Does a lapse in consciousness = death?

I just tried to read the memoir 14 Minutes by Alberto Salazar.

I was drawn to the subtitle: A Running Legend’s Life and Death and Life.

Here’s the deal: I think I might be setting my expectations too high for the books I’ve been reading lately. I’m looking to be inspired. And perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places for my inspiration. Perhaps I’m going to have to turn within.

This book was really poorly edited. I will admit that I enjoyed reading about Mr. Salazar’s anecdotes relating to his years training in high school and running the marathons. The guy clearly had a lot of talent, if Will Rogers invited you to train with him in 1976, there was no way you could’ve said no. But the material needs to have been organized better.

I was disappointed in the way that Alberto Salazar reports on his deaths. It’s like his jock ego hasn’t been able to allow him to delve deeper into what really happened. Time and again he refers to the 18% of people who had near death experiences and saw the light. As a person who saw “the light” (and who isn’t ready to discuss it publicly) I can tell you that seeing the light is an intense experience. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that his “death” was any more or less significant. The numbers show that 82% of near-deathers don’t see the light.

But he doesn’t do enough (in my estimation) with what happened to him in those 14 minutes when he was clinically dead.

Technically, if we do the math, after 3 minutes his brain was statistically unlikely to recover. But we’ve heard stories of people who have come back from being brain dead and suffered no long term ill-effects. He also contradicts himself in a way when he discusses his nightly prayer to the Virgin Mary asking that he be calm at the moment of his death. At his moment of death he was calm, his prayer was answered. (Couldn’t he show more gratitude toward his faith and to Mary?)

I’m all for being calm at the moment of death. That’s one of the things I’m striving for – but I want to add a layer of awareness. I want to be awake when I die. Like in a basketball game when a horn sounds the one-minute warning. I want that horn. That way I’ll know I have 59 seconds left to reflect on where I’m standing, how I’m feeling, and I want to be able to say, “thank you”(to the Universe) and drop dead. If there is any sort of after-life and I get to review my death and I don’t get to say “thank you,” I’m going to feel ripped off.

Which is why I tend to say thank you a lot now. For all I know I’ll die peacefully in my sleep or accidentally and in either of those instances the chances that I’ll get to say “thank you,” are greatly reduced.

I wish that Alberto’s drive on the track and now as a coach, translated to more curiosity and probing. His physician has classified the “death” as a “cardiac event” and isn’t sure what precipitated the event or why Alberto came back, largely in tact.

If I were Alberto I’d be going to great lengths to figure out why I had “died” for 14 minutes. But I don’t know if I’d be in such a rush to call it a death. I think I’ve look at more as a quarter of an hour lapse of consciousness. (Drinking to black out or fainting/passing out? Loss of consciousness does not necessarily equate with death.)

Feel free to go ahead and shell out a few bucks and read the book but what it boiled down to was this: Alberto had a lot of talent, was surrounded by other gifted long-distance runners, coaches and had his talent nurtured. He worked his ass off, was tough, and won several marathons.

All of that is impressive I’m not sure there’s an entire books worth of material here. Ultimately I couldn't finish the book because there was too much repetition and not enough substance.

And I’ve  ended up with another outlier on my hands. Today I think I’m going to go to the A & P and hang out in the section that sells potato chips and other nutritionally bankrupt foods so I can get a break from all these outliers.