It will no doubt seem odd to a lot of people that one of the first things I started thinking about after my diagnosis was what would this mean for my running habit? If you’ve followed my Instagram, especially my running journal, it won’t surprise you at all. My current running habit dates from turning 50, and in the decade since I’ve accumulated a collection of finisher’s medals from various distances and been a member of a running team for half that time.
What did surprise me was how little I could find online that were first-person stories about returning to running after a hysterectomy. And fewer still about where running might fit in a cancer journey. I am a fan of how Ali Feller has shared her journey with breast cancer on her Instagram. There are a few other runners from my Instagram community who’ve made mention of their surgeries. I know through my running team there are cancer survivors who still lace up their shoes. But when I googled ‘return to running after a hysterectomy,’ Women’s Running yielded lots of stories about breast cancer but nothing addressing my questons. The first Runner’s World result was from 2011! Eventually I found one article profiling ultra marathoner Colleen Johnson, who took up running in 2013 after she was diagnosed and has since used her racing as an advocacy platform.
But let’s backtrack. This started because of my diagnosis. On 27 November 2023, I learned I had endometrial cancer.
Despite being the most common gynecological cancer diagnosed and its incidence being on the rise, I knew nothing when my gynecologist phoned that day with my biopsy results. I didn’t necessarily know a lot about breast, ovarian, or cervical cancer, but for those I could at least describe risks and outcomes to some degree. All I knew about endometrial cancer was the comment I remembered from my appointment a few weeks earlier when my doctor said, ‘… and even if this is the worst case scenario, no one dies from this these days,’ (which is wrong, but I get she was going for easing my anxiety vs being clinically accurate). On the phone, she prefaced the details of my biopsy results with, ‘this isn’t the scary kind.’
The pathology report described ‘well-differentiated endometrioid adenocarcinoma’ as well as ‘atypical hyperplasia/endometrioid intraepithelial neoplasia.’ In plain English, there was both cancer and pre-cancer present. The good news was it was Type I — the most common — usually characterized as slow growing and not very aggressive. The treatment path was a complete hysterectomy, and although staging would need to be done as part of that process, my doctor was optimistic that surgery could be the end of my treatment and the likelihood of needing radiation or chemotherapy was low.
She also said things would move quickly. The next step was to await a pre-op consult with the gynecologic oncology team at the hospital where my surgery would happen.
She literally said I shouldn’t lose sleep over this.
Right.
In the short time since my diagnosis, I’ve learned a lot about waiting, patience, and becoming your own advocate, and I’m only at the beginning of this journey. My goal with this blog is to process my discoveries along the way, and maybe be resource to others who fnd themself on this path.
Running from hysteria 