For the last seven months I’ve talked a lot about my personal battle with heart disease and my recovery from open-heart surgery. The reason for that is two-fold.

First, I wanted anyone else with heart disease to know what I learned (as I learned it) and to know that there is life afterward.

Second, and the more important part, I wanted to help educate everyone else that while heart disease is the #1 killer of both men and women in the United States (according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), a lot of it is preventable.

There are things like family history and other factors that are out of our control, but a lot of what causes heart disease is up to us. Quitting smoking, eating more fruits and vegetables and exercising regularly are all really simple things we can do to avoid the pain of open-heart surgery.

And I promise you, the surgery hurts.

This weekend is the Charleston Heart Walk, the main fundraising event in support of the American Heart Association (AHA) of West Virginia. The money raised for the AHA goes to research to help find ways to improve our odds against those risk factors we can’t control, but it also goes to support educational programs to help us all avoid having a talk with a cardiologist. And a surgeon. (They also work to stamp out Stroke as well, the #5 killer in the US.)

I’ll be walking this Saturday. I’m going to try to jog the 5K distance, but we’ll see how that goes. Regardless, I’ll be out there and I think you should, too. If you can’t make the walk, please consider donating to the AHA, either directly or through a walk team. My team is Team Second Chance, so named because I feel like I have a second chance at life now. You can search the Charleston Heart Walk site for my team and donate that way, if you want. I don’t get anything from it. All the money goes to the AHA.

The link for my team on the the Charleston Heart Walk is: www.heart.org/charlestonwvwalk

If you want to join me on the walk/run, please join my team and come on out. I’m getting excited!

Today is my 49^th birthday.

I’m not telling you that to get attention. Realistically, my mom did all the work this day 49 years ago, so thank you mom!

I bring up my birthday because six months ago I was in the hospital waiting on open-heart surgery. I had absolute faith in Dr. Figueroa and wasn’t worried about the surgery itself. What I realized then is a little more than a week before that I had been shoveling snow. A month before that I had a heart attack that I denied. If things had gone differently, I might never have made it to the hospital for that surgery. From there never gotten the chance to celebrate this birthday.

A few days after my surgery, while I was recovering in the hospital, my youngest daughter Jamison told me that some people regard times like that as a new birthday. It’s a chance to restart and look at everything with a new eye. When I got home from the hospital, my friend Danny Boyd welcomed me to the Second Chance Club. I liked where both of them were headed. I was given another shot and I’m not about to waste it.

Before I left the hospital, I determined I was going to get in shape to be given permission to scuba dive again. I got that letter signed a couple weeks ago. I haven’t been diving yet, but I will soon. That goal met, it’s time to shift gears and set my sights on a new one. Without something to shoot for, it would be too easy for me to backslide and lose the gains I’ve made.

My next target is to jog a 5K race. Not just walk it, but I want to jog the 3.1 miles at a decent pace. That said, I don’t really care if I am the last one to finish. This is about me pushing myself, not competing with others. The Charleston Heart Walk is September 10. I’ve set up a team on the Charleston Heart Walk website called Team Second Chance and hope to get some friends to join me. (You don’t have to jog with me, if you don’t want. Just come out and walk.) You can search by team names to join me.

My goal is to give more people a second chance at life, and hopefully spare some of those people the pain of open-heart surgery. Maybe we’ll all celebrate a few more birthdays as well.

We’ll call your participation a birthday present to both of us.