Story and photos by Ed Hardee, Amelia Island Runners

The last thing Walt Kinsey remembers from his 13-mile Reindeer Run is glancing at his watch with just a block to go, and thinking: This is going to be my fastest half-marathon ever.

He has no memory of what followed until he awoke the next day, staring in disbelief at the ceiling of a Jacksonville hospital’s intensive care unit.

He doesn’t remember collapsing from sudden cardiac arrest, fewer than 200 steps from the finish line. He can’t recall the urgent efforts of paramedics to shock his heart back to life and stabilize him for a trip to Baptist Medical Center Nassau, nor the helicopter flight to Baptist in Jacksonville.

He never saw the runners who dropped to their knees and prayed for him while the life-or-death drama played out, amid a backdrop of a festive new Christmas race on a bright Saturday morning at Main Beach.

He does know this firsthand: “I’m glad to be alive.” He is thankful for everyone who helped him. And he is glad to be a runner. That was one of several factors that remarkably came together on the morning of Dec. 3 to help save Walt Kinsey’s life.

“The odds were really in his favor that day,” says Fernandina Beach Emergency Medical Services Chief Fino Murallo. Most victims of sudden cardiac arrest are not so lucky: "The average survival is 6 to 7 percent."

Kinsey, 61, a retired securities attorney from Washington, D.C. who now lives in Jacksonville, has been a runner most of his life. He turned to distance running in the last 2 1/2 years, including three marathons (26.2 miles each) and four half-marathons. He lifts weights, watches his weight.

A few years ago he went through a battery of medical tests to establish a baseline – “My wife made me” – lost 25 pounds, got his cholesterol under control, had regular routine checkups. During his runs there was no dizziness, no shortness of breath – nothing to indicate that something might be wrong.

When a neighbor told him about a new half-marathon in Fernandina Beach, he signed up. As a member of North Florida’s 26.2 With Donna/Galloway training group, he had run here before.

“It was a normal day for me,” Kinsey says. “I got up, drove over from Jacksonville, and felt good. The gun went off, I felt good, I was running and having a good time. It’s a great course, and I remember seeing kids out ringing bells, spectators cheering.” A photograph taken at Mile 3 shows a youthful looking runner in black and red, smiling toward the camera.

About an hour and 54 minutes after the race began, he was back at its Main Beach staging area. The course had taken him out North Fletcher Avenue and back, then through Fort Clinch State Park and Old Town Fernandina, and back again. “The last thing I remember was seeing the finish line, looking at my Garmin, and thinking, ‘Wow -- I’m going to have a PR (personal record) right here,’ so I wanted to kick it in.”

When he went down, striking his head on the pavement, he was only 10 to 20 yards from a rescue unit that race organizers had arranged to be stationed near the finish line. Manning the unit were paramedics Jared Lamar and Marcus Carter, who work out of Fernandina Beach’s 14th Street fire-rescue station.

Sorcha French, an emergency room nurse at the Fernandina Beach hospital, had already finished the half-marathon and knew that her time of 1:35:19 had made her the third-place woman overall. During her post-race cooldown she had jokingly greeted Lamar and Carter, whom she knew. “I said, ‘Paramedics! I need a paramedic! I just finished a half-marathon!”

She left the finish line area for a while, and was walking back for a post-run massage when a companion saw Kinsey collapse. “He said, ’Oh my God, a guy just fell.' I looked, and he was face-down.”

As she ran toward him, she again called for the paramedics -- this time, for real.

“He was lying there, bleeding. I wasn’t sure if he had tripped. People said he fell. I knelt down, and I realized he was unconscious. I was checking for a pulse, and the thought went through my head, ‘This is going to be worse than a fall.’”

Kinsey was in full cardiac arrest. Quickly, the paramedics moved the rescue unit into position to give them access to equipment onboard. The off-duty nurse advised them: No pulse.

Lamar rolled the fallen runner onto his back, and Carter began CPR chest compression.

Aboard the rescue unit was a portable, high-tech device that combines a heart monitor and a defibrillator. Lamar attached two electrodes to Kinsey’s body, and saw on the screen what he’d hoped to see – that Kinsey’s condition should respond to a jolt of electricity through the electrodes. In the language of paramedics, he had a “shockable rhythm.”

“He basically got his life back there on the ground when we shocked him,” Lamar says. Even for the paramedics, who are trained to stay focused on their mission, “it can be pretty emotional.”

Murallo, the EMS chief, says there is a brief window of time when the odds are highest for successfully resuscitating a victim of sudden cardiac arrest and leaving the person without permanent damage. With every minute that passes, the odds of survival drop by 10 percent. The golden window is 3 to 5 minutes. Kinsey was within the window.

