Mike Dyson: A Silent Heart Attack, Faith, and a Gym Empire

Mike Dyson: My name is Mike Dyson, and I'm eager to be healthy.

Michael Scott Eger: Today on the show we have Mike Dyson. Welcome. Why don't you tell us a little about yourself, so we can hear it in your own voice?

Mike Dyson: I currently live in Pensacola, Florida. I have four children and just welcomed our tenth and eleventh grandchildren — my son had identical twin girls, quite a shock for everyone, but awesome. So we have eleven grandkids now. I'm a franchise owner; I own several Anytime Fitness locations. I had five up until last year, sold two, so I'm down to three. I got into that through a health challenge back in the early 2000s. I was diagnosed with a major lower-back issue and I wasn't a candidate for surgery. In 2004, I was in a church service and felt like God called me to change my health. That set me on this course. I started walking on a treadmill in pain, every day in pain, and little by little I got better. Fast forward all these years, and here we are — franchise owners in fitness. Who would have figured any of it? Sometimes our story turns out much different than we anticipated. But it's been good.

Michael Scott Eger: So have you always been healthy?

Mike Dyson: I can't say I always was. I had some colitis and a few things when I was younger, but no major health challenges along the way. I was in athletics most of my life, and I was a Marine for over twelve years, so you're forced to exercise — that's forced discipline, not your own. So for the majority of my life I'd say I was healthy, until my major issue in 2023.

Michael Scott Eger: And have you always been happy?

Mike Dyson: No, I can't say I have. A lot happened at the beginning of my life that created things internally. My father left before I was born. At that time — 1960, showing my age — becoming a single mother was much different than it is today. There was quite a stigma about divorce. My grandparents and my mom talked, and they decided it'd be best for her not to have the child. So she drove across state lines into Kentucky to have an abortion. Fortunately, a woman named Lena Niner convinced her otherwise. That's why I'm here today. So that rejection was in my life early on. Then my mom had narcolepsy for the first twelve years of my life. It was pretty lonely growing up. My dad worked a lot; so did my stepdad. All that void — the father leaving, no answered questions, and five years later my mom remarrying — there was a lot of shame around it. I was five when my mom pulled up with my new dad in the car; they'd just gotten married, and I really wasn't privy to any of it. It was almost like you couldn't talk about it. I write about this in my book. There was an incident, and it was like there was shame about the whole thing. Divorce back then was different, so I think they just wanted to keep it quiet, and I wasn't told much of anything. I didn't grow up in a household where love was expressed. So to answer your question the long way: no. I was a kid with a lot of voids, and I didn't know how to process them. Later in life you try to fill them through relationships, sex, alcohol, drugs — all the “normal” things. I call them normal; they shouldn't be. You're just trying to cope with a void you don't even understand. The void drives you. From a Christian perspective, it's like the void of the father I needed pushing me in a direction I don't really want to go. So no, I was not happy for quite some time.

Michael Scott Eger: You overcame a lot — that's a lot for anyone to handle. Did your relationship with your parents ever recover?

Mike Dyson: It did. When I rededicated my life to the Lord in 1993, one of the first things I heard in my spirit was that I had to stop blaming. That set me on a course to stop seeing everyone else as the problem — even though some had done things to me — and to walk through forgiveness, realizing they were doing the best they could. And for the ones who may have intended harm, I still had to keep my own heart clean about it. I remember one Thanksgiving, maybe around '96, at my mother's house in Illinois. In front of everyone, I asked their forgiveness for how I'd been as a son — I had already forgiven them. My mom didn't talk to me for a couple of weeks, and I couldn't understand why. She was so taken aback she didn't know how to respond. Isn't that something? I was the one asking them to forgive me. But my relationship with my mom got stronger when I became a believer. My stepdad was an interesting one — old school. He never told me he loved me. I probably got closest to him near the end of his life. He ended up with cancer, eventually bone cancer. One night I woke up feeling like I was supposed to write him a letter, so I did. I told him how much I appreciated him, and put some spiritual things in there too. It took him a long time to read it, which was strange — you could almost take it as an offense. But it got me started. I began calling him every week, and every week I'd end the call telling him I loved him — and I did. I wasn't doing it to get a response. About a year later, for the first time, he said he loved me back. That was really something. So yes, I reconciled. I made the effort to do what I needed to do to be right in it, whether they were right or not. Because sometimes we're looking for a response from the other side, and I have to do the right thing because it's the right thing — not because the other person is always right. You follow me?

