My name is Steve, and I was born with ridiculously severe asthma. I’ve been hospitalized over 160 times for this disease and was not expected to survive past my mid-forties. As of this writing, I’m 70 years old!
Back in 2004, with my asthma slowly killing me and limited treatment options available, I decided to take action rather than lay around feeling sorry for myself. I sought out some of the best asthma doctors in the world, became actively involved in asthma research, and experimented with incorporating exercise, in the form of walking, into my daily treatment regimen. In doing so, I not only improved my own health but also changed the global narrative on physical fitness and chronic lung disease management.
Within a period of just eight years, through hard work, discipline, and sheer determination, I completed 21 long-distance foot races, including the Boston Marathon—three times! All while being chronically short of breath and with a baseline lung function about a third of normal. To be clear, I didn’t run any of these marathons. In fact, I can’t run at all—I just don’t have the lung capacity to do so. But I found that I could slowly condition myself to walk at a moderate pace for increasingly longer periods without getting dangerously short of breath. Of course, I can’t walk as fast as a healthy runner can run, but I still cover the same race distance; it just takes me about twice as long.
You might be thinking, “It’s only walking, what’s the big deal?” Well, covering long distances whether you walk or run them is much harder than it looks, especially when you have a disease that severely affects your ability to breathe. The truth is, I’ve worked extraordinarily hard at conditioning myself and building up the endurance needed to complete a marathon. Over the years, I’ve learned not to let my breathlessness make me overly anxious or dictate what I can or cannot do, physically or mentally. I know the risks involved in doing strenuous exercise, I take precautions, I learn what works for me, and then I try my best to adapt. The only advantage I might have over others with breathing problems is that I’ve had mine since early childhood. In short, I walk and exercise because I need to if I want to keep living.
My walking story and the birth of this blog begins in September 2004, when my asthma got so bad that I was forced to take early retirement from my career as a Respiratory Therapist. At the age of 49, physically disabled and unable to work, I became super depressed, constantly sick, and totally out of shape. Then one day, it occurred to me: people with traditional COPD are encouraged to attend pulmonary rehab classes and exercise to slow the progression of their disease and maintain a decent quality of life. So why not people with chronic severe asthma? The diseases may have different causes, but they share many similarities—mainly debilitating breathlessness and permanent lung damage. With that in mind, and plenty of time on my hands, I came up with an aerobic exercise program for myself that would hopefully add some structure to my days, help me manage the vicious dyspnea cycle, maintain what little lung function I still had left, and perhaps beat the odds by living longer and happier than science and medicine say I’m supposed to.
I created this blog to chronical my journey from disabled severe asthmatic to Marathon walker. I started out by trying swimming and slow jogging, but those activities left me instantly and severely winded. In the end, I chose good old-fashioned walking. Little did I know what a profound effect it would have on my life. When I first started walking for fitness, I was in such bad shape I could barely go a few blocks without feeling like I was suffocating; and on many days, I was too short of breath to walk at all. Despite the concerns and doubts of some, including many of my doctors, I kept pushing myself to go a little farther each time. I even took up racewalking lessons to learn the science of walking and improve my speed and technique. A year later, on July 31, 2005, I walked 13.1 miles in under three hours, successfully completing my first half marathon. Then, over a year after that, on October 1, 2006, just two weeks after an asthma hospitalization and with an FEV1 of 36%, I did what others said was not possible—I completed a 26.2-mile walk and finished the Portland Marathon!
Since then, I’ve gone on to finish a dozen other races around the world, including the Rome Marathon in Italy, three times. I think my happiest walking moment happened on April 20, 2009, when with the help of my good friend Mike Mc Bride and one of my lung doctors, I walked my way into the record books by becoming the first person with documented severe refractory asthma allowed to enter the mobility-impaired division of the 2009 Boston Marathon. I went on to finish the 2010 and 2011 Boston Marathons as well, crossing the finish line of each race approximately 12 minutes faster than the previous.
Alas, while I still consider myself a “Badass-matic,” 70 years of near-constant breathlessness, asthma exacerbations, and all the medications used to treat it have taken quite a toll on my body. Since completing my last full marathon distance at the Rome Marathon in 2023, I’ve set less lofty fitness goals for myself. I don’t see any more marathons in my future, but I still walk every day for both fitness and pleasure, and my message is still relevant: If you have obstructive lung disease, you need to stay active. As counterintuitive as it might sound, you need to exercise, even when you have a disease that affects your breathing. Fitness walking hasn’t cured my asthma, but it’s certainly made me a stronger person, and I believe it’s the main reason I’m still around to write about it. I won’t sugarcoat it—I suffer tremendously from this disease and all the side effects that come with it, but I refuse to be a prisoner to it. I live the happiest and most fulfilling life that I’m capable of. As I see it, you have two choices when it comes to chronic lung disease: you push on with life despite the difficulties and find ways to adapt, or you let your disease gradually consume you, make you miserable, and hasten your death. Plain and simple.
If you have asthma, please consider becoming a volunteer subject for SARP or some other asthma research study. It’s so important.
Update: So much for slowing down. On February 26, 2024, I walked 180 miles in 9.5 days, completing the last 10 stages of the Via Francigena pilgrimage walk from Siena to Rome, Italy.
Ciao e buona salute a tutti!