Runner in ‘Jesus Saves’ Bib Collapses, Is Saved by Group With Man Named Jesus – runnersworld.com

The last moment Tyler Moon remembers clearly in the Twin Cities 10-Miler on October 6 was seeing his parents and fiancée around the first mile. After that, he just has flashes of feeling off and struggling to breathe properly, followed by waking up in the ER with cuts on his face and a heavy, painful chest.

Despite never having any heart issues in the past, the 25-year-old had experienced ventricular tachycardia, an irregular heartbeat that caused reduced blood flow throughout his body. Just after the 8-mile mark, the lower chambers of his heart were getting no blood at all, so they simply shut down the operation, sending Moon careening to the ground, face first.

The race—his first of that distance—was meant to be a victory lap of sorts, capping off three years of hard work to lose weight, he told Runner’s World. He’d done a few 5Ks since college, and the steady, consistent running progress helped him lose 100 pounds.

“It was brutal at first,” the Eden Prairie, Minnesota, resident says. “But once I began to drop the weight, it wasn’t as hard on my knees and I got hooked. I began looking for ways to challenge myself.”

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When his fiancée’s brother ran the Twin Cities Marathon in 2018, Moon felt inspired, though he knew he wasn’t quite ready to go the full 26.2. So he began to look for something a little bit shorter, and decided on the 10-miler this October.

As a Christian, he also saw it as an opportunity to share his faith: He had “Jesus Saves” on his bib instead of his name.

“I hoped someone would see that message and feel encouraged by it,” he recalls. “That they might feel lifted up in some way, and that they weren’t alone.”

Courtesy Tyler Moon

Moon had no idea he’d be the one who needed that level of support.

When he went down, several people around him rushed over, including Jesus Bueno—known as Jesse—a registered nurse anesthetist. Another nurse who’d been watching from the curb rushed forward as well, and then a physician, another nurse anesthetist, and other healthcare professionals and first responders. In all, there were 11 highly trained people who immediately formed a team that worked together to start CPR while an ambulance brought an AED to shock Moon’s heart back to life.

“Initially, I thought he was having a seizure, his breath was ragged and he was moaning,” Bueno tells Runner’s World. “But then within about 10 seconds, his pulse was gone. That’s when we began taking turns to administer CPR.”

The ambulance arrived about two minutes later, and Bueno says it was very long couple minutes—but that kind of slowed-down time was familiar to everyone surrounding Moon, he says.

“Everyone there was very familiar with emergency situations, and so we all just clicked together,” says Bueno. “We really became a unit for Tyler.”

The biggest reason that so many people had to take turns with CPR was because Moon was running at a good pace—around a 9-minute mile—which means that everyone around him was doing the same, according to Virginia Brophy Achman, executive director of Twin Cities in Motion, which organizes the race.

She told Runner’s World that CPR has to be done at compressions of a rate of 100 to 120 a minute. But when you’re only a few miles from the finish line, and you’re booking it at a speedy pace, your own heart rate is much higher than that. Plus, you’re also dealing with an adrenaline surge. Both of these factors can be problematic, since they can push you to pump too fast with your compressions.

So with the exception of the other nurse who was a spectator, every runner who stopped had to take a moment to get his or her heart rate down in order to give proper compressions.

Achman is well schooled on marathon medical issues, thanks to a strong focus on emergency service accessibility put in place by William Roberts, M.D., the Twin Cities in Motion medical director. Not only are there aid stations along the route of both the 10 Mile and the Twin Cities Marathon, but volunteer medical assistance personnel also ride bikes up and down the route.

In terms of the number of non-race medical professionals surrounding Moon, she wasn’t surprised.

“The number one occupation of people in our races is healthcare,” she says. “We hope to never have incidents like this, of course, but if you’re going to have some type of heart event, being at our race is probably the best possible place for it to happen.”

To emphasize that point, Moon recalls he ran a similar distance about two months before the race, but did it solo on a quiet, empty stretch of road. If he’d had his heart incident then, no one would have been around to save him.

“I have to believe there was some divine intervention here,” he says.

At this point, Moon’s heart is healthy, doctors have told him. He’ll be having a defibrillator put in, just in case it should happen again, and his January wedding is definitely still on.

Even his face has healed up, so much so there only a few scratches left. But what will always remain is his gratitude toward those who stopped. In a volunteer dinner held on October 24, Moon gave an emotional speech, thanking everyone who had formed Team Tyler that day.

“To me, the most important part of this story is that a collective group of strangers came together, without hesitation, to save me,” says Moon. “That is an incredible, beautiful thing.”

Bueno echoes that sentiment, and says he’s been singled out because of the coincidence of his name matching up with the “Jesus Saves” message. But when people come up to praise him, he likes to set the record straight.

“I’m just one of many people who formed a team, and in some ways, that’s indicative of runners,” he says. “We might run as individuals, but we’re all so willing to help each other. That’s a great part of running, and the awesome thing about this story. We’re all in this together.”