"(CrossFit) is about making people better. It's about being a light to other men my age, to help them believe that they can get back into a level of great fitness."
Photos courtesy of Jeremy Ramberg.
While training for last year’s CrossFit Games season, Gus VanDerVoort suffered a massive heart attack.
Doctors said it should have killed him.
“They call it the widow-maker because when it goes, you die,” VanDerVoort said.
The 52-year-old former gymnast traded competing for coaching when he was 27, and opened his own gymnastics studio. He said the stress of owning a business, coupled with a messy divorce, sent him spiraling into obesity and what he calls “the H diseases,” or hypertension, hyperinsulinemia and hemorrhoids.
“I stopped training myself,” he said. “That’s when the bad eating started and I started picking up weight.”
Finally, after years of self-inflicted torment, the scale read 240 lb., at 5-foot-8. He’d had enough.
Intrigued by the gymnastic elements of CrossFit, he joined CrossFit Bartlett in 2011. A year later and 70 lb. lighter, he was the 24th fittest Master in his division.
The past is not easily silenced, however. In November 2012 during Heavy Helen—3 rounds of an 800-m run, 21 pull-ups and 21 kettlebell swings at 70 lb.—VanDerVoort quit early and went home red-faced and in pain.
“It’s the only workout I have not finished,” he said.
Doctors would tell him later that he had 95-percent blockage in his left anterior descending artery and 75-percent blockage in his right coronary artery. Immediately, he had three stents placed in his heart. His doctors attributed the cause of the attack to genetics and years of poor eating.
To this day, VanDerVoort credits CrossFit for his survival.
“I owe my life to CrossFit,” he said. “I had a good, strong heart muscle. I can only imagine it looked like a frickin’ fire hose pumping the blood through that small opening.”
After six weeks, VanDerVoort was cleared to return to the gym. His orders were to not lift any weight he couldn’t lift 20 times consecutively.
Though he was glad to be out of bed, training wasn’t the same. Every time his pulse quickened, he feared his heart would betray him.
“I didn’t know what my heart could do, so when I would start to get tired, I would wait for a cleansing breath,” he said. “Psychologically, I would need that.”
Recovery was slow and his CrossFit comeback was questionable. But eventually, VanDerVoort began to feel like the man he was before his heart attack.
While training over the summer, he PR’d his deadlift at 415 lb., his power jerk at 265 lb. and his bench press at 295 lb. He learned the butterfly pull-up, and reclaimed the muscle-up he hadn’t had since his heart attack.
When he went for a physical in October, his blood pressure read 110/65, and he was released from all medications.
“I thought, ‘OK, my body can do this,’” he said.
Now VanDerVoort is preparing for the 2014 Open. He trains four to five days each week at CrossFit Triad, for two hours each day—one hour for the workout, and one for mobility, his main limiting factor.
“I can’t do a pistol. It drives me nuts,” he said. “If a gun was held to my mother’s head, I could not do it.”
While his coach, Jake Clough, doesn’t write special programming for him, he prescribes hip and Achilles mobility exercises, and unilateral accessory work like one-legged deadlifts.
“I call it ‘pre-hab’ movement, ensuring good strength and symmetry for the system,” Clough said.
Clough makes sure VanDerVoort takes his rest days and keeps an open line of communication.
“He gets check-ups frequently and we discuss those,” Clough said. “(VanDerVoort’s history) is always a concern, but at the same time, there’s no way I’m gonna say he shouldn’t compete this year. We just keep a close eye on him.”
Under Clough’s supervision, VanDerVoort is no longer afraid that a given workout might be his last.
Recalling a recent workout with heavy cleans and chest-to-bar pull-ups, VanDerVoort said, “I made just under 4 rounds, which was just under what the horses in the club were doing. As gassed as I was, I didn’t think about my heart attack.”
But more important than proving his fitness for personal pride, VanDerVoort is competing to honor the CrossFit community and to be an example for others like him.
“Through my peers not allowing me to quit, and believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself, it has given me a window into what CrossFit really is,” he said. “It’s about making people better. It’s about being a light to other men my age, to help them believe that they can get back into a level of great fitness.”