Mike Dyson: My biological dad — when I was thirty-eight, my grandfather gave me some information, and the internet was just coming out. Back then you could find personal details pretty easily. I Googled him; six names popped up, and the third was actually him. I spoke to him on the phone — an interesting conversation, but it didn't last long. He said he wanted to be a part of my life, this and that, but he didn't. I tell people it's not always like the Oprah Winfrey show — it's not always everyone embracing you. You try to be prepared to be rejected twice, but you really can't be. So he fell off the map again. Then about four years ago I saw him on Facebook, made a comment, and he came clean — asked me to forgive him for the things he did. We had a video call. About six months later, he was killed in a freak accident: he was on a golf cart and got hit by a motorcycle. So it's wild how it all came about. I was actually supposed to think he was dead — I have a letter in my drawer that was meant to tell me he'd died — but I was never really told anything.

Michael Scott Eger: Some feedback from my end: talking to you feels like a fire hose of information, and it's intense. You've given us this personal story of dealing with rejection and coming to terms with it — and we haven't even really talked about your health story yet. I read something about chest pains?

Mike Dyson: Yeah, I had heart surgery in 2023.

Michael Scott Eger: And you were in the health and wellness space.

Mike Dyson: I was. I was completely healthy. It was a complete, utter blindside.

Michael Scott Eger: Do you know what happened?

Mike Dyson: I know what happened, but not necessarily how it came about. I rededicated my life in '93; I didn't live a healthy lifestyle before that, and as a Marine I probably played too hard, not in a good way. But I've been exercising ever since I got that word to change my health in 2004 — eating right, doing the right things. In September of 2023, I woke up one morning feeling like I was drunk. On my way to the bathroom I was almost banging into the walls. I don't drink, but I know what drunk feels like. It was strange. I was going to play tennis that morning at six, and I decided to go anyway — sometimes exercise makes you feel better. I played and did fine, a little off but nothing terrible. The next week the feeling came again, and this time I went to urgent care. I failed two EKGs. They wanted me to take an ambulance to the hospital; I said I'd drive myself. Then I came out of the bathroom and could hardly walk, so I took the ambulance. It felt really weird lying in an ambulance completely healthy — resting heart rate mid-fifties, blood pressure always spot on. They found troponin in my blood, the enzyme created when there's stress on the heart. They take it three times, and if it keeps rising, that's a problem. Mine kept rising, so they admitted me. They did an echo, everything you can think of, and all my tests came back with flying colors. The echo tech even said, “Your heart's lit up, it's perfect.” They discharged me the next day, patted me on the back, said I was good to go. By the time I reached the nurses' station I felt exactly like I had before they admitted me. Crazy.

Mike Dyson: I went home, and about a week later — almost to the day — the same thing happened. Admitted again, troponin again. They did a nuclear stress test, everything — nothing. They thought I had indigestion. Fortunately I kept pressing, because I know my body. They did an angiogram before Thanksgiving and found severe stenosis. When they did the heart cath, they found 80% blockage in my widowmaker and 99% in a large branch off it. They couldn't stent me — I'd have coded on the table; it was too close. The surgeon came out and said, “Open-heart surgery.” I was totally shocked. I went from zero to a hundred — it felt like getting hit by a truck. I was grieved. I cried a lot. I wasn't shaking my fist at God; I was grateful it was found. But now you feel like a ticking time bomb. And that same month of September, a surgeon had just moved from Fort Myers to Pensacola, and he brought a minimally invasive procedure with him — going in through the side instead of cracking the chest open the traditional way. Because I was healthy, they'd typically only do a single bypass, but I needed a double. He felt confident in my conditioning that he could do it. So on December 28th, one day before my birthday — I was sixty-two — he did a six-and-a-half-hour minimally invasive double bypass. Eight weeks later I was on the tennis court physically. But eight months later I began to struggle emotionally with the whole thing. It's a very strange thing.

Michael Scott Eger: I can only imagine. I survived a pulmonary embolism and a head trauma. With the embolism I could feel something was off — hiccups all the time, my heart rate racing, everything trying to compensate. It took so long to process. I was sick until my now-wife basically told me to go to the hospital. I said I'd go to the doctor first. I did the EKG, then the D-dimer, and it was borderline. They sent me to the hospital, and it was about thirty-six hours before I was admitted. It took time to clear that clock. The blockage comes and goes, comes and goes, and then it just stays — and it takes time to realize you're actually having one. I can only imagine it from your side: you've got blood, you don't have blood, you've got blood, you don't have blood, and then you're in crisis. But you survived it. So where did the gyms come into the picture?

