Still Running

Yes, you can be "cured" of cancer. But that doesn't mean you'll ever truly leave it in your dust

Final Stretch of the Bolder Boulder

When I crawled out of the foxhole of advanced, stage 3 colon cancer in early 2001, I was 43 years old and had lost 35 pounds since the first drop of a 24/7 chemo combo first began pumping through my veins. Bones surfaced through depleted muscles and wasted skin. My "package" had become blackened by radiation's friendly fire upon the skin near my groin. My body, the one I had known so well for so many years, now felt like it belonged to an alien.

And to think that three months before my diagnosis I could still knock out a five-mile training loop near my Colorado home, at an altitude of some 6,000 feet, at first 10 steps, though, I realized that even jog-walking a quarter-mile was out of the question. With pinkened scar tissue from my chest to my pubic bone (still more raw than I'd expected after two months), each step on the packed dirt and cinders sent shocks up my torso. So I stopped running, and did, maybe, two-tenths of a mile in a radiated survivor's shuffle. Then back home to lie down. Stat. Defeated.

Cancer can do that to you; it can make you forget that at one point, not so long ago, you ran a 10-K at altitude in 53:50.

I needed a plan. A long-term recovery plan. After all, I wanted badly to be moving again.

POSTING 10-MINUTE MILES WOULD MEAN I'M HUMAN AGAIN, NOT A FULL-TIME, SORRY-ASSED CANCER PATIENT. A RUNNER, NOT A SURVIVOR.

I wanted to run from cancer, as fast as I could, as fast as my scar tissue and internal adhesions would let me. Posting mileage and 10-minute miles would mean I'm a human again, and not a full-time, sorry-assed cancer patient. A runner instead of a survivor. I considered chasing new, postcancer PRs as a way to regain parts of my self that the disease stole from me. But before I could go there, I had an even bigger number to worry about.

Near the end of my treatment, I said to my oncologist, "Doc, what are my, um, chances?" I didn't use the word "survival," but he knew full well what I meant.

"Hard to say," the doctor replied rather benignly. "You're younger and stronger than most patients with this disease." All things considred, he told my wife and me, "you have perhaps a 60 percent chance of being alive in five years."

That's it? I thought. Maybe 60 percent? He tried to clarify the situation. If I made it through Year Two cancer-free, he said, my odds would get even better. That's because of all colon-cancer recurrences, 80 percent happen within the first two years following surgery.

If anything, I at least had some target to latch on to. A finish line, of sorts. And with it I gingerly returned to the gym to do light weights, the cross-trainer machine, some do-it-yourself yoga stretches. I had come-and-go pain that radiated through my groin. I ignored it at first. Then I couldn't. Though faint and intermittent, the pain still scared the hell out of me. Made me want to not work out, because I had to ask myself, each time, "Are these normal, postsurgical aches? Or way-early signs of tumor recurrence?"

Only my prescribed, every-three-month scans and exams reassured me—and let me stretch my goals. First, loop the damn 1.5-mile lake. Then aim for a friendly 5-K. Then, fingers crossed, chase something close to stamina. I would enter the Bolder Boulder 10-K, a race I used to do each year before all the drama. My chief hope was to finish sub-60 minutes, as I'd done prediagnosis. If I could do that, perhaps I could convince myself that maybe I could outrun this disease.

Emotionally, during my early return to running, I weathered the opposite of runner's high. I often felt postworkout lows, and often all alone. I was hurting, still. I was slow. But I didn't want to blame it all on cancer. I didn't want to wave the Cancer Survivor's flag, either. I wanted to put cancer in my rearview. Nothing against the pink ribbons and all, but I wanted to hurt "normally," like a runner who absentmindedly forgets his glucosamine.

I returned to the Bolder Boulder in May 2004 with thousands of other runners who, like me, had made the race an annual rite. They had their own reasons for coming back each year, but I only worried about my own, and what I needed to finish and go home satisfied. By then I was "N.E.D.," as the docs often say in CT scan reports: No Evidence of Disease. Nothing could get me down…except my finishing time that morning: 1:03:48.

Cancer can do that to you: age you prematurely—in a heavy-legs, stiff-hip way—and make you wonder, Will I ever be myself again?