I've been involved with endurance athletics the last few years. Triathlons but also the things that go into it separately (running, swimming, biking, etc.) The

I've been involved with endurance athletics the last few years. Triathlons but also the things that go into it separately (running, swimming, biking, etc.) There's kind of a genre of posts that show up on triathlon forums that roughly fall into the category of "I'm a dedicated triathlete who does X impressive triathlons every year with good times and I just had a heart attack." Sometimes there's a variant of this along the lines of the OP: "I suddenly started feeling winded and didn't feel right so I got checked and they rolled me into the OR immediately." Inevitably everyone on the forum is terrified, wondering how such a thing could happen that someone could be at the pinnacle of aerobic health, and then suddenly collapse with a serious cardiovascular problem. Then everyone realizes this is a recurring theme, there's a discussion of whether triathletes are at greater or lesser risk for cardiovascular problems, and people usually end up with some rough consensus that exercise is actually good. Then finally everyone starts talking about how to identify problems before they get too bad. The conclusion is usually that it's impossible to just tell without preventative screening. That is, the best thing to do is to go get checkups. Get stress tests etc. proactively. Get physicals and so forth and so on. Not that you should be a hypochondriac, but you need medical testing and screening, not monitoring of symptoms. I'm probably as guilty of not doing regular screenings as anyone, but maybe that should change.