What Cardiac Arrest, AFib, and CrossFit Taught Me About Starting Over at 40

In May 2019, I crossed the finish line at the Blue Nose half marathon in Halifax. Two hours, ten minutes. Then my heart stopped.

I was 37 years old. 17 years into a career in the Canadian Armed Forces. I was carrying the kind of accumulated injuries that come from spending most of your adult life in uniform. I was smoking. Drinking too much. My cholesterol was high enough that my doctor was pushing me toward statins.

And until the moment I collapsed at that finish line, I would have told you I was in pretty good shape. I had just run a half marathon. How bad could it be?

What I didn’t know yet: I had atrial fibrillation. My heart wasn’t beating right. It hadn’t been for a while. And on that particular Sunday in May, after 21.1 kilometres of asking it to do hard work, it gave up.

The Finish Line

I remember crossing the line. I remember the clock reading 02:10:57. After that, nothing.

What happened next, I had to be told. I went down at the finish. The Halifax half marathon is a busy event — Atlantic Canada’s largest annual run, thousands of participants and spectators. By incredible luck, three of the people standing closest to me when I collapsed were exactly the people you’d want to have nearby if your heart had just stopped.

Lorri Giffin was the first to reach me. She’d just finished the half marathon as a volunteer pace runner. She’s also a nurse practitioner. She spotted me out of the corner of her eye, thought I was having a seizure, and was at my side within seconds. By the time she got there, I had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. She started CPR.

Dr. Tanya Monroe joined her. She’s an emergency room physician who was also volunteering as a pace runner that day. She jumped straight into the CPR effort.

Taylor Cormier had just finished her own half marathon. She helped too. Together the three of them kept my heart pumping for the next six minutes while the on-site paramedics raced over with a defibrillator.

The paramedics worked on me for ten minutes. They shocked me four times. Eventually my heart restarted.

I woke up in the hospital with the diagnosis: cardiac arrest, caused by undiagnosed atrial fibrillation. AFib. A condition where the heart’s electrical system misfires and the upper chambers quiver instead of pumping cleanly. Untreated, it kills people. It almost killed me.

The cardiologist told me that two things saved my life: the speed and quality of the CPR Lorri, Tanya, and Taylor delivered, and the availability of a defibrillator within minutes. Without either, I wouldn’t be writing this.

What I Was Before

I joined the Canadian Armed Forces in 2002. By 2019 I was 17 years into what would eventually become a 22-year career.

The military trains you to be tough. It also wears you down. By 41, I was carrying:

• Chronic injuries from years of physical demands
• Joint issues that came and went depending on the week
• A nicotine habit that started decades earlier
• A relationship with alcohol that had crept past “social”
• Cholesterol numbers that had my doctor reaching for the prescription pad
• Accumulated stress I’d never properly addressed
• And, as I’d just discovered, a heart with a problem nobody had spotted

If you’d asked me about my health in early 2019, I would have said it was fine. I was running. I was working. I was functional. That’s how I would have measured it.

I was wrong about all of it.

Recovery, And What Came Next

The first weeks after the cardiac arrest were brutal — physically, mentally, financially, emotionally. There’s a particular kind of fragility that comes with knowing your body just tried to quit. You sleep differently. You walk differently. You watch your kids and your wife and you think about what almost happened.

I left the hospital with an S-ICD surgically implanted in my chest — a subcutaneous implantable cardioverter-defibrillator. It sits under the skin, monitors my heart rhythm constantly, and shocks me back if anything goes wrong. A safety net I never wanted to need, but one I’d rather have than not.

The cardiologist gave me clearance to start exercising again, with caveats. I didn’t go on medication. I had to figure out what “exercise” was going to mean for me going forward, and whether I could rebuild my heart through training instead of pills.

What Nobody Warned Me About: PTSD

I had PTSD before my heart ever stopped.

