I’m Dan and not so long ago I was a sedentary, overweight, chain smoking 38 year old and not thinking a thing about it.  Then it hit…  I say hit, it was more like a tight squeezing around the chest, the pain radiated out and down my left arm, sweat started to build up to the point where it was just pouring down my face, it was as if someone had thrown a bucket of water over me.

After my years of careful nurturing, the silent enemy inside me had made it’s move. It played a traditional opening gambit, known as the Myocardial Infarction, the medical name for what we generally call a heart attack, my enemy had clearly (and painfully) declared it’s presence. That day I declared war on Heart Disease.

With the help of the National Health Service I started to fight back, initially with medication – Beta Blockers, Statins, ACE Inhibitors, Aspirin and Glyceryl Trinitrate. I’ll now be on these for life constantly keeping the enemy in check.

Medication helps, but the best strategy and tactics to truly defeat heart disease has to be the major lifestyle changes you can make, along with a positive attitude.  My lifestyle changes were obvious I needed to stop smoking, lose weight, eat sensibly and exercise regularly.

After an initial three month recovery period, I picked up and dusted off my weapon of choice from the shed, no not the lawn mower (that takes a different kind of motivation!), my bicycle and I started pedalling myself to fitness.

I’m now four and half years into my new lifestyle, although I must say that cheese is much harder to give up than nicotine, but that doesn’t mean the war is over.  No it’s a constant battle, especially where cheese is concerned.

So, Why Coeur Cycliste?

The aim and goal of this site and blog is to inspire others into a healthier lifestyle through cycling, not only fighting my enemy, but raising awareness and helping others to fight their enemy within – hopefully before it can make its first move.

If I can help you I will, leave me a comment on one of my posts or contact me via Twitter – you don’t need to fight the enemy alone.

I was going to call it “The Heart Cyclist”, but the name didn’t sound right to me.  Cycle racing has it’s heritage in France, and a lot of the terminology used by cyclists today is French, for example the Peloton, the Flame Rouge, the Lanterne Rouge, etc – so I decided to go with heritage and translate it into French – Coeur Cycliste (Heart Cyclist).

My first post goes into more details about the day war started.