Senior muscleman lives with heart ailment
“If you think young, you stay young. If you think old, you die young.”
These are the words — a mantra, if you will — of 70-year-old athlete and bodybuilder Peter Nicoll.
“The brain is the most powerful thing we have,” he says. “It really is mind over matter, and you have to do things for yourself. No one is going to do it for you — no one.”
In some ways, Nicoll is a walking, talking miracle.
He’s had more health issues than most people, including everything from Reiter’s syndrome — a rare combination of three types of arthritis that landed him in a wheelchair for eight months — to cystoid macular edema, which left him blind for a period of time.
But it’s the condition he lives with daily that would probably scare most of us silly. Nicoll has atrial fibrillation, an electrical problem of the heart that causes it to beat uncontrollably and irregularly at speeds of up to 300 beats per minute. It comes on without warning and can last for minutes — or hours.
But even that condition doesn’t keep him down.
Nicoll says 40 hours in a day wouldn’t be enough for him. If he’s not working out with his trainer — former bodybuilder Emery Dora at Physical Park, a gym near his home located near Montreal — he’s either detailing cars or organizing events for the Montreal Jaguar Club.
And he’s into photography. And singing.
“Nicoll, who was born in Birmingham, England, and moved to Canada at age eight, says he was “a scrawny kid” who had every childhood illness out there.
When Nicoll was 12, his father — a naval man and Olympic running hopeful (until the war broke out) who walked 10 kilometres a day until he died at 92 — gave him a copy of a naval exercise book (which he still has), a pair of Weider hand springs and a makeshift set of barbells. And he began to train himself.
He became so muscular, he was given the nickname “the Cruncher” in high school.
He even took on the school bully. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but when I dangled him over a banister, I earned the respect of the whole school. And guess what? He never bullied anyone ever again.”
At age 35, Nicoll took up taekwondo and did that for about three years, eventually switching to karate. “I lost a lot of weight,” he says. “I was very lean; martial arts can be incredibly demanding.”
He stayed that way for more than 20 years, but in his early 60s he decided to bulk up again. And he did it the all-natural way.
“I’ve never taken a drug in my life,” he said. “I don’t believe in that craziness.”
Which is obviously a good thing, given his atrial fibrillation.
Nicoll developed the condition in his late 50s and went for periods where it did not recur.
When it did, it was with a vengeance.
During one episode, he was rushed to a hospital by ambulance every day for 10 days.
Doctors have tried various medications to no avail. He’s consulted naturopaths and herbalists with little success. Nicoll has learned to deal with it.
One thing that seems to be working, he says — fingers crossed — is that he’s undergone three ablation procedures. (This involves placing electrodes into areas of the heart to “destroy” nerve endings believed to cause fibrillation.)
When Nicoll was 65, he turned his attention to bodybuilding. A former colleague suggested he enter a competition, but he wasn’t sure it was something he wanted to try.
With time, and a little prodding, he decided to give it a shot.
In his first competition, at age 66, he placed first in his Ultra Grand Masters division.