A lot of adults do. You don’t always have to name the source for the weight to be real. I don’t talk about it much. The cardiac arrest layered something new on top of it.

For months after the event, I jumped at chest twinges. I’d lie awake at night feeling for my pulse. Every flight of stairs became a question. I had dreams about the finish line. Every time I felt my heart speed up — climbing stairs, getting startled, getting upset — my brain would immediately ask: is this it again?

Research shows that roughly 1 in 3 cardiac arrest survivors develop PTSD-level symptoms in the year after the event. For me, it stacked on top of what I was already carrying. The hypervigilance compounded. The old grooves got deeper.

I’m not going to tell you CrossFit cured my PTSD. It didn’t. PTSD doesn’t disappear because you start lifting weights. That’s not how this works.

But here’s what training did, honestly:

• It gave the nervous-system hum somewhere to go. The constant alertness, the readiness — that energy has nowhere to land in normal modern life. In a workout, it does.
• Community. Training alongside people who weren’t trying to fix me. Just train next to me.
• Evidence. Three or four times a week, proof that I could ask my body to work hard and trust it to come back.
• Structure. The coach decides the workout. On the worst mental health days, not having to decide is a gift.

Exercise is one of the most consistent, evidence-backed interventions for anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. It is not a substitute for proper treatment — I’ve gotten that too, and I still do when I need to. But it’s the most reliable tool I’ve found for the day-to-day work of carrying what I carry.

If you’re a cardiac survivor, a veteran, a first responder, or anyone moving through life with the kind of mental health load other people don’t see — I want you to know the gym can be part of how you handle it. Not the whole answer. Part of one.

For me, the gym became the place where I stopped being afraid of my own heart, and the place where the rest of it had somewhere to go. Not because the PTSD disappeared. Because I had somewhere to outwork it.

But getting to that gym took me nearly three years.

That’s the part nobody warns you about either. The trauma doesn’t sort itself out in a few weeks. It sat with me for almost three years. In that time I mostly avoided exercise. Every workout decision felt weighed down by “is this it again?” I gained weight. I got more sedentary. The smoking didn’t go anywhere. The drinking got worse. My doctor pushed harder on the statins. I was slowly losing ground in every direction.

Natalie kept telling me about CrossFit. I dismissed her for a long time. Until I didn’t.

The First Month

I could barely do a few pushups.

That’s not a humility move or a marketing line. That’s an accurate description of where I was when I finally walked into my first CrossFit class. I was 40 years old. Almost three years had passed since my heart stopped at the Blue Nose finish line. Three years of slowly losing ground. Decades of military mileage on top of that. A body that had been told, by the most dramatic possible mechanism, that it wasn’t supposed to push itself anymore.

I could barely do a few pushups.

Here’s what I expected: to be embarrassed. To feel like the worst person in the room. To get judged. To get pushed too hard. To get hurt.

Here’s what actually happened:

The coach asked about my background. I told her everything — military, cardiac arrest, the list of nagging issues. She nodded and made notes. When we started the workout, she had a scaled version of every movement ready for me. Pushup variations on a box. Squats to a target. Light weights. Slower pace.

The other people in the class were not 25-year-old competitive athletes. They were adults like me. A few were younger, a few were older. Nobody looked at me twice when I dropped the bar between sets because my arms were shaking. The coach watched my form like a hawk and corrected me kindly when I was about to do something dumb.

I left that first class exhausted. And for the first time in years, I felt like I’d done real work in a way that wasn’t slowly destroying me.

I went back the next week. Then the week after. By the end of my first month I was looking forward to it.

What CrossFit Actually Changed

Within the first year of consistent training, here’s what happened:

None of that was the plan. I went to CrossFit because my heart had stopped and I needed something. I didn’t go because I wanted to quit smoking or drinking or get my cholesterol down. Those things happened because training that hard, that consistently, makes the things you used to do feel ridiculous.

