I am sharing a glimpse of my personal story for the first time, despite feelings of vulnerability because I believe that with hope, courage and determination, there is strength within each and every one of us to push through our personal sufferings and rise above our challenges – as I did, completing my first bodybuilding competition only 7 months after a battle with breast cancer.
When I reflect on my life experiences and battle with cancer, I realize that I AM AWESOME! When faced with adversity, I transformed my life, when I could have allowed myself to choose a path of self-destruction. I had hope when it was quickly fading, and that gave me the courage, the will and the strength to persevere. I feel blessed to be firmly on the other side of it and reinventing myself.
I’m a Registered Osteopath. I completed my training in Canada and New Zealand, and in July 2018, I purchased my clinic, Grey Lynn Osteopathy in Auckland. Three months later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
A scheduled 30-minute annual check-up turned into a 7-hour thorough examination. In past check-ups, a soft voice in my mind whispered, “thank you” to the universe when a clear diagnosis was given. The drive home from the thorough examination was in silence. I knew. My husband knew. The soft voice in my mind sadly whispered, “not this time.”
relate my experience with cancer to my experience in a race. Endurance racing is a metaphor for what I’ve endured in my life and from these experiences I knew that hope and the will to survive would help me persevere and prevail with breast cancer.
I have been physically active all of my life. As a child, I spent my summer holidays and time after school with the neighbourhood kids playing, biking, running through the parks, playing hide-and-seek and tag. As a mediocre athlete in primary and high school, I mostly just enjoyed being with friends and participating in sports and being on a school team. I became more serious about sports in my early 20s when a friend who had registered to run the Toronto Half Marathon challenged me.
“I betcha you can’t do it,” he said.
That was enough to ignite a fire which led me to rise to the challenge. That was the start of what became a life of endurance racing.
I’ve since crossed the finish line in a dozen half marathons and 8 marathons including the 100th anniversary of the prestigious Boston Marathon.
I then switched to multisport racing and completed half a dozen Half Ironman and 2 Ironman distance triathlons which covered 226 kilometers of swimming, biking and running. I’ve completed countless duathlons and was honored to represent Canada in the World Duathlon Championships, a biking and running event. But sports competition didn’t end there for me. I’ve cycled around Lake Taupo, competed in the Coast-to-Coast multisport race covering 243 kilometers of running, cycling and kayak, and completed a handful of long-distance ocean swims in New Zealand.
When friends and family asked, “Why? Why would you do these races?” My response back then and to this day is “because I want to … because I can”. In retrospect, one of the elements of endurance racing that I see now as being pivotal in my evolution as a human being, but was not so clear years ago, is the fact that at some point, I came face to face with the raw version of myself. And this person, was not pretty. Most of the time she was on the verge of giving up, of stopping. Salt stained shirt and shorts due to the accumulation of sweat from running for over 3 hours. The sting of chaffing in body parts that she didn’t realize could chaffe due to the constant friction. Her body pushed to the absolute limit, full of lactic-acid making the motion of even lifting the legs and swinging the arms almost unbearable so she shuffles with hands on her hips, head held down in shame … dejected, depleted of fluids, depleted of energy, depleted of the will to survive and endure, and for a moment but only a moment, depleted of the “Why”, the reason that they are in this situation in the first place.
A runner can “hit the wall”, a cyclist can “bonk” because the athlete’s mind and body are on the verge of collapse. A weakened mind and body can invite negative thoughts. The instant that doubt sets in, stopping becomes so easy. Stopping… but not quitting. Quitting is not so easy. It’s a mental game of tug-of-war between the mind and the body. I’ve hit the wall. I’ve bonked. Each time, I was on my own and only I could get myself out of that dark place. In a race setting, spectators are watching. All eyes were on me and this tug-of-war unfolded before their eyes. One could almost hear the spectators ask themselves “…is she going to make it? Is she going to finish?” This is one of the reasons why I wore sunglasses during my races, to hide the pain.
Marathon runners know too well that the marathon begins at the 30 km mark because this is the point in a race that the runner is truly tested. I struggled mentally, physically and emotionally at this point in my first marathon… stop, run, stop again, run a little bit more, stop again… just finish, and, “because I wanted to… because I could” one step at a time, I finished the raced.
