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Mike Raffan completes home ultra-marathon in his garden just seven weeks after heart surgery

A north-east man completed a 106-mile ultra-marathon in his garden- just seven weeks after undergoing major heart surgery.

Mike Raffan ran the extraordinary distance in just 27 and a half hours.

He lives near Collieston and started the effort at 6 am last Friday before finishing just after 9am on Saturday with short 10-minute breaks every so often.

To succeed with this, he mapped out a 100m route (16 laps per mile) in his garden.

He had only recently recovered from a serious heart operation.

Last year Mike noticed that he was finding it hard to breathe while running uphill, as though there was a weight on his chest. Over time, it got harder and harder and he sought medical advice.

He said: “Tests revealed that I have an anomalous right coronary artery from the opposite sinus with an intermural circuit, which basically means I was born with my right artery growing out of the wrong place.

“The surgery I needed was too specialist to be done in Aberdeen, so I had to go to Glasgow Golden Jubilee Hospital. I had the operation on February 25 and was out of hospital after just three days.

“The nurses on the ward were not sure about discharging me so early as they had never let anyone out in less than four days – the preference is seven. However, I passed all their fitness tests and the surgeon said it was OK for me to go.”

Mike  has so far raised more than £1,300 for the Glasgow Golden Jubilee Hospital, as a thank you to the medical team who looked after him during his surgery.

After just 10 days of being home, Mike went for a slow two-mile run with his wife Annette keeping an eye on him.

“Every time I went out, I felt I had to hold my chest. The rehab physiotherapist told me this was due to the impact and that my chest bones had not fused together properly, so I started doing a lot of cycling instead to get to get my fitness back.

“It’s only been in the last two weeks I have started running properly again. I relied on muscle memory and stubbornness to get me through the challenge. The run was slow. Stopping every 50m to turn around was like doing a bleep test for 27 hours.”