WARRIOR 

THING;I’VEHAD TWOHEARTSURGERIES, STOPPEDRUNNING FORAGESANDSTILLMANAGED TORUN

After giving up running in her teens due to a serious heart condition, Charlotte is back and she’s more than making up for lost time…

Words: Rachel Ifans

Ultrarunner Charlotte Clarke was born with a heart condition called Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) although she didn’t

know that until she was diagnosed at the age of 21. In fact, it took seven years – from 14 to 21 – for doctors to work out exactly what it was that made Charlotte’s heart go into an irregular and scary pattern of overdrive.

Charlotte, who’d always run with her dad as a young child and was one of the few schoolkids who relished the idea of the weekly cross country, explains how SVT felt: “My heart would palpitate at 180 beats per minute and this was when I was sitting down! It was like I was running a marathon to be honest and would last for hours. It was exhausting.”

The attacks were sporadic and unpredictable which made it very hard for Charlotte to put in measures to manage them or work around them.

It also, she says, made it very hard for doctors to unearth the root cause during her teens. “It was quite terrifying when I was younger. We’d go to A&E, only to get there and my heart go back into its normal rhythm. On occasion, I’d be accused of making the whole thing up,” she remembers.

SVT is a condition where extra tissue in the heart means signals get caught in a loop and, while Charlotte and her parents knew there was definitely something very wrong, unless the signal force by putting Charlotte on a treadmill.

Charlotte went from running 12K to taking on a 50K ultra in just six months

Charlotte’s teens were a frustrating time when the running she’d loved as a child had to be put on the backburner. After finishing school, she went off to university to study dance and it was then that she was finally diagnosed; a diagnosis that resulted in two operations to remove the troublesome extra tissue.