Bravery. Courage. Strength. Vulnerability. Our guest today is Angela Pohl, one of our own Running for Real community members. She shares with us the story of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment journey as she gets ready for double mastectomy surgery on June 11. There’s so much we can all learn from Angela, starting with her admirable mindset. From her, we learn how we can use our runner’s attitude of courage and determination as tools to aid us in some of life’s hardest challenges.
“I had been chronicling my whole running journey for a couple of years now, and just all of the learnings that I’ve had through that, the mental training and all the progress that I made through that I decided that I was going to be very open about sharing my breast cancer journey as well because it’s a chapter of my running journey or my overall journey.” –Angela Pohl
Listen to the Running for Real Podcast here:
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During 2020, Angela ran 55 half marathons, 13 full marathons, and was training for a 100-mile ultra when she got diagnosed with breast cancer. In this episode, she helps us cover…
- Importance of self-checks and mammograms- even if you believe yourself to be a healthy runner or athlete.
- Don’t put things off. First it was COVID hesitation to not go to the doctor’s office, then it was a marathon training cycle putting off doctor’s visits until she finally went. There’s always something going on, but checkups are important. Don’t put them off.
- “Not everybody who goes through a cancer journey wants to be seen as a fighter or battling or a warrior. Some people are on a healing journey. They feel that the cancer is part of their body, so they don’t want to fight their own body. They might not want to use that kind of metaphor just because it has some kind of violence, you know, associated with it. For me it’s kind of a journey. I’m a race addict. And so I thought it would be kind of fun if you can call this fun at all to, you know, pretend that this is a whole race that I’m going through, and it’s probably more like a multi-leg ultra marathon.”
- “That is something that I learned from running about how to stay in the mile that you’re in, not, look all the way down at the results will start worrying about that because you just need to take it one mile at a time.”
- Angela learned that exercise is good while you’re going through chemotherapy. Even just going on a walk.
- Angela co-founded a non-profit, Good Running, in 2016. Each month the group of runners selects a non-profit and donate $20 directly to the organization. They also gather raffle prizes and runners get a raffle ticket for every mile they run or walk. It’s all about runners doing good, together.
Resources:
Angela’s Instagram: @goodrunning26.2 (Message her some words of kindness and encouragement)
Thank you to momentous, Athletic Greens, and goodr for sponsoring this episode.