Each race brought with it a challenge in one form or other that I alone had to endure. In races that can last up to 14 hours or days, there are many moments when the highs and lows swing back and forth and the raw version of you rears its head from time to time and each time asks “what are you made of”? And each time, I had an answer. For me, this raw version was the source of the “Why”. “Because I want to, because I can” these are just words and it is the emotion or vibration behind it that gives the “Whys” its power to endure.
Have you ever wondered why you are able to accomplish some things and not others? Simply, because you need to want it. Philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche explained it well… “Anyone with a strong enough “why”, can endure any “how”.
You know you want something badly when your body is overcome with emotion that starts from the pit of your stomach and engulfs every cell of your body extending from the tips of your fingers to the bottom of your toes. The feeling moves through you and surrounds you in warmth and tingly sensations. The feeling is so profound that it takes your breath away, creates a lump in your throat that renders you speechless. And this emotion overcomes you in seconds but this is when you know that you want it.
I managed my cancer and treated it as though I was training for an event. I was … I was training for my life. As I gathered the information from the surgeon and oncologist, the whole process seemed manageable in small chunks. First the mastectomy, then the chemotherapy and Herceptin treatments, then the reconstruction surgery. I had a check-list of tasks that needed to be done and I checked them off one by one as life with cancer progressed.
My biggest goal while living with cancer was to keep family life as normal as possible. If I felt well enough to work, I did. If I could go to the gym, I did. I even managed to keep the majority of my hair with a cooling cap. My youngest daughter commented, “mom, sometimes I forget you have cancer because you are still working, still going to the gym and doing everything you usually did”.
Life during chemotherapy was a dark place. I’d heard that, “chemotherapy will kill the cancer, but it can also kill many other things in your life… it can kill your soul.” If endurance racing stripped me down to the raw version of myself mentally and physically, chemotherapy was worse.
Going into my chemo treatment I had a routine, which made the whole experience just slightly more bearable. I wore the same shirt every time so that the nurses had easy access to my port. I put my ice cap on as we left the house. I had extra ice packs to put in the freezer when I got to the hospital. I made myself a smoothie to have during the session. I had my meditations downloaded on my phone. I had a book about the history of Cancer and I had my Mac notebook downloaded with some stand-up comedy…3 ½ hours was a long time to sit and watch toxic junk drip into myself.
I can still remember my third chemotherapy session, after a steroid-induced nap, as I watched the chemo dripping into my veins, I thought, “oh my god I need to do something about this to prevent my body from deteriorating”. As I went through the options in my head, I thought that chemo would likely have damaged my bones and made them too fragile so another marathon would not be possible. Then I considered an endurance swim in New Zealand but decided that it would not be wise after a recent mastectomy. Then I thought, well I’m still going to the gym … I’ll do a body building competition, why? Because I wanted to, and because I still could.
I had 12 weekly rounds of chemo and with each one I marked it off of the calendar and grew excited to have a goal to look forward to. I started training two weeks after my last Herceptin treatment. I wore a baseball cap to the gym towards the end of the treatments despite managing to hold on to a bit of hair. I wore a wig to work in the last month of the treatments and as my hair was growing back only because as a health practitioner, I did not want to look sickly to my patients. The lingering tingling and numbness that the chemo left gradually faded and with each day I felt the warmth of gratitude to the universe that that was the card that I got dealt. It could have been so much worse.
There were 7 months from the time I finished my treatments to the day that I competed in my first body building competition. And since then I have continued to reinvent my life, not taking anything for granted. Crossing the finish line of a race isn’t always the only goal because every step of the journey is valuable. The highs and lows give meaning to our experiences and the highs are only valuable because of the low.
It has been 2 ½ years since my diagnosis and I’m in the process of competing in my third body building competition. If I can share with you some thoughts to be mindful of when you are trying to achieve your goals, in the long-term or the short-term, it is this:
- Have hope, be courageous and live with determination. If you want to do it, let it resonate with you because when you want to, you will find strength to persevere the highs and lows until you achieve the goal,
- Break your goal down into small achievable milestones so that these little successes keep inspiring you to continue,
- Cry when you need to but also remember to smile along the way because when you smile, despite the hardships, something physiological happens where your brain ignites positivity and you behave accordingly.
I have enjoyed sharing my story with you, thank you for listening.