Always Aim High!

Regaining your fitness after chemo is possible, as is regaining your health. It will likely take a great deal of work and determination on your part, combined with many radical diet, lifestyle and environmental changes but it can be done.

It’s taken me a while, but 7 years on I’m back to full strength. Last weekend, I competed in my first triathlon since I’ve fully recovered and managed to finish 2nd in my age group (40+) and 8th female overall. Pretty good, consider where I was only a few years ago.

Anything is possible when you put your heart and soul into it!

For me cancer has turned out to be a huge wake up call. Cancer shook me, it forced me to think deeply about everything I held dear, my life so far, my current beliefs and ways of living, and also how I wanted to live and to be in the future.

Fundamentally, I knew that I wanted to live but I also wanted to thrive. I wanted to be fully back to health. No compromises.

I was 40 years old and 41 weeks pregnant when I was diagnosed with stage 2 invasive breast cancer. What should have been one of the happiest times of my life was devastated by a diagnosis few people are every really prepared to receive, let alone one who is heavily pregnant.

Shortly after pulling out of chemotherapy, I made a rather bold and random statement to a friend during a heated discussion about my decision to follow my own path back to health. It was along the lines of:

“Look, you really do not need to worry about me, I’m going to be around for a long, long time. I’m going to run London Marathon when I’m 100 and unless some other lady beats me to it, I’ll be the first lady to do so...”

This idea has since become my guiding star, ensuring that I stay motivated to simply keep on doing what I am doing to ensure that I remain fit and healthy long into old age. Whether I achieve the actual goal is now less relevant, but in order to have any hope of achieving that goal I simply have to be fit and healthy in the here and now. So that is my short term goal.