The right place at the right time: Rocky Hill runner saved at finish line after heart attack at Hartford Marathon

Peter Patel felt fine as he approached the finish line of the half marathon at the Eversource Hartford Marathon the morning of Oct. 8.

Patel pulled out his phone and recorded a video as he ran. It was his second half marathon; he was happy to be done.

“I’m getting there,” he said to his phone, the Soldiers and Sailors Arch looming in the background.

That was the last thing he recalled before waking up in an ambulance.

Patel, 49, of Rocky Hill collapsed about two steps from the finish line of the 13.1-mile race. It was a heart attack. As music played in the background, finish line spectators watched and other finishing runners detoured around him, the marathon’s medical team labored to save Patel’s life.

They did. After 2-3 minutes of CPR, which seemed much longer to the bystanders, and one shock by a defibrillator, Patel’s heart began beating again. He was taken to Hartford Hospital, where he had triple bypass surgery Oct. 14 and he is now resting at home.

“I’m just happy it didn’t happen six months later when I was running somewhere remote,” Patel said Thursday. “This was an amazing spot to drop dead because all the doctors were there.”

“If he were alone, unfortunately, this would have been a fatal event,” said Dr. Ayyaz Ali, who performed triple bypass surgery on Patel at Hartford Hospital.

Hartford Marathon director Beth Shluger visited Patel in the hospital before his surgery, along with Dr. Stanley Chartoff, the marathon’s medical director and an emergency physician at Hartford Hospital, and they gave him his finishers medal.

“I feel so proud, all the effort you put into preparing for this, that everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do and the outcome was really wonderful,” Shluger said.

Shluger, whose Hartford Marathon Foundation has 27 races on the schedule this year, said in all of her years of organizing races, she’s only had four “close calls” during her races, two on the course and two at the finish line.

“We’ve had people go down past the finish line, but not with this severity,” she said.

She said HMF owns an automated external defibrillator (AED) and she and her staff are trained to use it but she wasn’t sure if that particular defibrillator was used on Patel.

Patel started running in 2019. He trained and finished the half marathon in 2:40:02.

“I thought it was good exercise and I like running,” he said. “I never ran before. Before this half marathon, I was running five miles every 3-4 days.”

A year and a half ago, Patel said he had a heart scare; he had chest pains, so he got it checked out.

“They did stress tests and said, ‘You’re healthy, go home,’ ” Patel said. “I did have blockage somehow but they just couldn’t detect it. I aced all the stress tests. They didn’t have any reason to go deeper in my heart.”

Patel said he felt fine the entire race Oct. 8. His legs and feet were tired by Mile 10 but he pushed on.

When he fell, it looked like he had tripped. He went down hard. Initially, the medical personnel thought it was a seizure.

“We were in the [medical] tent, someone called over the radio that someone had a seizure at the finish line,” said Ripley Fricano, an emergency room nurse at Hartford Hospital who was working at the race. “There were a bunch of EMTs there. Then they said he was coding so we all ran down there. I took over compressions from one of the EMTs.”

Sofia Martone, an EMT training specialist at Hartford Hospital, was performing CPR with Fricano.

Fricano is a runner. She noticed Patel’s watch was still running and she clicked it off.

“We were switching compressions and I could see it still running,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, we have to stop that. This man just ran 13 miles. His time was great.’ I would be so sad if I ran a half marathon and didn’t get the actual data.

“We made sure to cut his bib avoiding the [timing] chip so that when he was pulled across on the stretcher, his chip would count to the finish.”

Patel’s official finish time was 2:57:28.

Ali, the vice president of cardiac surgery and director of the heart transplant program at Hartford Hospital, performed the 3 ½ hour surgery on Patel.

“Toward the end of the race, he developed a very serious arrhythmia, an abnormal heart rhythm called a ventricular fibrillation,” Ali said. “That’s what resulted in his collapse and his subsequent need for resuscitation.

“One of the investigations we did is called coronary angiography, which takes a picture of the heart arteries. That revealed he had some serious severe narrowings involving the major arteries of his heart. During periods of rest and relative inactivity, that may have not been compromising him. After running for [three] hours as part of a [half] marathon, there was a critical threshold which was probably exceeded in which his heart was not getting enough blood supply.”

Ali said that after a proper period of recovery, Patel would be able to resume running. But Patel, who is married and has an 18-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son, said he is not going to run anymore. He does plan to keep active with hiking and biking and hopes to be able to educate people about heart health.

“Not that I’m scared, but I want to look out for my family,” he said. “If I run, they’ll all run after me. I just don’t want to take a chance.”

Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com.