Why I Wear a Go Sport ID

I have been running and/or exercising with some sort of identification and emergency contact information on me for at least a couple of years now.  Being from Dallas I’ve heard the news stories of a young female who passed away during a well known race here and a young female who was in accident on a well known trail which resulted in her death. Sorry, this is not one of our typical happy go lucky posts.

Sometimes there are instances where even having that ID on you makes absolutely no difference.  Which is NOT me saying us that as an excuse to NOT take measures to make sure people know who you are, who your emergency contacts are and what you are allergic to in emergency situations.

How many of you have been in or around an emergency situation?  Is that what made you go out and buy an identification product?  Or had you already decided it was the safe thing to do?

My memory is foggy now on whether my ID came first or the holy crap moment, but nonetheless my sad experience is this –

I’m not normally a late evening worker outer (meaning after say 8pm), but  for whatever reason I had gone to my gym (who shall remain nameless) and parked myself on an elliptical with my music going one evening.  I am doing my workout thing and notice a dude gets on the elliptical next to me.  Oh, and look he doesn’t stay on for that long so I think “must be doing a pre weights warm up.”  I can see him out of the corner of my eye as he got off and went behind the machines which back up to a wall.  Then all of a sudden he’s no longer in my peripheral vision and there’s a thud.

When I look he’s fallen flat on his face.  None of the gym members working out in that area really knew what happened, but as people began to talk to him it was clear that he was unresponsive.  I grabbed my phone and dialed 911.  While I am on the phone with them we all see he’s stopped breathing normally and ever thirty seconds or so his body is gasping for air.  A bunch of gym members flip him over on his back and then the member that was a nurse began administering CPR on him.  The paramedics get there and being to work on him.  I have to be honest and say that the gym employees were really not a big help in this situation nor did they seem very prepared for it.  We all watched this guy get wheeled out of the gym and I looked at my phone to see how long it had been since I’d dialed 911.  Being a former lifeguard and going through all the training I knew that the 45 minutes spent trying to revive this guy without success meant it would take a miracle for him to be alive.

The next day I put up some sort of facebook status about what I’d witnessed and how important I thought it was to have an ID on you while exercising.  My status is followed by a message from a college friend asking me for details, naming a High School friend of her’s and that he’d passed away last night.  Of course, I immediately search for his name on facebook and it’s the guy from the elliptical next to me.

I find out he’s only two weeks older than me.  Than me!  At that time I only had a few months left of being a 25 year old!  A 25 year old guy next to me at the gym had a heart attack and died!  He’d been in a serious relationship for a number of years and of course I start thinking about how my boyfriend and I just celebrated 2 years together.  My heart immediately hurt for the dude’s girlfriend (and it did for his family).  I can’t even tell you how shook up I was from those 45 minutes at the gym that night.

From that day forward I’ve been a huge promoter of wearing IDs when running.  I am not sure in this dude’s situation if it would have changed anything, but I know his parents and girlfriend might have known sooner.

Are you someone who has put off getting an ID? How come?

On weight loss shows you often hear contestants say “I need to lose the weight so I can be around for my kids as they grow up!”  To me the next step from there is protecting yourself when you are exercising to lose the weight or running outdoors so that you can ensure you are around for your kids in that way as well.

Over the past few months we’ve kind of fallen in love with the Go Sport ID.  The heart and spirit of this company is felt through the twitterverse! 🙂  And we can’t help but love that they are a Texas based company!  We both have been rocking the Inspire ID and love them! Whoever decided to give customers the option of buying a multipack of colors for the wristbands was GENUIS!  I get all stupid excited to change the band out!  The Inspire only costs $18.95, the multipack of band is an extra $5-6 and there is FREE shipping!

That means it costs less than $20 for someone to know what you’re allergic to in case of an emergency.  Less than $20 for someone to contact a family member even if something minor happens to you and you can’t call.  How is that not worth it?

-Beth