The Path Back To Health
While being treated for a brain tumour, Adam Carroll took up running. Now he loves it
‘ I LOVE THAT YOU CAN JUST TURN YOUR MIND OFF AND NOT STRESS ABOUT STUFF’
WHEN ADAM CARROLL, a 32-yearold IT worker from London, fell down one day during a work trip in New York, his colleagues laughed. But that laughter quickly turned to panic when he failed to get back up.
‘I felt a surge through my brain, throbbing pain,’ says Adam. ‘I lost all speech, so I couldn’t tell anyone I was in trouble. Then I hit the deck.
‘Next thing, I’m surrounded by New York paramedics. I was rushed to hospital, but I was awake in the ambulance. When I first got to the hospital, I was laughing and joking with one of the nurses.’
However, when Adam returned from a brain scan, the nurse’s ‘whole demeanour had changed’. Adam had a cancerous brain tumour and was told he would need an emergency operation that same day. ‘I was petrified,’ he says.
The tumour was removed in two operations over one week and although he was walking within a few days, Adam was off work for eight months, as he needed monthly courses of chemotherapy treatment.
There had been no warning signs or symptoms before the collapse, so his experience made him realise he had to change his lifestyle of ‘partying, drinking and eating shit, and not doing any physical activity at all’. As well as adapting his diet and cutting down on the booze, Adam began to run, though not, initially, to become fitter.
‘I took it up, at first, through boredom,’ he says. ‘I was off work for eight months, so I needed something to do after sitting indoors on my own all day.’ Despite his lack of experience (‘I had never run – I couldn’t even run for a bus’), it didn’t take long for Adam to find joy in lacing up his trainers and getting out the door. ‘The last thing I wanted to do was sit indoors moping around all day,’ he says. ‘I lived in Hackney at the time, so it was a good way of getting out and exploring the canals and local area.’
Although it was a struggle at first, Adam persevered: ‘I was so out of breath I wondered what the hell I was doing at first, but I stuck at it, tracking my progress on Mapmyrun and going a little bit further each time.’ Despite a monthly round of chemotherapy and blood tests, Adam’s fitness – and his confidence – continued to improve and he decided to enter his first race: the Hackney Half Marathon, in April last year. However, on race day, he was thwarted by public transport.
‘I moved last year from Hackney to Winchmore Hill, up in north London. The morning of the race, a new train timetable was introduced, so all the trains I could have used to get to the start line had been cancelled. I couldn’t make it down in time for the start of the race. I was absolutely gutted.’
Adam’s disappointment stemmed not only from not being able to run his first race, but also because he had raised around £700 for The Brain Tumour Charity. Undeterred, he took matters into his own hands and mapped out his own, unofficial half marathon: a 13.1-mile route from his office in the City to his home in north London.
‘I ran it after work one Friday evening,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t quite the same thing, mainly because I did it alone, but also because I think the Hackney Half is quite a flat route, whereas running up to north London is not flat at all.’ Despite the hills and the lack of on-course support, Adam made it home to record his longest run. That night, he celebrated in style: ‘There was no medal, obviously, so I bought myself a Kinder Egg.’
In other areas of his life, as with his running, Adam refused to let illness hold him back. Just a few months after his cancer diagnosis, he went on the search for love – in a very public way. His appearance on Channel 4’s Firstdates programme broke hearts as he opened up about his diagnosis to his date, Leena.
Although there was no romantic connection, the pair are now friends and, for Adam, the dating show was something of a cathartic experience: ‘Sometimes it feels like a stigma to have a brain tumour, as people can be afraid of how it will affect your work and relationships. But I think it’s important to talk about it – to safeguard your mental health – as it’s easy to get bogged down in worries about your diagnosis.’
Since running his homemade half marathon, Adam has kept to a routine of ‘at least three 5K runs a week’. He’s still undergoing cancer treatment, but it’s going as well as he – and his doctors – could have hoped. ‘The next MRI scan will be in October, when my chemotherapy finishes’ he says, ‘That’s when I get moved over from Macmillan [where he sees his oncologist] to the neurologist, who’s going to look after me for the next five years or so, until I get the all-clear.’
Complete recovery may be a few years away, but running has been invaluable not only in helping Adam with the ‘scanxiety’ of each trip to the hospital, but also in easing the worries of day-to-day life. ‘I love that you can just turn your mind off and not stress about stuff,’ he says.
Adam has now secured a charity place to run the Virgin Money London Marathon next April. ‘I can’t wait!’ he says. ‘It’ll be a culmination of all this running and a sign of progress from the point I was at last year. It’s the ultimate thing to say, “Yeah, I’ve arrived!”’