Challenge’ with a Big C

Carol Grant is well qualified to talk about challenges. She writes: in November this year I will run further than I have ever run in my life. Why? Because I can. Last year I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Every woman’s nightmare and especially for me as my own mother died of the disease when I was a teenager.

My story has a positive outcome – early treatment and an encouraging diagnosis. So on 6 November I’ll be running in the New York Marathon, sponsored for the charity Breast Cancer Care.

One of the things people don’t tell you about having cancer is that it is very boring. The monotony is broken by moments of intense emotion and activity (you think you’re going to die, you have what you hope will be a life-saving operation) but mostly it’s a grinding routine of hospital appointments, treatment and the predictability of the reactions of those around you.

My memory of having radiotherapy was not of the treatment itself but of sitting in the grim NHS reception area every day for five weeks looking at a fundraising poster on the wall showing a picture of a man, a woman and a child with the strapline: ‘One in three people in Sussex will get cancer in their lifetime’.

The woman and the child were in glorious technicolour. The man had faded away to a grim monotone. That summed up what my life felt like at that point. So I decided to run the marathon for two reasons. First, simply because I could. Being diagnosed with a serious disease is all about other people determining your future and constraining your actions. Once I had finished my treatment I wanted my world to be about infinite possibility, not limitation.

The second reason is that I needed to repair the damage that cancer had done to my physical, emotional and mental strength. I had always thought of myself as a very strong person able to cope with high levels of challenge in both my personal and professional life. What shocked me about dealing with cancer was how quickly my resources were depleted.

My physical recovery was pretty rapid. But my capacity to handle complex intellectual tasks was dramatically reduced and my emotional stores took a real battering. Most days I felt frightened and vulnerable, a reed in the wind, buffeted by forces beyond my control.

A mile at a time

Marathon training has put me back in control. I’m fitter and healthier now than ever. But the main benefit has come from the increased emotional and mental resilience.

When I finish the course in New York it won’t just be because my body is capable of it. It will be because my mind tells me I can do it and I have the emotional strength to sustain myself through fatigue, self doubt and the sheer monotony of running 26.2 miles.

So my training, as well as cranking up the mileage, also involves techniques such as positive self-talk, visualisation and relaxation techniques (yes, it is possible to relax while running!).

The main thing the training teaches you is to live ‘in the moment’. And here my guru is American ultra-distance runner Stu Mittleman, who ran a thousand miles in eleven days. How did he do it? He says ‘I never ran a thousand miles. I couldn’t do that. I ran a mile a thousand times’.

It’s something I didn’t do very well when I had cancer, but it was my biggest learning from the whole experience. Your mind is constantly in ‘what if’? mode – What if the treatment isn’t successful? What if I die? But you can’t control any of that. All you can control is how you manage yourself through the coming day.

Whether it’s tackling a life-threatening situation, a major challenge or an endurance run, I’ve now learnt that you have to be able to run those thousand miles one at a time.

Carol Grant is director of Grant Riches Communication Consultants and a client of Management Futures. You can read about her marathon endeavour and sponsor her online at www.cgny05.org.uk