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Press Democrat story from Oct 18, 2011


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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  11/1/2011

Our friend Matt

The extended family of Sonoma County cyclists lost one of its favorite sons recently. Matt Wilson collapsed and died while on a bike ride on Friday, October 14. It was his 23rd birthday. The local paper called it a heart attack, which is approximately but not exactly accurate.

Matt WilsonMatt had been on our club ride that morning. After the ride, he and his friend Henry Stroud decided to add a few more miles by riding to the top of Los Alamos Road. (This is a big, scenic ascent right on the edge of Santa Rosa. It is the nearest big climb to the city and is popular with racers and tourists alike. It’s a dead end of five miles, with a main summit about 3.5 miles in and then a descent to a trailhead. Most people just do the front-side climb, which is pretty hard, with many long pitches on the high side of 10%. The climb up from the trailhead on the back side is only a mile-and-a-half, but has some seriously steep bits, up to 18%.)

On this day, Matt and Henry rode over the top and down to the end of the road, then back up. I’ll let Henry tell what happened next…

“Just as we crested the top for the second time and were treated to a spectacular view, Matt quickly pulled his bike over to the side of the road and leaned against the fence. He had told me earlier that he had passed out on the bike before, so I just assumed he needed some space and rode past him for about ten seconds before turning around. As I circled back I knew something was wrong. Matt had collapsed against the fence and was passed out. He quickly woke up and stood up. I asked him if he was okay he and if he wanted some food, but he told me to leave him alone. I backed off a bit, but then he passed out again. This time he was fully out and breathing heavily. Again I approached him, this time slapping him in the face, hoping to rouse him.

“Matt only awoke once more. He told me to leave him alone and then began to breath heavy and laboriously, almost holding his breath and taking a breath every 30 seconds or so. He was also shaking a bit and I thought maybe it was a diabetic seizure. I was in shock, but knew the situation was getting worse. Matt stopped breathing altogether and I felt for a pulse. Nothing. I called 911 and got through on the second attempt. They dispatched an ambulance. I put the phone down and performed CPR for 12 minutes before the ambulance arrived. Matt was already gone. I felt the energy leave his body and I knew that he wasn’t going to wake up again. Desperately, I yelled at him and kept giving chest compressions, steadily, until the paramedic slid in and took over. For 40 minutes I watched as they worked to revive him with steady doses of atropine and the defibrillator. They called the helicopter, but after so long it was unlikely he was going to wake up again. Matt had left this world almost the second he stopped breathing.”

Matt was certainly correct about his having passed out on rides before. Those of us who knew him had heard of several such incidents over the years. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, we are kicking ourselves for not having seen these as the red flag they were: that Matt had a serious medical condition.

But let’s back up a bit and get to know Matt a little better. I first met Matt at the 2007 Terrible Two double century. He had just graduated from El Molino High School when he started--and completed--this grueling ride. I noticed him at the finish, wandering around with a goofy grin on his face and that look of dazed exaltation that so many first-time TT finishers have. He told me later that it was reading my annual accounts of the event that had inspired him to get into long-distance riding and, in particular, to tackle the Terrible Two. He wasn’t the youngest rider to have completed the event, but he was one of the youngest, and unlike all the other very young riders who did it, he stuck with it, coming back every year and finishing all five of the editions of the ride since then. He got into the whole doubles scene and entered many other big rides. In 2008, he did the California Triple Crown Stage Race and finished 12th overall, 9th among the men.

More recently, he had joined the Red Peloton race team and had been focusing on race training, although he always retained a special affection for his first love, the Terrible Two. Throughout the years, he was a member of the Santa Rosa Cycling Club and would show up for club rides…not every week, but often enough that we got to know him well. And what a treat it was to get to know him. He was a special person. At his memorial service, and in many e-mails to our chat lists, friends constantly referred to his great sense of humor, as if that were his defining characteristic…the class clown. But Matt’s dry, wry wit and cheerful patter were just the colorful trimmings on his complex, sophisticated personality.

Jonathan Lee, the captain of his Red Peloton team, put it pretty well: “There is something about Matt though, you always feel like his big brother or sister, or his parent. This will usually last throughout the months/seasons, but every so often it will get blurred when he hits you with some of his quirky wit and offbeat humor. It is during these moments you begin to realize you are in the presence of a superior mind, a greater intellect than yours. And it seems to happen most often when you are about ready to blow sky high on some climb in Sonoma County and Matt will be beside you talking happily at you, and just smiling away.”

Those of us who are older than Matt took the typical approach to his youthful enthusiasm. We sort of patted him on the head and patronized him…but, as Jonathan notes, that was about the time we’d realize how smart and wise he could be. Way smarter and wiser than most of us were at that age or perhaps at any age. The observation has been made that he was an old soul in a young body. That sounds about right.

There are numerous Matt stories out on the ‘net now, some written by him and more written by others about him. If you go to the SRCC site, you can find a few, and there are more at the Red Peloton site. (Don’t miss the Comments section at the bottom of that page, especially the note from his close friend Garth Powell.) What it all adds up to is a fascinating fellow. Charming and plucky and eternally optimistic, quirky and whimsically wise. An original.

I’ll share one of his own stories with you here, but I have to set it up with a little background. This is about the finish of the 2011 Terrible Two. Matt started out in great form, riding up amongst the leaders. But along the north face of the Geysers at around mile 90, he had one of those heart-related incidents that had plagued his career. His heart rate rocketed up and wouldn’t come down. He said later that he’d never been so scared in his life. After a few minutes of standing by the side of the road, his heart rate dropped a bit and he was able to continue to the rest stop at the midway point of the ride. I was there, and he told me he was going to take his first-ever DNF at the TT and ride down the valley with me after lunch…the honorable 142-mile bail-out option we offer. But after sitting in the rest stop for awhile, he watched club mate Megan Arnold, along with his friend Bob Redmond, roll in and then out, onto the second half of the course. Megan was halfway through the second of three doubles in the CTC Stage Race and was in the process of becoming not only the first woman finisher at the TT this year, but also first woman finisher in the Stage Race.

