Patrick Vellner has been performing at the highest level of CrossFit for over a decade and has only gotten better as years passed. However, while Vellner remained near the top of the leaderboards in recent years, he also silently faced a heart condition that made it exceptionally difficult for him to achieve the desired results. Well, he utilized the offseason before the 2026 season to perform a heart ablation procedure and turned to Instagram to share his experience.
Heart ablation is a procedure done for irregular heartbeats. In Vellner’s case, it proved to be quite a problem on certain occasions, preventing him from pushing to the limits. So, Vellner decided to fix the issue in hopes of continuing to improve his health and fitness.
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Patrick Vellner’s Heart Ablation Experience
Patrick Vellner’s experience with heart issues started back in 2024, and he first noticed it during the CrossFit Open. While performing one of the Open workouts, Vellner felt completely exhausted even before completing all exercises. He thought it was a normal occurrence, but his wife insisted that he should get checked out.
“I’m going to give you the scoop on my ablation that I got yesterday and why.
In 2024 I had a weird episode in the last week of the Open, you might remember it. I was not done with the workout, not even close, and I was ready to chalk it up as a random weird occurrence and move on. But my wife is a physician and encouraged me to go get it checked out.
I got worked out while we lived on Vancouver Island and they found atrial flutter. It is like atrial fibrillation, it is just a slightly different electrical pattern. There are also obviously other small differences. Basically, we are talking uncontrolled contractions of the top of the heart.”
It turned out that Patrick Vellner’s heart condition went unnoticed for a long time, mainly because the symptoms of it were similar to the ones caused by high-level exertion. However, it also could have resulted in much more severe consequences, such as an increased risk of a stroke. As a result, Vellner needed to fix it both because of his goals in CrossFit and overall health.
“It went undetected for a long time because symptoms of it really are like palpitations, shortness of breath, and fatigue, which as an athlete I have a lot of. At the time, the episodes were really short and infrequent, so it was recommended that I get it fixed at some point, but it wasn’t necessarily urgent. The biggest risk of leaving it untreated for a long time is that it can lead to an increased risk of stroke, which I wasn’t super down for.”
Despite everything the atrial fibrillation caused, Patrick Vellner was unable to get treatment, as the 2025 season was already underway. So, he pushed through the setbacks and waited until the season was over. He recently got the chance and completed the surgery. Consequently, he also revealed how it felt being awake throughout the entire procedure.
“Then we moved from the west coast to the east, and by the time I got my case referred and we got settled in our new place, the 2025 season was underway and there was no time to really schedule in a recovery. So, we just kind of pushed it. Again, episodes weren’t super frequent at that point. So it felt like not a huge deal.
Unfortunately, major triggers for episodes are high stress situations and high exertion, which, when you are an athlete and that is your job, is a tough one. In the 2025 season, I had a few more episodes and I had a couple of bad ones during competition. So, before the end of the year, we decided that during the off-season, I was going to try and get an ablation done and just solve it.
It’s a day surgery. Not a huge thing. You stay awake for all of it and they kind of go in through your groin, feed a catheter up to your heart and then they burn out some little areas. So the electrical impulse in your heart stays under control, goes where it is supposed to and doesn’t start spinning out of whack. The feeling of having part of your heart burn from the inside is super weird… Recovery is meant to be pretty short, kind of a week to 10 days and then by the two-week point, it can start to ramp back up again.”
Watch Vellner’s full name here:
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Patrick Vellner is a CrossFit veteran with dozens of appearances at the biggest competitions in the world. He notably achieved three silver and three bronze medals at the CrossFit Games. Moreover, he won two Rogue Invitational competitions in 2020 and 2023. So, now that he has completed his heart procedure, Vellner will hopefully get back to his best shape.
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