You can’t drink the way I was drinking and still show up at 6 AM. You can’t smoke and still hit the lung capacity benchmarks the workouts demand. Your cholesterol doesn’t stay high when your cardiovascular system is being asked to work hard, three or four times a week, every week, for a year.

The training did what no doctor’s lecture, no New Year’s resolution, no fitness fad could do: it made the bad habits feel incompatible with who I was becoming.

How A Cardiac Arrest Survivor Ended Up Owning A CrossFit Gym

Two years into my training, Natalie and I were having one of those conversations couples have. About what’s next. About what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. I was approaching retirement from the CAF. We had options.

One of those options was Kaos.

The gym I’d been training at had given me my health back. I had spent two years watching coaches work with people like me — adults coming back from injuries, from illness, from years of inactivity, from the kind of life experience that leaves you wondering if you’re done. Watching them get stronger. Watching them get their lives back.

Natalie and I decided that’s what we wanted to spend the next chapter doing.

So in 2024, we opened Kaos CrossFit in Bayers Lake. Family and veteran-owned. Built around the kind of coaching that gave me my health back.

What I Tell Adults Considering CrossFit At 40+

Since opening Kaos, I’ve coached hundreds of people who walked through our doors with some version of the same story: “I used to be active. Then life happened. I want to get back in shape but I don’t know where to start. Is CrossFit even for someone like me?”

My answer is always the same: CrossFit doesn’t care what shape you’re in when you walk through the door. It cares that you walked through it.

Here’s what I tell them, and what I’ll tell you if you’re reading this and wondering whether to try it:

1. You don’t need to be in shape first

This is the trap that keeps most adults out of fitness for decades. You think you need to “get in shape” before you can start training. That is backwards. Coached training is how you get in shape. Your first month is about learning movements, not crushing personal records.

2. You don’t need to be the youngest person in the room

You won’t be. Our oldest members are in their 60s. Our youngest are teenagers. The fittest people in the room at any Kaos class are almost never the youngest — they’re the most consistent.

3. You don’t need to be fearless about injuries

I started CrossFit after a cardiac arrest, with chronic military-service injuries, and barely able to do a few pushups. I wasn’t fearless. I was scared. The difference is that a credentialed coach who watches every rep and scales every movement is the difference between training with caution and getting hurt with bravado.

4. You don’t need to commit to anything before you try

Your first class at Kaos is free. No payment, no contract, no high-pressure sales pitch. Worst case, you decide it’s not your fit and you walk out an hour later. Best case, it does for you what it did for me.

What I Owe

I owe Lorri Giffin, Dr. Tanya Monroe, and Taylor Cormier my life. Literally. They were strangers when they put their hands on my chest. They will never be strangers to me again.

I owe my wife Natalie for not letting up when I dismissed her about CrossFit for months. She knew before I did.

I owe my first CrossFit coach for treating me, on day one, like an adult who could be taught — not a fragile patient who needed to be protected from himself.

I owe the Canadian Armed Forces for 22 years of structure, discipline, and the kind of identity that made it possible to rebuild a body that had been pretty thoroughly beaten down.

And I owe every member who walks through Kaos’s doors a coaching experience that respects how hard it is to start over.

The Invitation

If you’re a Halifax adult 30-50 reading this because some version of my story sounds familiar — whether it’s the cardiac event, the military service, the accumulated injuries, the slow erosion of habits, or just the quiet sense that you’ve been losing ground for too long — I want you to consider this:

You don’t need to wait for a finish-line collapse to start over.

You don’t need to wait until you’re ready.

You don’t need to be in shape to try a CrossFit class.

You just need to walk through the door.

Shawn Quigley, CD, is the owner and head coach of Kaos CrossFit in Bayers Lake, Halifax. He holds CrossFit Level 3, HYROX Academy Level 1, and NCCP Comp Dev Olympic Weightlifting credentials. He retired from the Canadian Armed Forces in 2024 after 22 years of service. He has not had another cardiac event since 2019.