Her brave race — against cancer
Not even cancer can stop runner Gabriele Grunewald from pursuing her dreams.
In March, the 30-yearold athlete and then-three-time (now-fourtime) cancer survivor found out that small cancer tumors had formed in her liver. This past Monday, she went for a biopsy and began chemotherapy the next day.
But that didn’t keep her from running the 1,500-meter race at Nashville’s Music City Distance Carnival on Saturday, where she hoped to qualify for the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships on June 23 in Sacramento, Calif.
Although Grunewald, who’s sponsored by Brooks Sports, fell short of her goal, by just 19 seconds, her spirits remained high.
“As for me, Wonder Woman doesn’t live here,” she wrote on Twitter. “But I am: smiling, trying, showing up, failing, living, doing what I can. Thank you for support.”
Minneapolis-based Grunewald was first diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that had spread through one of her salivary glands in April 2009. Although she received treatment, the cancer returned to her thyroid in October 2010, and she underwent surgery and radioactive-iodine treatment. In August 2016, she had a large cancerous tumor removed from her liver.
Despite her health struggles, Grunewald won the women’s 3,000-meter race at the USA Indoor Track & Field Championship in 2014.
“Cancer can stop you from doing a lot of things,” she wrote in a May blog post for Spikes, a site run by the International Association of Athletics Federations. “But I’m more interested in what cancer can’t stop me from doing. Here’s to finding out.”
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