After they had rolled on out of sight, Matt got out of the lawn chair he had been occupying for the last half hour and informed me he was not going to DNF after all. His own goal for a best time was gone, but he now took motivation from the prospect of helping someone else; of riding with Megan on her quest, for keeping her moving with strong pulls and moral support. And that’s how it played out. Mind you, this is someone who has just suffered through a scary cardiac event; who should be resting, but who instead hops back on his bike and chases after (and catches) this other very fast rider, and then spends the next several hours hammering with her. Matt takes up the story over the last three or so miles of the ride, on Occidental and High School Roads…

“We were riding hard, very close to the finish, but had some even harder riding to do once we got onto High School Road. It was mixed feelings for me here: we’d spent most of our reserves to get here, to be near the finish and feel the elation of almost having accomplished a goal. We prepared for months, training in the hills and making sacrifices...and it showed. We worked very hard on that ride to get there so quickly, but we knew that you can only be in that moment for so long. Just that moment might be reason enough to suffer as we did, but it was the friendship that struck me most. If it wasn’t for Megan and Bob, I wouldn’t have been there. I wouldn’t have been able to share all that, or get my fifth t-shirt in a row. By far my least favorite year on the TT was 2009. Nobody was there to share the feeling of finishing the Terrible Two with me, and that was my fastest time ever. A ride like that will never compare with the one I had this year, to be in the company of friends. This was my favorite, and it was about to end as we pulled onto High School Road. It was here that we really drilled it, not for the sake of a faster time, but to show that we really put it all out on the course. You could say it was suffering, but it never feels that way. It is meditation, to reach the limits of what the body will allow and stand on the edge, feeling forward into darkness…”

The autopsy performed on Matt confirmed what many of us had suspected for years: he was born with a defective heart. I’m not a medical expert, so I’ll keep this simple. The right coronary artery entered the heart in an incorrect way that impaired blood flow, leading to ventricular arrhythmia and fibrillations. I’ve spoken with a doctor familiar with the case, and he says this condition, when it first presents itself, usually results in immediate cardiac death. He finds it amazing that Matt could live with this condition and perform at a very high level for so many years, in so many events, without having dropped dead long ago.

The sad thing, the really tragic aspect of this, is that it should have been detected and could have been treated with surgery. He had been to the doctor about it, and some tests were done. But not an angiogram, apparently, which would have detected it. (I don’t know this for sure: that an angiogram was not done. But at any rate, the doctor he saw said he couldn’t find anything wrong with him.) Matt probably should have pursued it more actively, because he knew the problem was real. It had cropped up too many times to ignore. But he was young and poor--still going to college--and, like most young, active people, he probably thought all his tomorrows were promised, there for the taking.

(I don’t want to digress too far into a rant about politics, but I am fairly certain that in a country with decent national health care, this death would not have happened; that he would have had access to inexpensive and comprehensive care. The problem would have been detected and diagnosed and dealt with. But for a poor, uninsured kid like Matt, that was just not an option. If you want to calculate the hidden costs of our current health care mess, look no further than this case. Here was a young man who was clever, compassionate, had good values and attitudes; who, in the fullness of his maturity, would have been an asset to our society, who would have done good things… And because of our cock-eyed system, he has fallen through the cracks. It’s not just a loss for his friends and family. It’s a loss for all of society.)

Anyway…Matt…geez… We who knew him are still trying to come to grips with the reality of this: that he is gone; that someone so young and vibrant--so alive--could be snatched away so suddenly. We who are older live--and die--with the expectation that we will leave our world in the hands of our younger brothers and sisters, our children. We take some comfort from knowing that, with kids like Matt around, the world we leave them will be in good hands. But when one of the young ones, one of the good young ones, is erased from that equation, it knocks that comforting premise all sideways and leaves us feeling hopeless and bereft.

This isn’t the first fatality in our little local peloton. I wrote another essay in this space on the same topic a few years ago, on the occasion of a rash of deaths in our cycling family. Matt’s death is just one of three cardiac-related fatalities to have occurred on rides in the Santa Rosa area in the past couple of months. There is a tendency to offer up one of those blithe platitudes in such cases: “he died doing what he loved.” That may be true, and it may also be true that it beats the hell out of wasting away with some crippling illness or spending the last years of your life in a wheelchair in the hallway of some extended-care facility, staring at the wall and waiting for the end that won’t come soon enough. But that is cold comfort and meagre consolation.

For me, the best consolation and the best therapy for accepting Matt’s departure is another old stand-by: carpe diem. On my rides since Matt died, I have been carrying his memory with me, thinking about how quickly and capriciously that life force can be snuffed out. As I have ridden over the ridge tops on Coleman Valley and Cavedale, in the crisp-warm weather of this glorious Indian Summer, I have felt a renewed lust for life…an intense, fierce joy in being here, in this body, in this mind, in this world, right now, right here. Matt’s passing has reminded me to never take one single day for granted.

We can’t bring Matt back, but we can hold his memory close in our hearts and minds, he and all our other friends who have gone off the front, over the next summit. If you knew Matt, you can cherish that: all that he added to your life. If you didn’t know him, you can still honor the memory of this fine, young lad by living your own life the way he would have: always happy, always smiling, and always attuned to the best in his fellow travelers along life’s road.

So long, little brother...

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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