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For Ed Barnes, a finance manager for an area construction company, the tick, tick of his artificial heart valve is a constant reminder of a timely and remarkable medical intervention that saved his failing heart and opened a new chapter of life. It was also a call to action that took him from simply watching the Marathon to running in it.
Barnes, the husband of Shani Walker, an FHS graduate from the class of 2009, went through an operation at the Children’s Hospital in 2005, when he was 16, in which a valve developed by St. Jude’s Hospital brought a new sound and rhythm to daily life and a new sense of purpose.
“I was born with a heart murmur and by the time I was a teenager, the bicuspid valve was leaking back into the heart causing the valve and chamber to expand,” Barnes explained. With his new ticking heart, Barnes said he and his father continued to enjoy watching the Marathon together but a story his father told of a cousin of his who had run in the event after recovering from a brain tumor, inspired him to promise that he, too, would run the Marathon some day. When Barnes lost his father in 2011, he felt it was time to start making that promise a reality, starting off slow and building his capacity to go the distance in a variety of running events.
Then he finally won a lottery spot for the 2019 NYC Marathon. There, he learned about the Abbott World Major Marathons, a championship-style competition for marathon runners that started in 2006. It is a points-based competition founded on the six (recently expanded to seven) major marathon races recognized as the most high-profile. Running in all six, became a new goal, Barnes explained. He finished Chicago in 2021. Then, he finished Berlin in 2022 and completed the London Marathon only a week later.
In 2022, Barnes even set a Guinness World Record, for the fastest marathon with an artificial heart valve. Barnes has now e finished five of the six Abbott World Major Marathons. Only Boston is left. On April 21, when he finishes that race, he will be the first runner with an artificial heart valve to get the Abbott Six Star Medal.
Wife Shani Walker has also taken up running, but so far, only to the half-marathon level. But Ed’s training and travels have energized the couple, powering their travels together and giving Walker a role as his ‘manager,’ handling travel and logistical details for both of them. The pair also have a group of close friends that take care of their menagerie consisting to two dogs and three cats when they are traveling for marathons.
Why run Boston last? Walker explains, it was a strategic choice. When the pair learned about the Majors, they realized that traveling to the more distant locations for the final race would be burdensome for friends and family from Massachusetts, so they prioritized first the other US-based locations and then, worked in overseas locations. The Berlin-London pairing was serendipity. London is usually in the spring but was rescheduled for a date just a week after Berlin Marathon. “So we had a visit to Paris, between the two events,” recalls Walker.
And Barnes admits his doctor wasn’t on board. “He said it was okay to run a Marathon but when I told him I did two in a row he said, ‘well don’t do that again!’”
