When Tyler Moon opted to have “Jesus Saves” printed on his Twin Cities Marathon racing bib instead of his name, he had no idea how prophetic those words would be.

The 25-year-old Eden Prairie man, who works for General Mills in logistics, enjoys running and had watched his fiancee’s brother run in last year’s Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon.

He wasn’t quite ready for a marathon this year, but he was confident he could do the 10-mile race.

On Oct. 6, he lined up with other runners at 7 a.m. in downtown Minneapolis for the Medtronic TC 10 Mile. His parents and fiancee Amy Greene — they plan to marry in January — were cheering him on.

“I was feeling great that day,” he said. “I was pretty excited to get up and do it. I’d been looking forward to it for a really long time.”

As the race progressed, he was running eight-minute miles, just as he’d expected. He knows that, not because he remembers it, but because it’s recorded on his watch, which tracked his progress. He can’t remember anything after the first mile.

By the eighth mile, on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, something went wrong. Doctors would tell him later he experienced ventricular tachycardia, a fast, irregular heartbeat. For about 10 seconds his heart was not pumping blood. He had a heart attack, fell on his left side, fractured bones in his face, got a concussion and scraped up his left knee and hand.

Behind him was a Lakeville man named Jesus Bueno. He goes by Jesse, but said his legal name is Jesus, pronounced “Hay-SOOS.”

“He just collapsed,” Bueno said. “He basically fell straight down.”

Bueno, 43, is a certified registered nurse anesthetist who’s helped perform CPR on patients in the hospital. He dropped down beside Moon, realized he wasn’t breathing and told someone to call 911.

He was having a hard time determining if Moon had a pulse, because his own pulse was pounding so hard from the exertion of the race.

“We’ve got to start CPR,” he told his colleague who was also running and had stopped to help. The colleague began chest compressions while Bueno breathed for Moon, using a mask supplied by a race attendant.

Moon said he was told chest compressions continued for between five to 15 minutes. Neither man was sure of the time, because as Bueno said, “It was kind of a blur.”

Eventually paramedics arrived. Bueno continued helping, putting the patches of the defibrillator on Moon so they could shock his heart back to a regular rhythm.

Moon was taken to Regions Hospital and Bueno finished the race, trying to process the incident.

“It was surreal,” he said. “I thought, ‘Did that just really happen?'”

Meanwhile, Moon’s parents and Greene thought they had missed Moon and started walking toward the finish line. A police officer called Greene’s phone with the news and a squad car brought the shell-shocked trio to the hospital.

“It was pretty scary,” she said.

Bueno didn’t know what happened to Moon, and that bothered him. So, remembering his bib number, he learned his name and contacted him through Facebook.

“I was just glad that he was good and that he’s going to be fine,” Bueno said.

Moon is still recovering. He broke about five bones in his face but was told his heart is fine and that what happened to him was an anomaly. He said he’s grateful to be alive and to all who helped save him, and he can’t help but wonder about the significance of the words on his racing bib.

“Amy and I are Christians and on my race bib I wanted to have a statement so that when people saw me run by, it pointed them to Jesus,” he explained. “It says ‘Jesus Saves,’ which is pretty fitting after everything that happened. We’re just happy God had it happen where it did, where there were all these wonderful people that stepped up. Like I’ve said, I went for a run, then all of a sudden, a bunch of strangers saved my life.”