After Dodging a Deadly Widowmaker, Mark Weir Is “Lucky to Be Alive”
Known as the “Mr. Tough Guy” of mountain biking-it says so right on his business card-former pro mountain bike racer Mark Weir is like Chuck Norris on two wheels.
He’s won the notoriously rollicking rowdy Downieville Downhill eight times. He once climbed more than a million vertical feet in one year-on a Santa Cruz VP downhill bike. And he still spends 20 hours a week shredding trails in his backyard and beyond as a brand ambassador for Cannondale, Bosch, and WTB.
So when Weir started feeling some odd chest pains while out riding this past September, he was a bit bewildered. “Right as I would start riding, I would get this weird pressure pain in the center of my chest, and then it would radiate to my shoulders and behind my shoulder blades and to the top of the crease of my elbow at the tops of my forearms,” he recalled.
If you think those sound like classic heart attack symptoms, you’d be correct. But if you think that most men would immediately recognize those symptoms and get to a hospital as soon as possible, you’d be mistaken.
Ignoring the Serious Signs
“You see it all the time,” explained heart surgeon Larry Creswell, M.D., endurance sport enthusiast and author of the Athlete’s Heart Blog. “Guys have a heart attack or other cardiac event, and when you talk to them, they had symptoms like chest pain or tightness and shortness of breath-sometimes for quite a while-and they just ignored it, figuring it had to be something else.”
Weir was no exception there. “Everywhere I was feeling pain were all the places that you’d get sore if you were chopping a lot of wood, which I was.” So he ignored his pains and pedaled on.
“I’d feel it as I started to ride. Then it would get stronger as I started to head into the hills,” he said. “And I’d just pedal through it and start to feel better again when I went hard-or maybe the other pains you get when you go anaerobic masked it at that point, so I didn’t feel it that much.”
After all, pushing through pain is what you do, right?
“It’s such a mental game,” Weir said. “We’re cyclists, we’ll fight through this stuff, pain isn’t an issue. I didn’t really have much shortness of breath. But I didn’t feel great.”
This went on for six-yes, six-weeks, including during a weeklong mountain bike trip that included exploring trails along Nevada Highway 50 for four to six hours a day.
People around him were having chatting while they pedaled over Toiyabe pass-the longest continuous maintained trail atop the longest mountain range in Nevada-while he suffered in silence.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere, and I’ve got this chest pain, thinking, ‘This is not that fun.’ And then we’d finish and crack beers and I’d be like, ‘Well, it’s not hurting me now, so that’s good!’’ I figured it had to be cramps or some kind of spasm or nerve pain,” he said.
It didn’t really occur to him that it could be his heart, especially since by all standard measures, he was the portrait of cardiovascular health. At 45, he’s relatively young. His blood pressure is great, and his cholesterol levels-133 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) total, 63 mg/dL HDL (the “good” cholesterol), and 48 mg/dL LDL (the “bad” kind)-are all well within the ideal range. Same for his triglycerides, which sat around 112 mg/dL. All the numbers were good.
All except one: the percentage of blockage in his left anterior descending (LAD) artery, which is the main pipeline of blood supply to the heart. That one was 99 percent blocked, which essentially left him about 1 percent away from what cardiologists call a widowmaker-the most lethal type of heart attack you can have.
Listening to Your Body-and Admitting There’s a Problem
After the Nevada trip, he was off the bike for 10 days, taking antibiotics and healing a cellulitis infection, more or less a volcanic saddle sore. When he got back on his bike, he told himself if it happened again, he’d get checked.
And it did. On just a little spin up his street, he had chest pains that felt even worse than before. “I called my wife and said something’s not right, and it’s getting worse,” he said. “I could feel it radiating into my arms and shoulders and shoulder blades, and it was almost debilitating.”
Ultimately it became a matter of pushing your ego aside and admitting something is wrong, Weir said. There’s an irony involved there: You can complain-even brag-about your bum knees or back or pain from injuries, but there’s a feeling of weakness that comes with admitting something’s wrong with your heart. And that makes you want to tamp it down, or hide what’s going on.