“It’s hard to say because there was so much going on, but I’d guess it was 1 ½ to 2 minutes,” French says. “It seemed a lot longer.”

Lamar and French resumed CPR as additional units arrived with support crew from the 14th Street station to help stabilize Kinsey and move him from the street to the rescue unit. Gone are the days when the goal of an ambulance crew was to rush a patient to the ER before treatment could begin; now, patients are stabilized before they receive a slow, safer ride to the hospital.

It was 18 minutes from the first call for paramedics until the rescue unit departed. And while the rescue crew was increasingly hopeful that their patient would survive, the crowds at the race site had no idea.

A group of student volunteers from the FBHS Little Women, who had been assigned to direct runners to the finish line and cheer them on, were among the first to know what happened. With the rescue work going on in the street and vehicular traffic soon blocked, they kept their composure and directed runners to head onto the grass and then back to the road to finish their race.

“It was a traumatic situation but they handled it beautifully,” race co-director Susie DeMille says. “I am so proud of them. They kept doing what they needed to do to help everyone stay safe.”

DeMille directed spectators to stand back and told parents and their children to head for the children’s play zone. Robin Lentz, vice president of the Amelia Island Runners club, realized that Kinsey’s race number would yield his identity – but his race bib couldn’t be found.

However, race competitors have another identifying marker – a timing chip worn on the shoe. “He was already loaded onto the rescue unit. I yelled, ‘Get his chip, get his shoe,’” Lentz says. She ran with the shoe to the race-timing truck, where a computer scan yielded Kinsey’s name, the missing number – 278 – and from there, contact information.

“I called his wife and said very calmly, 'There’s been an accident, we don’t know what happened, your husband has fallen. We need for you to come this way.' His wife is a wonderful lady, she was so calm and collected.” As Sandra Kinsey drove to Fernandina Beach, Lentz rode in the front of the rescue unit to the local hospital. “I didn’t want him to be up there by himself.”

And as DeMille was urging spectators to move back, she saw one group of about six to 10 runners that she decided should stay.

“They said, ‘We’re kneeling here, praying,” DeMille recalls. “They were on their knees, very distraught, holding hands. I said, ‘You’re perfect where you are.’ I think they knew they couldn’t help him, and the best thing they could do was to pray to God for him. And obviously, the people who did help him worked miracles that day.”

Doctors operated on Kinsey after he was helicoptered to Jacksonville. “They found that I had 80% blockage In two arteries,” he says. “They put in two stents, and they say I’m going to be fine.”

They also said that his strong heart was one reason he survived.

“My doctor said, ‘Don’t let anybody tell you not to run.’ The running helped save my life as well. I feel very fortunate – my doctor said I will have a full recovery and won’t have any issues or disabilities. He said, your strong heart and the good, quick response basically saved your life.”

He also said a heart attack or cardiac arrest would have happened eventually anyway, perhaps not in a place where expert emergency care was so close at hand.

“He’s a walking miracle,” says Murallo. “He couldn’t have ‘picked’ a better spot to have this happen. Rescue units today are hospital emergency rooms on wheels.”

The EMS chief says everyone, runners or not, should have a stress test to look for hidden conditions such as Kinsey’s – especially people older than 40.

“It was a hidden thing that I wasn’t aware of,” Kinsey says. “You may think you’re fit, but if you don’t know you have blocked arteries, it could come on you the way it did me.”

Says Carter, one of the first-responders who helped save his life: "He's one of probably less than 2 percent who go into sudden cardiac arrest and walk out of the hospital and live their lives as if nothing had happened."

Kinsey hopes to resume running again in a few weeks, after he’s cleared by his doctor. One race he definitely plans to do next year is the second annual Reindeer Run half-marathon.

“They gave me a medal, even though I didn’t finish,” he said with a laugh. He has met DeMille, who visited him in the hospital, and met with rescue workers last Thursday to thank them “and hug their necks.”

"You guys are my heroes," he told them.

He is grateful to them and to everyone who helped that day, and afterward. “The community of Fernandina Beach has been wonderful to me, everyone has been extremely friendly and helpful,” he says. “It makes you feel good.”

And after an encounter with death, he has a renewed appreciation for life.

“I went home from the hospital on Tuesday (Dec. 6), and the next day I showered, I walked my dog, I drove to Starbucks, got coffee and walked to Memorial Park. I drank my Starbucks, with the wind and the sun on my face, looking at the river, and I thought: Life is good. You don’t know how good, sometimes, until you deal with something like this. Life is good. Life is sweet.”