A new take on a training block.

Before I was diagnosed, my last in-person race was a 10k in May. It was my ‘home race’ where I usually ran the half, but this time I had picked the shorter distance. In my head, I was on the cusp of breaking up with longer distances — my entry into the Chicago marathon had gotten waylaid by the pandemic and looking at turning 60 felt like a good time to reframe why I was racing.

I love towing the line, meeting up with friends, running camp in the summer with my teammates, and the celebration of running as a community. The drive to push my body over longer distances just isn’t as important as it was when I started. Still, it was only two weeks before I got my results that I was re-considering all of this … maybe one more time?

Following my biopsy results, it was obvious that race plans weren’t in my immediate future. I wasn’t upset. My new project was preparing for major surgery. And if things unfolded on the timeline described, I would have a pre-op consult in the next week or so, and surgery would follow within 30 days after that.

It hasn’t quite unfolded that way.

The call from the Surgical Gynecologic Oncology department didn’t arrive for 10 days, and then it was only to tell me that the pre-op consult would be scheduled for sometime in January. A mixed blessing since it felt like forever away on the calendar, but it also meant I could enjoy the holidays without worrying about surgery and recovery as part of the festivities.

The smartest thing I did when it dawned on me that this timeline wasn’t mine to control was join Cancer Connection, the Canadian Cancer Society’s online community. It gave me a space to connect with other women with similar diagnoses, and it validated what I was learning … waiting is one of the hardest parts of this journey. With almost a month before my pre-op appointment and another six to eight weeks before surgery likely to follow, I was staring at a 10-week timeline on my calendar.* 

The number one recommendation for taking care of yourself before surgery is to ‘stay as active as possible.’ The penny dropped. I started to think about this window of running as a training block. Instead of a race, my goal now is to get in shape for surgery. It hasn’t really changed the mix of what I do — I routinely run five days a week — but it is a great framing to hold myself accountable when I’m tempted to let a run slide in favour of seeing what Netflix wants me to stream. It’s also been the motivation to up my base to 10-15 miles/week from the 8-10 miles I was running earlier in the year.

And on that note, I am headed to the gym.

* I’m writing this from Montréal, where wait times for cancer surgeries are at a record high.