Nineteen years ago, Wayne Pichon smoked regularly and had never run a mile in his life. He also should have been dead from undiagnosed blockage in all his major coronary arteries.
Nearly two decades later, Pichon, a 69-year-old financial adviser, will participate in his 19th Alaska Heart Run on Saturday. Aside from his first race in 1997 where he walked the course — two months after a successful quadruple bypass open-heart surgery — he has run every race since.
"I'm beyond blessed," Pichon said. "I was one of the really lucky ones.
"My surgeon gave me some very strong advice when I asked him, 'What do I have to do so that you never have to put your hands in my chest again?' He told me not to smoke, but he also told me, 'Walk or die.' I took that pretty seriously."
The Alaska Heart Run is in its 38th year in Anchorage. The annual 5K run raises money for the American Heart Association, and features timed and untimed races. Heart disease survivors, and those still struggling with disease, wear red baseball caps during the event.
As of Thursday evening, the Alaska Heart Run was just under $25,000 short of its $290,000 goal for 2016 with two days remaining before race day.
In the week leading up to the Saturday's run, Pichon volunteered with race organizers selling T-shirts and helping last-minute participants register for the event.
Pichon said if it weren't for an observant technician, a quick-thinking cardiologist and a skilled surgeon, he probably wouldn't still be around to help raise awareness for heart disease.
Like many heart disease victims, Pichon's cardiovascular issues arrived suddenly. He said he had steady pain in his chest for a couple months, but none of the medical tests he had were cardiac based — not until a technician asked him if he had considered he may have heart problems.
"I remember thinking, 'That's the stupidest thing I've eve heard. I'm only 50 years old,' " Pichon said.
A stubborn Pichon finally scheduled an appointment with cardiologist Mark Selland, and exactly one minute and six seconds into a treadmill test Selland knew something was wrong.
"He just literally stopped the treadmill," Pichon said. "I remember at the time, I had chest pain. I started to turn my head and he said 'Just look straight ahead and stick out your tongue.'
"What he did, he stuck in a nitroglycerin (pill). He said, 'Don't swallow it, just let it dissolve in your mouth.' I did and the pain went away."
Pichon couldn't get into the hospital right away, but he came back the next day for a series of medical tests. The news wasn't pretty.
"(Selland) said, 'I don't know how to tell you this, but you have major blockage in all your coronary arteries,' " Pichon said. "He actually showed me, 'If it weren't for this one artery, on the ascending portion of your heart, I'm afraid the outcome wouldn't be very good … You're a walking time bomb.' "
At that moment, Pichon was swooped onto a cart and taken to a hospital bed. He and his wife, Barb, had to wait three days before a surgeon was available to perform his surgery.
"I will never forget my wife — she's in medicine as well — I remember her asking the surgeon, 'How many of these have you done?' " Pichon laughed. "He looked totally dumbfounded and said, 'I don't know, maybe 3,000.' She goes, 'Eh, I guess that's enough.' "
The surgery was a success.
"I had a very, very good surgeon, who obviously did a pretty good job," Pichon said. "And I'm still here today. It's a miracle, that's all I can say."
Pichon participated in his first Alaska Heart Run two months after his surgery, in April of 1997. But he had to walk the course.
He wanted to run.
Pichon took baby steps to reach his goal of running the Heart Run. First, he took his 50-foot tape measure and laid out a small course throughout his house to figure out how much he would have to walk without stopping to reach a mile.
He did the same thing at the Dimond Center, going late at night or early in the morning to walk his precisely calculated distances.
After that, he upgraded to walking between telephone poles on the roadside until he was strong enough to switch between walking and running between the poles.
Finally, he worked up to his first full-mile run without stopping a couple of months later. It was significant progress from the exhausting one minute, six seconds on the treadmill that led to his original diagnosis in February of 1997.
"I had never run in my life other than maybe some high school sports, or something," Pichon said. "That was monumental for me."
He ran his first Alaska Heart Run in 1998 and has run it every year since then aside from one year when the run was snowed out.
"I've been doing it every year since, and I hope I can do it for a lot more," he said.
Pichon said recently, someone told him he's brave for running and doing his part to battle heart disease. But Pichon said he doesn't consider himself the brave one.
"The people that are brave are those 3-, 4-, 5-, 7-year-olds that have conditions that are very, very difficult to treat," he said. "All you have to do is go to the Heart Run and you see these little kids with their red hats on. I run for the red hats."
Pichon said his favorite part of the Heart Run is seeing the children after the run. Every child who finishes the race gets a medal.
"My favorite part is the finish line, where several of us get together, and we hand out medals to the children.
"Especially to see the children who are in wheelchairs, the children being pulled by their parents in wagons, the children who are being carried. And they have the red hats. That's what it's all about," he said.
The Alaska Heart run begins at 9:30 a.m. Saturday at the Alaska Airlines Center for the timed run and 10 a.m. for the untimed run/walk. Last year's event drew nearly 6,000 participants.