A 32-year-old guy named Matt Howell was running in his first 10K earlier this month in Richmond, Virginia. And around the three-mile mark, he saw another runner who’d COLLAPSED. But luckily Matt’s been a firefighter and a PARAMEDIC for about ten years. So he stopped to help, and realized the guy didn’t have a pulse.
There were already people doing CPR by then, so he basically supervised and made sure they were doing it right. Then a cop showed up with a defibrillator, so Matt took over, put the pads on the guy’s chest, and shocked him with it. And it WORKED.
After about two more minutes of CPR, the guy’s heart started beating, and he was breathing again. By that point an ambulance was there. So Matt got up and FINISHED the race.
The whole thing added 10 or 15 minutes to his time. But apparently it got his adrenaline going, because he says he ran FASTER after that, and still finished the race in just over an hour.
The guy he saved got out of the hospital this past weekend, and says he’s planning to finish the race from where he collapsed. So Matt says he might walk the rest of the course with him soon.
(Check out a photo of Matt here.)
