Par Samuel Sauneuf
Published on 13 May 22 at 16:30
This is the story of a man who has lived a thousand lives with sport. Laurent Dubost, it’s a barely believable resume. He was a racing cyclistcompeted in the world speed-sail championships (land windsurfing), practiced running, fencing, judo, swimming.
Creator of the association Cardiac des Montshe now promotes the beneficial effects of sport on cardiovascular diseases and organizes, at Dol-de-Bretagneon July 2 and 3, 2022, an event for the benefit of the Heart and Research Foundation.
“Sport was my life”
Laurent Dubost, in the 80s and 90s, is a carcass of muscles, lungs inflated with helium and supercharged energy.
Rally driver, car and motorcycle, he even has several Dakars on the clock. Not to mention its participation in the “Pulsion passport”. The “ancestor” of modern multi-sport adventures.
A crazy raid, over 12,000 km, via eight countries, to be chained windsurfing, motorcycling, running, swimming, cycling, etc. “I had this ability to be able to adapt quickly to a new discipline,” says the very young sixty-year-old today.
“Sport was my life. I had the energy, I was curious, I was thirsty for discoveries and challenges. »
Laurent Dubost has thus gone through his adult life at this unbridled pace, even if it means sometimes resigning and returning, once his prowess has been accomplished, to the company specializing in artificial insemination which employs him.
“I was exhausted”
Laurent Dubost is also the story of a man struck down by illness. That of heart which made him capsize in his fifties.
“I was getting more and more tired. I went home exhausted at noon. I no longer had the strength to cook myself, I fell into my couch. I didn’t understand what was going on. »
Laurent’s heart is getting tired at breakneck speed. Time doesn’t help matters. Neither the treatments nor the hospitalizations.
A bicuspid aortic leak is finally diagnosed. She is the cause of this severe heart failure.
open heart surgery
No choice, Laurent Dubost must be done transplant two heart valves. He is 56 years old and underwent open-heart surgery on April 4, 2017. It was that or certain death a few months later.
His sister, who was diagnosed by medicine with the same pathology at the time, will not be so lucky. She will die a month before the planned operation.
“I no longer felt alive”
A new life then begins. A life made up of drugs, rest, a heart “blocked” at 110 pulses per minute. A life at odds with that which the Breton, originally from Normandy, has always lived.
“I no longer felt alive. The sedentary lifestyle weighed on me. The sofa, the television, it was no longer possible. »
The click will come during a stay in Ventoux.
“I was frustrated to climb this legendary mountain by car. I saw all these cyclists, I wanted to do like them. »
“It doesn’t have to end”
For Laurent, it is obvious. “Life is not that. Everything does not have to stop because of an operation. It’s decided, he’ll go up the Ventoux by bike also the following year.
His first workout? Four kilometres, around his home in Taden, near Dinan. “I came home exhausted. At his own pace, quietly, gradually, he pushes on the pedals until he completes 70 km. The game is almost won.
“OK you are sick but…”
With the aid of electrically assisted bicycle and his friend, the late Hubert Auriol, he climbed the Ventoux in 2019. “We ended up at sixty”, laughs the phoenix of the effort.
Laurent Dubost has just given birth to a new chapter in his life. That of encouraging others, like him, to “move for their hearts”.
“OK, you’ve been sick, but don’t stay sedentary. A sedentary lifestyle accelerates aging. Sport keeps you fit. »
A challenge that has become collective
There is life after heart surgery. You can do a thousand things, and you have to do them on condition that you “do them at your own pace”. This is essentially the message of the Cardiac des Monts association created by Laurent Dubost. His personal challenge has become collective for the benefit of research into cardiac pathologies.
And after a new climb of Ventoux in 2020, Laurent Dubost changed gear by launching the Cardiac in the Dol country and the bay of Mont Saint-Michel in parallel. With Hubert Crespel, former physiotherapist and osteopath, passionate about “sports care” and obsessed “by prevention”, he brought together more than 200 cyclists alongside the legend of French cycling last year. Bernard Hinault.
This year again, his association will organize the 2e edition of the Cardiac from the Pays de Dol and the Bay of Mont Saint-Michel the weekend of July 2 and 3 (read below) before a new edition at Mont Ventoux on September 17 and 18.
With heart specialists
Laurent Dubost has also surrounded himself with specialists like François Carré, sports physiologist cardiologist, and Jean-Philippe Verhoye, hospital surgeon, alongside whom he testified again recently at a public meeting organized in Baguer-Pican.
With again and again this same speech:
“The goal is to arouse interest in sport and physical activity for everyone, whatever their level. It’s about leading the public on the paths of effort, discovery, sharing, progress, history and above all the happiness of being in good physical condition. »
Laurent Dubost puts his heart into the work to get this message. And if it’s not the craziest challenge of his incredible sporting life, it is undoubtedly the most beautiful.
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