The fitness instructor who ‘died’ while training for a marathon

Grant Williams was out on a run before his heart stopped on Smithdown Road – he is now calling for more to be done

A fitness instructor whose heart stopped while training for a marathon has issued a stark message after he died for eight minutes. Grant Williams, from Woolton, was training for the Manchester marathon on March 9, 2024, when his heart stopped for eight minutes.

He was 11 miles into his 12-mile run when he suffered a cardiac arrest on Smithdown Road. Grant, who has always been a fit and healthy man, had been out for a run with members of his fitness class, NG-UP Active, when he felt a pain in his chest before suffering a cardiac arrest.

He told the ECHO earlier this year: “We were training every Saturday. Just the Saturday before we had done a 19-mile run. On March 9, we were only going to do a 12 mile-route. We had just stopped to take a picture. We were about 11 miles in coming down Smithtown and then I just can’t remember a thing.

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“I had a cardiac arrest – your heart just stops and you don’t feel or see anything – I [cardiac] arrested twice on the bottom of Smithtown Road and I can’t remember falling, hearing voices, seeing anyone, I can’t remember the CPR, or being shocked by the defibrillators. I was lucky that the group I was with started performing CPR straight away.”

Doctor Melanie Hamilton had been cycling home from her night shift at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital when she noticed a group of people standing around Grant who was “fighting for his life”, and sprung into action. Melanie took over the CPR and brought Grant back around.

But then he fell into a second cardiac arrest. Thankfully a second off-duty doctor, who had been getting his haircut in a nearby barbers, rushed to help. The doctors used a defibrillator from a nearby Tesco to save his life.

The 52-year-old has now claimed more needs to be done to make sure defibrillators are more accessible. He said this week: “Being an Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) survivor is surreal. If it wasn’t for publicly accessible defibrillators then I wouldn’t be speaking to you right now.

“I think going forward it should be absolutely compulsory in high schools that defib training should be given as it makes no odds what age you are. Everyone should be confident in using them. It’s disappointing that it isn’t law yet. I’ve put training on for my fitness group in Liverpool and plan to do it again in a few weeks time.

“With the VAT situation, the price of defibs now is £1000 upwards, even for small businesses it is so difficult to raise that kind of money, especially with the cost of living at the minute. With me being a college lecturer in St Helens, I’ve put in place from September that 100 of our students will take part in defibrillator training because it is so vital.

“When you’re walking down a high street, every shop, every facility should have the defibs signposted there. But the government need to help with the funding for this to happen. They saved my life and I would absolutely recommend that they’re put in every park, every shopping centre, everywhere.”

According to Imperative Training, a company which works to educate and supply life-saving knowledge and equipment across the country, a 2023 study from the European Society of Cardiology found that the lack of public access defibrillators in the UK is resulting in needless death due to the delay from the point of cardiac arrest to defibrillator shock. The figures show that, on average, the nearest defibrillator is a 19-minute round walk from any given postcode in the UK.

If CPR and a shock from an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) are given within four minutes of collapse, survival rates from OHCA are around 70%.