“You feel ashamed almost, like man, I can’t admit to this. No one wants to admit to that,” he said. “But then you realize that it’s not just about you leaving this place. It’s the emptiness you leave behind. It made me so damn sad to think that my kid wouldn’t be able to see his dad, or that my wife would be on her own, and that put me to my knees. I was like fuck this, I’m going in, I don’t care about my damn pride. Because it’s not about me.”
So he went to the emergency room in Terra Linda, but he didn’t stay there long. “They put me in the ambulance quick and took me to San Francisco,” Weir said. “There, they took me straight into the cath lab-they didn’t bother to stress test me. With all my symptoms, they said, ‘You are very close to not a good thing.’”
The doctor later told him he was lucky to be alive. One more percent of blockage-especially had he been out riding in Graeagle, a cellular dead zone in the High Sierras where Weir spends much of his time, and that’s where someone would have found him.
While blockages in any of the heart’s three main arteries are serious, when the LAD gets blocked, it’s almost always fatal without prompt emergency care.
Fitness Helps, but Is No Guarantee
Weir believes his high level of fitness likely helped keep him alive, thanks to the development of collateral blood vessels that provided essential blood flow to the heart. In fact, according to a 2016 study of people with heart disease, both moderate intensity and high-intensity exercise significant increased coronary collateral blood flow.
But all the fitness in the world couldn’t save him from his genetics: He has the propensity to store plaque in his arteries. It’s a family trait. Weir’s grandfather had his first of three heart attacks at age 36. His dad, now 73, also has a stent.
“He gave me male pattern baldness and fucking heart disease,” Weir said wryly. “I thought I could dodge that family history because I was healthy and active, but that means nothing. You can’t run away from it. You have to deal with the hand you’re dealt.”
Events like this are uncommon, but certainly not rare, Creswell said.
“Coronary artery disease (CAD), the build-up of plaque within the coronary arteries, sometimes occurs in seemingly very healthy individuals,” he explained. “It is important to remember that even the best fitness does not necessarily guarantee against hidden heart disease.”
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Weir ended up having balloon angioplasty-a surgical procedure that widens a blocked or narrowed blood vessel-and the surgeon inserted a stent to keep the vessel open. He’s taking blood thinners and blood pressure and cholesterol medication as preventive measures to keep his future risk as low as possible.
Getting Back to a New Normal
A month post surgery, Weir is settling into his new reality: He’s buckled down on his diet, and is riding his e-bike.
“I’m eating clean, lots of vegetables and good fats, like I used to when I raced,” he said. “Being able to ride the e-bike has saved me, because of the ability to control how much load you’re putting on yourself. We’re all such sufferfaces-and I love to suffer-but exercise doesn’t have to hurt to have a good time.”
He ponders that if in some ironic way, being the athlete he is actually accelerated his disease as much as it ultimately saved him from it. For more than 20 years, he ate to fuel his riding-probably putting in twice as many calories as most people, he said-and after he was done racing, he turned to less nutrient-dense options, since he didn’t have to worry as much about performance. Did that encourage the plaque to develop faster, he wonders?
Whatever the cause, Weir is taking the results seriously, and has tweaked his lifestyle accordingly. “I’m not drinking as much or going as hard living this life as a lifestyle athlete, entertaining and drinking beer until 2 a.m., and riding the next day till your face falls off and repeating it the next day,” he said. “It’s hard. I like to cook. I like to party. I like to entertain and build community.”
Now, part of that community building is helping to educate his fellow riders that, just like him, they are not bulletproof. He hopes that being open about his issue-he is, after all, the notorious Mr. Tough Guy-will encourage others to recognize their own.
He waited a few weeks post surgery, “just to be sure I wasn’t doing an early celebration,” to open up about it all. But now, despite his reluctance to share on social media or to be considered an “influencer,” he’s ready to get the word out.
“There are a lot of people like me that I think I can help,” he said. “It’s crazy how many people have already responded that they’re getting checked out because of my story.”
And that might be the best kind of influencer of all.
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