Bio: Mike McBride, 55, was diagnosed in 2005 with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease/emphysema. Pulling an 80-pound oxygen cart, he finished the 2009 Boston Marathon. McBride works as a paralegal for Beatty & Wozniak, an energy law firm.
The journey: Even after his mother was diagnosed with COPD in 1998, McBride did not quit his pack-a-day smoking habit. But when he was hospitalized with an unknown lung ailment in 2005, he received the same diagnosis as his mother, who had died just three weeks earlier.
Along with COPD/emphysema, he had bacterial pneumonia and developed a condition called BOOP (bronchiolitis obliterans organizing pneumonia) — “as in Betty,” he says. “My immune system turned on to combat the bacterial pneumonia and began to attack my lungs. It left me with 50 percent lung capacity.”
This was a guy who called himself a “gym rat.” “I would go to the gym three or four times a week and then smoke on the way home. I quit about once a day, saying ‘I shouldn’t smoke.’ ”
But he swore he would never smoke again after his nine-day hospital stay. With the help of nicotine patches, gum and a Nicotrol inhaler, he quit. “Frankly it was easier than I thought it was going to be,” says McBride, who began his recovery by walking a few blocks in his neighborhood. Those walks led to training for his first race — the 2005 Bolder Boulder.
“I actually don’t run, I racewalk,” says McBride, who will run his fourth Bolder Boulder this Memorial Day. “They told me in hospital that the only thing that would slow down the progression of the disease was to be physically active. They suggested walking, so that’s what I did.”
So how does a guy with obstructed lungs finish a marathon?
McBride uses a custom-made cart that holds four oxygen tanks and weighs up to 100 pounds. He pulls it like a rickshaw. “With the harness, I sort of look like a surrey, harnessed up like a horse,” he says. His partner of 17 years, Cameron Garland, is a registered nurse and helps change the tanks every 6 miles along the race route.
How he trains: McBride walks an hour every day, using his next race as a training goal. “I keep doing them in the summertime to stay outside and keep me training. I can be really lazy. If you get out of a routine it’s easy to say ‘not today,’ and soon two months have gone by.”
In the winter, he climbs stairs. Lots of them. He climbed all 1,098 steps of the tallest building in Denver for Run the Republic. He race-walks in the Colfax Half-Marathon and the Slacker Half-Marathon in Georgetown. He went to Chicago for Hustle the Hancock and Climb Chicago, four buildings, 45 stories each.
The Boston Marathon was his fourth 26-mile race. “It’s kind of the mother of all marathons with the exception of maybe going to Greece, and it was everything it was billed to be,” says McBride, who ran in the mobility-impaired category. He was the last official runner to complete the race, with a time of 7:31:36. “I got to see everybody, all 22,849, because they all passed me. It was still wall-to-wall people on the side of the road, and there were still people cheering when I crossed the finish line.”
Kristen Browning-Blas: 303-954-1440 or kbrowning@denverpost.com