Mike Dyson: I already had the gyms. I was in the automotive industry for years — worked for one of the largest automotive companies in the world, at a staff-level position. When I was called to change my health and started walking on that treadmill in pain, I did that at a wellness center for about a year and a half. Then an Anytime Fitness opened up close to our house and shaved minutes off my morning, which matters when you're working a corporate schedule. So we joined — it was much more convenient. The other part of that word in the church service was that my calling was being restored. I'd been called to ministry dramatically in 1994, so I felt I was being drawn out of the corporate world. I put the numbers together for Anytime Fitness. We were paycheck-to-paycheck people — many times there were parentheses at the bottom of the checkbook, if you know what that means. That's negative, and you're waiting for the check to hit. We had no capital in the bank. The only thing we had was about forty-some, almost fifty thousand dollars of equity in our home. So we fasted from media — not food — for ten days. We got quiet: no TV, no radio, nothing. And we didn't hear no. We took that as a yes and stepped into the franchise. That was 2008, our first one. We opened the second in 2010, and it wasn't profitable for almost four years. Then I felt impressed by that same voice to expand that location — while it wasn't profitable, as crazy as that sounds. We also had to refurbish it, like when Taco Bell makes you redo the building to look better. How that got financed was its own miracle. When we reopened, we'd gone from thirty-six hundred to six thousand square feet — and two weeks later, one of the largest, nicest gyms nearby closed down. We went from unprofitable for four years to being a top-ten-percent club in the nation. Who would have known? The Lord knew. We just happened to listen. Then I opened a third, a fourth, bought one in 2019, and just sold two. So we're back to three. I was already an avid fitness person in 2023 when the heart issue hit.

Michael Scott Eger: Let's go back to the prompting — the media fast, is that what you call it?

Mike Dyson: Yeah. We just got quiet, didn't listen to any outside noise.

Michael Scott Eger: You were cutting out the static to hear a no.

Mike Dyson: Correct. We were really seeking God on whether that was our way to go — whether to step into the franchise or not. It's a scary thing, putting up money you don't really have, just the equity of your house, living paycheck to paycheck. We were givers, but we couldn't save much. We didn't live extravagantly — a decent house, no new cars or car payments. It just takes a lot to live, and we had four kids. So we fasted to hear a yes or a no, and we didn't hear a no. We took it as a yes and took the step.

Michael Scott Eger: Roll back for me — I want to be clear how the yes formed.

Mike Dyson: The yes formed by the lack of a no. That's how it formed.

Michael Scott Eger: I get the yes from the no. But how did the idea even get in your mind that you'd become a gym owner?

Mike Dyson: Good question. I think it came from that word about changing my health and my earlier call to ministry — I felt that calling being restored. I just had this impression in what I call my “knower,” kind of in my gut, where I feel like I hear the voice of God, like in your heart. A sense that I wasn't going to be doing what I was doing much longer. It wasn't zero to a hundred — it was a smidgen at first. We'd thought about businesses, but there were some we just wouldn't go into. The fitness industry is great — it's a job where you help people with their health. It really fit the calling if you think about it: we're ministering to people in their health. You can minister to someone spiritually, but you can also minister to them physically. So when we got quiet, we were really just trying to sense whether we were being blocked — like, “No, this is your own idea, wrong move” — or whether we felt peace to go forward. It was peace. We didn't feel blocked, and that would have been the no. We felt it was the step to take.

Michael Scott Eger: Okay. So we've got your childhood and the rejection, the businesses, your faith, the gyms, surviving the heart surgery, the yes and the no. The fast is interesting to me. Let's finish the arc — where are you today?

Mike Dyson: I'm still coming out of some of the emotional darkness from the heart surgery. It was a strange thing to be so grateful and yet feel so dark at the same time. I held gratitude in one hand and grief in the other, trying to balance them. I've done a lot of trauma ministry with people — inner soul-healing work — but living it myself was perplexing. I feel like I've come out of a lot of it now, which is great. I'm very solid in my relationship with God. And going to my book: I'd had those notes for seven years but never wrote it. Last fall I was awakened in the middle of the night and felt I should revisit my notes. The next morning I felt encouraged to write, and I wrote the book in three months. I think coming through the suffering of the heart surgery, I wrote from a different posture, a different heart — no pun intended. Physically I'm in great shape. I'm sixty-five, and I could give you lots of stats. I didn't notice a lot different after the surgery because I was already in good shape. I feel hopeful, and I'm believing this book will help others see how you can overcome and come out of things, even in the midst of severe darkness.

