Two-time breast cancer survivor Lori Milhaven, 60, is thrilled beyond words to be running as part of a mother/daughter team in Sunday’s New York City Marathon.
She’s the daughter.
Her mother, 80-year-old Laverne Johnson, will be leading the way, with a goal of recording the best time in her age division.
And Milhaven has no illusions about beating her mother’s time
“Just keeping up in life with her is a challenge,” Milhaven joked. “She’s always going.”
Laverne Johnson is pictured ahead of a New York City Marathon. (Courtesy of Laverne Johnson)
Until she wasn’t.
Last year, just weeks before the big run, Johnson suddenly had trouble just walking down the block.
Milhaven and Johnson were on their way to meet her other daughter at a Greek restaurant in Manhattan when the serial marathoner was suddenly out of breath and more tired than usual.
“We would always try to go to have dinner on Fridays together,” Johnson said. “That was our time together and just to relax.”
Two-time breast cancer survivor Lori Milhaven, left, is thrilled beyond words because she is running with her mother, Laverne Johnson, right, as part of a mother/daughter team in next month’s New York City Marathon. At center is Johnson’s other daughter, Jennifer Thompson. (Courtesy of Laverne Johnson)
The restaurant was only 10 blocks away, just half a mile by New York City measurements, the kind of distance that, for Johnson, is usually as easy as stepping over a crack in the sidewalk.
But this day, the restaurant might as well have been in Connecticut.
Johnson’s symptoms quickly got worse, and they went to an urgent care center. As soon as doctors examined her, they called an ambulance and rushed her to Mount Sinai West Medical Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“I get to the hospital and there’s 20 people waiting for me,” Johnson said. “’What’s going on?’ They were really concerned.”
There, a more comprehensive analysis determined that she was in severe heart failure, and that if she had waited any longer to get help, she might not have survived.
“She’s a pretty healthy woman who all of a sudden comes in and can’t walk a couple of blocks,” said Dan Pugliese, a cardiac electrophysiologist at Mount Sinai West. “Something was definitely wrong.”
Some of Laverne Johnson’s York City Marathon medals. (Courtesy of Laverne Johnson)
Pugliese determined that Johnson had developed an arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat, which got worse with her vigorous training.
Pugliese performed an emergency procedure to get her heart rate steady, prescribed some medicines, and told Johnson to take it easy.
What he did not tell her was to skip the marathon.
“If we can keep her in normal rhythm, she can do what activity she feels capable of doing,” Pugliese said. “Because she was already fit and well-trained, her ability to bounce back was much better.”
Laverne Johnson is pictured in a hospital bed after her health scare. (Courtesy of Laverne Johnson)
Weeks later, at age 79, Johnson ran in and completed her 19th New York City Marathon.
Johnson, who was born and raised in Monette, Missouri, started running as an adult student at Michigan State University, while working part-time and raising two daughters on her own.
“There was no time left to stay fit except to do something by myself,” she said. “So I started running, and I could run anytime, day or night. So that’s when I started it. And then we moved to New York City and I started seeing about the marathon.”
Laverne Johnson wears an “80/20” outfit in honor of her 20th New York City Marathon at the age of 80. (Courtesy of Laverne Johnson)
That was in 1990. But when the competitive Johnson realized early on that she would never actually win the marathon, she set another improbable goal. She wanted to finish 20 of them by the time she was 80.
Johnson, an entrepreneur who runs a corporate training business, was well on her way until a few weeks ago when she had another medical setback. Doctors, who were monitoring her closely, noticed that she had developed another arrhythmia, but they caught it much earlier.
They performed another cardioversion procedure to shock her heart back into a normal rhythm, and Johnson is back on track.
“Last year when I did it, it was a run-walk, because that was my doctor’s instructions,” Johnson said. “This year, I don’t have any instructions. I’m running the whole thing.”