After surviving cancer, exercise made me feel alive again
Doctors are loath to prescribe it, but physical activity allows sufferers to be freer and fitter than before, says Laura Fulcher
Thudding along a dusty towpath, breathless and sweaty, I looked down at my own feet, clad in battered trainers, and felt euphoric. Somehow – magically, miraculously – I was running. If you had told me four years earlier that I’d be able to do any such thing, let alone enjoy it, I’d have responded with a low cackle of despair. After being diagnosed with a fist-sized tumour in my bowel at the age of 29, I had spent eight months undergoing gruelling treatment, leaving me unable to walk more than 100 metres. Running was far, far out of reach.
I had been so focused on getting better – free of illness, that was – that on hearing I was finally out of danger, an overwhelming sense of irony set in. I had survived against the odds, and yet I didn’t feel alive at all: instead, this newly “healthy” me was marooned on the sofa, imprisoned in a broken body, now three stone heavier and afraid to move. Recent advice from Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, that GPS shouldn’t be “afraid to tell people that they need more exercise” are words that I would have longed to hear back then.
He has also extolled the virtues of “social prescribing” – encouraging people to “look after themselves better and stay active” through the likes of community classes, gardening and dancing. There is “increasing clinical evidence this can be more powerful than just prescribing drugs,” he said.
I don’t blame the clinicians like my own, who must be wary of heaping further pressure on cancer-wracked bodies, but the current lack of NHS guidance on this issue is parlous. I felt old before my time, and was still suffering from “chemo fog”, which goes on even after treatment ends: I couldn’t recall familiar words – let alone think – and while fatigue crippled me during the day, insomnia afflicted me during the night.
Exercise could have helped all this. Studies have shown that a wellsupported exercise programme can lead to dramatic improvements not just to overall fitness but to many of the long-term issues I faced.
The World Cancer Research Fund points to good evidence that exercise has a range of benefits for cancer survivors, including reducing fatigue and depressive symptoms, and improving general quality of life.
Meanwhile, a 2017 review of recent research found 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, as well as two to three weekly sessions of strength training, can help reduce the risk of breast cancer ever coming back.
Comparing myself with my peers, who were climbing mountains and cycling the Pyrenees, forced me off the sofa – I wanted to do all of these things too. But my first attempt – a long uphill walk – went badly wrong. I suffered internal bleeding due to a badly healed blood vessel from my surgery; another week in hospital later, and I was afraid of exercise itself.
Kathryn Dugdale-evans, a 39-yearold fellow bowel cancer survivor from Norfolk, was a great inspiration. “If you’re serious about making changes it doesn’t happen overnight,” she told me frankly. “It takes time, commitment and continuity.”
She had scheduled a series of sessions with a personal trainer the year prior and found it transformative – though not without its issues. “When I started, the first two months were extremely hard, my muscles and bones ached for days. I was slightly concerned it would bring on a terrible bout of fatigue, but I made sure I rested on my recovery days.
“By three months in,” she recalls, “I felt alive and confident. Exercise helps to focus more on myself and less on the negative. It keeps my mind off things I can’t change.”
And so, beginning with short distances, I started slowly, taking short walks: after several months I could go for miles. On a good day, I could even conquer a small hill.
Encouraged by this, I downloaded the Couch to 5k app, which takes you through nine weeks of exercise until you can run for more than three miles without stopping. It was while training for this, running by the canal near my Warwick home, that utter joy took hold: finally, I thought to myself, I was getting my life back.
Last year, I founded Mission Remission, an online platform for cancer survivors to share all the helpful advice they wish they had been given. Exercise had banished my chemo fog, and I wanted to let others know.
It was through the site that Simon Lord, a prostate cancer survivor, got in contact. He was running half marathons within months of treatment. “Activity makes us feel better,” he says. “I always have a better day after I’ve run to the top of a hill. The peace, the view and the happy dog alongside me guarantee the day will go better.”
Lord, 59, is such an advocate of the healing power of fitness that he’s recently become a personal trainer. “For years cancer patients were told to rest, to take it easy, but now the research is telling us activity is good and will help ease fatigue.”
Dr Meriel White, a GP in Leeds, agrees, saying exercise not only helps improve the physical side effects of cancer treatment, but has a very important role to play in improving mental health too. “I’d love to be able to prescribe exercise over medication,” she says. “We just need the infrastructure to enable it.”
Mission Remission also put me in touch with Jo Taylor from Manchester who, in spite of facing incurable secondary breast cancer, still exercises on a daily basis. “I particularly like Nordic walking,” she says. “Really, it’s all about trying new things and finding what’s right for you. The main thing is finding the motivation, and group exercise is so important for this.”
To help others Jo, 49, has begun to run exercise retreats for women facing breast cancer to provide “a safe and comfortable place for people to support each other and find motivation in exercise”.
Liz O’riordan, a breast cancer consultant facing recurrent breast cancer, also continued to train – as a triathlete, no less – during treatment, and all on the advice from “other patients who told me I had to stay active. Meanwhile, my medical team would tell me off for cycling to my chemotherapy treatment because my white cell count was too low.”
While researching for her book, The Complete Guide to Breast Cancer: How to Feel Empowered and Take Control, the 43-year-old investigated why patients weren’t encouraged to exercise. “As a doctor you’re never given any training. We’re not told to tell normal patients how to pick up activity, let alone cancer patients.
“The UK is far behind the rest of world,” she adds. “In Europe cancer patients are given a personal physiotherapist and a 12- week exercise programme” – something that Hancock, whose focus is on taking our wellbeing into our own hands, with the right advice, knows well.
Surviving cancer felt like a miracle, yet receiving the all clear was not the complete cure. I can only hope that Hancock’s proposals will show people in a position similar to my own how healing a pair of trainers and some good old fashioned endorphins can really be.
‘For years, patients were told to take it easy but research is now telling us to move’