Michael Scott Eger: Surviving that was probably an inflection point that changed your whole worldview. In the book, do you put words to the guilt you felt? It seems like a complex thing that isn't fully coming through in conversation — I'm intrigued to read how you get it onto the page.

Mike Dyson: That's a tough one to describe. All of us, at times — our conscience speaks to us. We know certain things aren't right. Say I'm in an aisle and suddenly think about slipping a candy bar into my jacket. My conscience would speak to me, inwardly, and I'd just know that's not the right thing. The inward voice I hear is God's voice. Scripture says, “My sheep will know my voice.” We don't always expect that God speaks that way, but He does. And that comes from intentionality in relationship. You're married, I'm married — there's an intentionality to it. If my wife and I moved into two different states and never talked, we'd be married but wouldn't have much of a relationship. My book talks about that intentionality. It gives some tools, and I put a testimony from my own life in every chapter to show where these things actually apply. It's hard to describe, but I know it's God's voice leading and guiding me — there's no doubt. And I believe there's an enemy out there who wants the opposite. My life has prospered in so many ways — and I don't mean financially. I mean in fruitfulness: being able to love other people and love myself. We say “happy,” but I'd say “joy.” Happiness can flit away with whatever happens in the moment, but joy remains. Peace can feel circumstantial, but the peace I have from the Prince of Peace stays solid, even in circumstances that don't line up with it.

Michael Scott Eger: Since you keep hinting at the book, let's bring it in. What's it called?

Mike Dyson: It's called The Shadow. It comes from Psalm 23 and Psalm 91. Psalm 23 has the shadow of death — that psalm is often used at funerals, so we tend to think of death itself. But I talk in the book about how we've taken Psalm 23 to mean death, when it's really about going through the shadow of death. It says your cup runs over, He prepares a table before you in the presence of your enemies, He anoints your head with oil — a lot of positive things. But you have to walk through the valley to get to them: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” One morning I was reading, and I like to look at the original language — the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New in Greek. In Hebrew, the word “shadow” in Psalm 23 and the “shadow of the Almighty” in Psalm 91 are the same word. I was puzzled — two shadows with two conflicting effects. What I felt God was saying is that this is what happens in our lives. All the things at the beginning of my life were like the shadow of death trying to swallow me up in lies about who I was — that I was insignificant, inadequate, that I had nothing to offer. What happens to people is they become seated in the valley instead of walking through it. We become hopeless; our hope gets diminished, and we get paralyzed in those lies. What God calls us to do is lean into His shadow and move through those things. None of us likes to go through hard things, but instead of denying them, we need to walk through them so healing can come. On that couch, what God said was to stop blaming. I've had to take personal responsibility throughout my life, and instead of avoiding the things I needed healed, I had to step into them — and sometimes those aren't comfortable.

Michael Scott Eger: Who should read this book?

Mike Dyson: I think it's for anyone. It would land in the Christian section, but it's for anyone — even someone who doesn't have a relationship with God, because it helps them understand from a spiritual perspective what's happening. The concept I'm writing about happens to everyone. I talk about healing, health, finances, destiny, eternity, obstacles and how to combat them. And here's an interesting one: I'm kind of a math guy, so I got curious about the psalm right between Psalm 23 and Psalm 91. Exactly in the middle is Psalm 57 — and in Psalm 57, David ends up contending with both shadows: the shadow of death and the shadow of the Almighty. It's an easy read, and it flows all the way through to eternity. So I'd say anyone.

Michael Scott Eger: Where should we send people?

Mike Dyson: Amazon has it — The Shadow. That's the only place it's listed right now. And if people have a question or want to ask about my story — I'm pretty transparent about everything — they can go to my author website, which is my name plus the word “author” dot com: mikedysonauthor.com. They can email me through it, and I'd be happy to answer questions or chat, especially if they're facing something. My hope is that people get hope. Many face so many crises that they start to feel hopeless and think it's only for other people. And whether or not someone's bank account is full — as great as that is — it will be fruitless if you don't have a whole heart. I'm hoping people get healing in their soul. Some tragic things happen; I just talked to a man recently about something very unfortunate that happened to his daughter. How do people recover through these things? I hope they'll get out of this book — and maybe out of this conversation — that God is still with them in the midst of it all, and that He wants to be part of the healing.

Michael Scott Eger: So mikedysonauthor.com, and the book is…

Mike Dyson: It's called The Shadow.

Michael Scott Eger: The Shadow. With great gratitude, I want to thank you for coming on the show. I feel blessed to have had this conversation — that whole life story affected me. Thank you, and I hope we speak again one day.

Mike Dyson: For sure. Thank you, Michael, for having me on. I really appreciate it.