
chambers of the heart expand and contract in
perfect sync to send the equivalent of 7,600
litres of oxygen-rich blood throughout your
body every day.
Your heart delivers blood to even the
most remote parts, from your brain to your
quadriceps to (when needed) the erectile
tissue of your penis – and, most important, to
the heart muscle itself.
Despite this wear and tear, it lasts: The
walls of the heart flex and stretch, and its
valves keep blood flowing in the right direction
without breaking down or stopping, even
while you sleep. What machine could do that
for 80 years?
fKeep the beat Men who exercise regularly
pump more blood with each heartbeat than
those who are less active, according to UK
research. The American Heart Association
recommends either five 30-minute sessions ofYour heart acts as a
bellwether of the
state of your health,
your level of fatigue,
and the role of stress
in your life.
JUNE 2017 35