How a brain tumor helped cyclist Chris Baccash change his life
It would have been understandable for the Doylestown, PA, native to feel despondent about the road ahead. But he had a different reaction to the news.
Being a professional cyclist with an optimistic disposition and an adventurous spirit comes in handy when, after having a seizure at work and waking up in a hospital, you learn you have a large brain malignant tumor.
This happened to Chris Baccash in December 2019, when he was 27. He had a diffuse astrocytoma, a slow-growing brain tumor that typically affects young adults. The course of action: two surgeries with neurosurgeon Donald M. O'Rourke, MD, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, seven weeks of daily proton radiation, and then a year of oral chemotherapy.
It would have been understandable for the Doylestown, PA, native to feel despondent, afraid, or worried about the road that lay ahead. But he had a different reaction to the news.
When all this happened, Baccash was working as a business analytics manager and spending most of his free time training and racing with the Doylestown Bike Works elite cycling team. He had recently finished the 50-mile Bucks County Classic with a personal-best time, and in terms of his athletic achievement, he felt on top of the world.
But looking back, he was not content. He yearned for meaning. So, while he wasn’t thrilled to have cancer, he was interested in how this “imposed pause” in his life could present some new opportunities.
“It’s rare that we get these opportunities to pause and stop the show,” he said. “I thought, this is an opportunity to change my life.’”
And that is what he did.
100 miles of joy
First, he wanted to race the infamous Leadville Trail 100 MTB—100 miles of cycling across the high-altitude, extreme terrain of the Colorado Rockies.
He was beginning to question “the self-centered training and performance lifestyle I had led for most of my 20s,” he said in “Mountains We Climb,” a documentary short about his road to Leadville. So, he would push himself to his limit, but that was in service of doing the thing he loved, surrounded by beauty, in the company of good friends.
On Aug. 1, 2021, after 10-and-a-half hours of cycling in the Colorado heat, he crossed the Leadville finish line, hand-in-hand with a buddy, feeling pure joy and serenity. It was everything he had wished for.
The film was shown at the 2022 Bicycle Film Festival in Doylestown, New Hope Film Festival, and the SouthSide Film Festival in Bethlehem, PA, alongside other films about resilience and triumph.
A new path
Now it was time to develop romantic relationships, make new friends, engage in his community, and chart a new career path.Baccash started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a master of Applied Positive Psychology, centering on the science of well-being. He knew he wanted to pursue a life helping people live theirs, though he didn’t know what that would look like.
In May 2022, he received his master’s degree just two blocks from where he had his surgeries and treatments. His final capstone project explored friendship and virtue in the context of adversity—and whether “the hard stuff in life is really the good stuff in life,” which he now knows to be true.
“I believe that doing hard things with your friends both makes the friendship better and makes the adversity easier to shoulder,” he said. “By seeking out hard things together—and it doesn’t have to be a catastrophe like brain cancer; it can be a race, or a project, just something difficult to rally around—we get to see the goodness in one another.”
That was also the year he fell in love. He and Mary Grace had first met as children in Doylestown while doing the middle school musical. She accompanied him to his last day of proton radiation. They married in 2025, with three of their former music teachers performing at the reception.
A normal life
Baccash teaches high school math at an emotional support school in Doylestown, coaches volleyball at Central Bucks East High School, his alma mater, and sits on the Bike Works board.
Since finishing chemotherapy in 2023, he has been fortunate not to need any additional treatments. He has semiannual MRIs to monitor his brain for new tumor growth.
Of course, he worries sometimes about the cancer coming back. He takes steps to keep himself as physically and mentally healthy as he can—taking frequent walks, meditating, and climbing big mountains with his wife and their golden retriever.
All in all, the main highlight of the past four years, Baccash said, is “I’ve been able to live a normal life.”
For those who might be struggling right now with a difficult diagnosis, like brain cancer, he has some words of wisdom:
“It is perfectly OK to look at your circumstance and diagnosis and say, ‘This really sucks.’ And if you don’t want to reframe it in that moment, don’t,” he said. “But there’s a beautiful quote by Khalil Gibran, who said, ‘The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.’ And that’s the gift of perspective.”
A version of this story was published on Aug. 18, 2022.