REAL BODIES
BODY REBUILDER
After Keegan Hirst retired from his career as a professional rugby league player, he reinvented himself by founding Gay Man’s Coaching and beginning his Happy Healthy Homo podcast. But when a bolt-from-theblue diagnosis turned his life upside down, he was forced to rebuild his life and his relationship with his body
As told to Benji Johnson
Photography Francisco Gomez de Villaboa
Something is wrong. It’s autumn 2024, and I’m running through Scarborough with my partner Joel and our two dogs, Fen and Ava. Keeping my health and fitness in check is nothing foreign to me. Even though I had to redefine my relationship with exercise after retiring from professional rugby in 2023, movement and physicality are concepts ingrained into my being; it’s been my way of life for as long as I can remember. But right now, I can feel that my body isn’t responding to the calls I am making. “Joel, can you slow down a bit?”
“Honestly, if I slow anymore, I’ll be walking,” Joel utters without catching a breath.
Something is definitely wrong.
I’m now at the doctor’s, waiting nervously for the results after a series of tests and discussions. They believe it’s angina. It’s not.
One wrong diagnosis later, they confirm that I have dilated cardiomyopathy and heart failure. Confusion and uncertainty set in, but it is the anger I notice. My body has been an instrument, a tool, a vessel for progression my entire life — I’ve even made a career with its aid. From rugby to now working as a personal trainer, it’s never been an ornament but a working machine. How could this have happened to me?
I’m told that a healthy body is expected to have an ejection fraction — how much blood your heart pumps with each beat — of between 60–80 per cent. Mine is at 20 per cent. It’s strange; I was certain I had a healthy body. I think back to every out-of-breath run, the growing struggle when walking up the stairs, the gradual deterioration of my training sessions in the previous few months, and my unwavering certainty that all of this was just a chest infection too stubborn to clear despite the lack of cough or symptoms. Oh, how wrong I was.