Chorley man Darren Nicholls who survived a cardiac arrest gets ready for tough Ironman challenge

This month marks Heart Awareness Month and also the sixth year anniversary of Darren Nicholls’s life was saved by quick thinking strangers. The engineer, , 52, from Charnock Richard, collapsed after a training run for Chorley Council’s Couch to 5k event in February 2017 and needed 20 minutes of CPR and a defibrillator to re-start his heart by fellow runners.

He was then put into an induced coma for a week to lessen the chance of another cardiac arrest and went through a four-hour heart triple bypass. When he came round he couldn’t remember anything of what had happened. He attended Preston charity Heartbeat’s rehabilitation classes in Chorley to aid his road to recovery.

However, determined to not let this stop him in his tracks, seven months after undergoing surgery he took part in his first 10k run at Run Preston in September 2017. Six years on and he has completed several half marathons, full marathons, the Coast-to-Coast bike ride, an Ironman UK challenge in Bolton and taken up skiing.

Considered to be one of the most difficult one day sporting events in the world, an Ironman Triathlon is one of a series of long-distance triathlon races organized by the World Triathlon Corporation, consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride and a marathon 26.22-mile run completed in that order, a total of 140.6 miles. Darren will be undertaking this challenge once more this time in Majorca in May.

He said: “I am excited to be taking on the challenge again. In 2019 I did Ironman in Bolton which is quite a chunky challenge which included a swim, a bike ride and then a marathon which I ran with the people who saved my life.

"It was quite upsetting for them but as I had no memory of having the cardiac arrest it was alright for me. I am eternally grateful because there’s no doubt without these people I would not have survived or been in a normal state today and I would not have went on to achieve what I have done today had it not been for my cardiac arrest."

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