Triathlon is more than a wonderful sport – it is a lifestyle that encourages you to make healthy choices that can save your life. To celebrate turning 55, I decided to do two Ironman races just four weeks apart. Having done that and being a little competitive, I went to the Preventive Care Center in Nuremberg to see how I could improve on my performance. After a detailed and broad set of tests confirmed that I was in great shape aerobically, their sophisticated full body scan with ultrasound detected a shadow in my thyroid that turned out to be a lot more serious than expected. Without this detailed analysis, I likely would have gone along blissfully ignorant for several years until a rasping cough would have signaled a metastasized cancer requiring endless rounds of chemo with poor prognosis. By making the time to make the right healthy lifestyle choices that triathlon encourages, the net was that I was diagnosed early for cancer that was operable and was doing an Ironman again within 7 months.
For the full post in LinkedIn please see: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-triathlon-saved-my-life-reynold-lewke
