Ironman competitor John Clubb knows what it takes to outrun cancer.
“The whole race is just about the individual – like cancer,” the elite athlete said last week. “You’re going through it with people’s support, but ultimately, it’s your fight.”
Originally from England, the 51-year-old West Terrace resident has been running, biking and swimming for much of his adult life, including the decade he’s lived in Canada. He trains up to 10 hours a week in and around Cochrane.
So, naturally, when a routine PSA (prostate specific antigen) test about two years ago showed high levels and a follow-up biopsy confirmed prostate cancer – Clubb’s first question was whether or not he could keep exercising.
“The doctor said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’ I heard. ‘Keep pushing,’” Clubb remembered. “There’s two ways to go: you can cave in and say this isn’t fair, or you just ignore it and say let’s go fight, let’s go play – and I chose to do that.”
While doctors kept an eye on the tumour, Clubb ran the Boston Marathon in April 2015 with a personal best of 2:48:44, then raced again in Kentucky in October – where he won his age group with a time of 10:15:32 and earned a spot at the 2016 Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.
But the news wasn’t positive when he returned home.
“I went to my doctor (and he said), ‘It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse. We’re going to take some action,’” Clubb said.
Surgeons removed Clubb’s tumour in January of this year. While he was thrilled with the successful operation, the pace of recovery was quite a bit slower than the elite athlete was used to.
“When I was in hospital, I was getting lapped around the ward by older guys. I’m trying to walk with a dog and old ladies were beating me up the hill,” he said with a laugh. “I had to embrace it and recognize what I’d been through.”
Clubb didn’t slow down completely, though – just three months after surgery, he won a 15 km race in Calgary. And earlier this month, he tackled the “searing heat” of Hawaii for that Ironman World Championship he’d qualified for the previous year.
“It’s a beast. It’s an animal,” he said of the Kona course, where changing weather was a big factor. “Half the run is a lonely oceanfront where there’s no wind. You’re overheating. When you come back you come back on a highway in the lava fields, there’s some winds … You roll with the punches.”
Clubb said his teenage sons Jake and Ben – who travelled with him and were at the finish line – gave him the energy to push hard on the last mile.
“Knowing that they’d be there drove me on,” he said. “They saw me and they ran down the hill with me … It was lots of emotions. Everything came over the last year.”
Clubb said he wants to encourage others to have their PSA tested on an annual basis, and to know it’s possible to carry cancer – and carry on.
“For anyone else who has doubts: there’s light at the end of it,” he said. “It makes your realize life is for living.”
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