One of the hardest things for any athlete to do is to retire. Perhaps a close second is sitting on the sidelines with an injury, unable to participate in the sport you love, or in the case of driver Mark MacDonald, powerless to earn a living. So what does an injured driver do to pass the time? Some may take a vacation. Others may workout all day to the extent that the injury allows. Maybe they simply veg on the coach and binge shows on Netflix. Not MacDonald. He's pouring his energy into a newfound passion - the stock market. "I love [the stock market]. I started a few years ago. I had a few bucks that I had sitting around and I had invested and I started watching what the brokers were doing and why they were doing it," said MacDonald, who added that fellow driver Yannick Gingras helped him out by hooking him up with Manchego's owner Barry Guariglia. But we are getting ahead of ourselves in terms of the root cause for MacDonald' s abundance of free time over the last six months. The 47-year-old has been a bit snakebitten when it comes to injuries in his career and the past two years have been particularly unkind. He suffered a tough blow in October 2024 at Yonkers Raceway when an accident left him with fractures of his ribs, tibia and vertebrae in his back. When he finally returned in April 2025, another on-track incident about a month later took him out of commission with a broken hand and another fractured tibia. While that stay on the sidelines was short-lived, he never quite felt 100% over the summer and into early fall. "I kept feeling like I just didn't feel right. Like I was going to pass out all the time. It would come and go. I would feel good for a day and then I wouldn't," said MacDonald about his situation from July to October 2025. Originally the doctors told him it was just an adjustment period to being on blood pressure medication, but when his leg started swelling up again and one day he couldn't even zip up his driving boots, it was clear the situation was more serious. His wife took charge. "Honestly, I have to give credit to my wife [Alea]. She's like, 'enough, we got to take care of this. You're going to die.' And she was so supportive and she helped me through it all, and she did everything so I could just lay in bed for a month when I got home." Cutting to the point, MacDonald had a rare bad reaction to the contrast dye used for the many MRIs he had to undergo. It left him to the point where he was dealing with kidney failure and hospitalized for a week. "I was knocking on heaven's door there," said MacDonald about his time in the hospital. "I don't know how else to explain it other than you just feel like you're being held underwater a little bit. You want to get breath, but you can't. It's terrifying. It's scary. It is. And it was, it scared me." Once finally out of the woods in terms of his health scare, MacDonald got back to work on his recovery. That included not just the usual rehab and workouts, but a lot of time spent on his newfound stock market hobby. "I bought a book, and then I bought another book, and then I started going to Goshen Library," said MacDonald about his homework on the road to financial wisdom. "I don't have any extra education for finance or anything like that, but I started. I went and rented The Intelligent Investor, and I put a lot of work into it, and I started doing my own thing." ► Sign up for our FREE DRF Harness Digest Newsletter While he stills leans on Barry Guariglia a little, MacDonald says he gets up at 6 a.m. each morning to watch business news on CNBC. He has his own portfolio with a mix of stocks, options, calls and puts. "I actually really wish I had done it for a living," said MacDonald, who can often be found on X discussing the stock market. "It's the only thing I'm really good at, numbers. I guess I'm okay at driving horses, but I'm really good with numbers." MacDonald has also gotten his daughter Kiara involved to the point where she comes home from school discussing the bulls and the bears. That's pretty advanced for a 6-year-old. As for his own advice, it centers on the future. "You have to think long-term. Thinking you're going to go in and out of stocks, you will get your head handed to you because you end up buying at the top and selling at the bottom almost every time," MacDonald said. While MacDonald may want to spend his days in front of a computer studying the market trends, there is another voice calling loudly in his head to return to his true calling on the track. He may lead you to believe he is just an average driver, but the numbers say otherwise. Since 1997 when he got started, MacDonald has amassed 6,743 wins and horses he has steered have earned north of $107 million. A Canadian native, MacDonald made a decision during the winter, while he was prohibited by the doctors from driving, that he would return to his roots to drive mostly at Woodbine Mohawk Park. Originally the plan was to return to the bike during the first week of March, but he had a minor setback in the way of a pinched nerve that delayed the inevitable.  Looking at the entries, the time is now as MacDonald is slated to head behind the gate nine times on Saturday at Woodbine Mohawk Park. It will be his first on-track appearance in nearly six months. "I miss racing at Mohawk. That's like home. All my brothers are there and all my daughter's family's there; her cousins and stuff. And I love the track," said MacDonald, who plans to stick up there as a regular through the Sire Stakes season before considering U.S. options like Pocono, Yonkers and the Meadowlands closer to his New York home during the late fall and winter. "I can do a little New York, too, up there. Batavia is not that far away and Buffalo and those tracks are close. "I don't know how it will go," admitted MacDonald about the move to Mohawk. "I haven't been there in a while. It was 2011 when I moved down [to the U.S.]. So, it's been 14 years, but I still know a lot of people there and I have a lot of friends. "I want to really hustle this summer. I feel like I barely worked in the last year and a half, to be honest with you." A dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, MacDonald should have no issues shuttling back and forth. He's holding out hope that the change of scenery on the work front will be a positive move, and that just maybe the stars will finally realign for him on the track. "In this game you just never know for sure when something great might happen if you just stay consistent and show up," concluded MacDonald.