IT WAS in April last year that Grete Waitz went for a training run and came back feeling more tired than usual. Though the then 51-year-old had been retired for some years, her husband, Jack, still thought she should not have been as worn-out as she evidently was. He had coached her practically all her adult life and knew exactly what his wife was capable of.
They knew her blood count was low and her husband persuaded her to have a check-up. It was then the bombshell was dropped: "I worked out an hour the same morning and I felt fine, and then you go for a blood test and three hours later you're told you have cancer. Talk about the roof caving in."
Waitz could be seen during the European Championships, strolling though the press area, dressed in a track suit. She looked drawn, but that was not unusual. When she was winning her five world cross-country titles and world marathon gold, she was as thin as a rake. Try running 100 miles a week at 5.30min per mile pace. It has that effect.
We met for a chat in the restaurant at the Norwegian Seamen's Church, hard by the Ullevi stadium, to discuss the following day's women's marathon, but when we'd finished, I asked her if she still trained. Given the circumstances, I was not expecting the reply: "I try to break a sweat every day, to put it that way. I go on my exercise bike, or go on the treadmill, or I go outside. I'm pretty relaxed about it. I do all that in the morning.
"I'm a morning person. If I'm not done before breakfast, just forget it. I'm a triple A person. I wake up at five, quarter past five."
For the record, the treadmill is set at an eight per cent angle and since she was diagnosed her mileage has gone up, not down. A seven-mile walk can take the best part of one hour and 45 minutes which is a good pace, enough to tire a normal 52-year-old, let alone one being treated for cancer.
Exercise is an important weapon for Waitz in combating the disease. She believes it gives her the strength to withstand the chemotherapy when others who are not so fit suffer: "You can deal with the disease better if you are fit and live a healthy life." She has seen other patients take to their beds after treatment whereas she just goes on living normally, though she does admit that food, no matter how good it is, tastes bland after a chemotherapy session.
Inevitably there are comparisons with that other well-known cancer sufferer, Lance Armstrong, but Waitz is having none of it: "What he went through was ten times more than I did," she said. Armstrong's cancer spread to his lungs and his brain, but since Waitz has never specified what kind of cancer she is suffering from, it is difficult to compare.
Certainly, to see the Nordic glint in her steely blue eyes and feel the energy she generates, is to gain an insight into the brand of determination that is innate in top achievers. At one stage in the conversation, she talked of Paula Radcliffe's public failure in Athens, and referred to her backbone as a pre-requisite for putting up with the pressure she was under. It is very much the quality Waitz has in abundance. This is one tough lady.
The story of her cancer only came out because as a public figure, Waitz realised it could not be kept a secret for ever, so last year she told the press. But she rarely talks openly about it, saying that will only happen when she has beaten the disease. It is a way of dealing with the problem, but there is no question of her hiding her head in the sand. She puts her knowledge of exercise and sickness to public use and last year became a fitness advisor to Norway's biggest cancer hospital which had built an exercise centre for patients.
Last year in New York, a team in the marathon dedicated their race to her, so Fred's Team, named after founder Fred Lebow, became Grete's Team for the day and even before race-day had raised over $3.5 million. New York and Waitz are synonymous. She entered it as a pace-maker in 1978 as an add-on to her track career and won it in world record time, setting her off on a new career. She went on to win eight times more and doubts the feat will ever be repeated because of the number of races today. "When I ran there were not that many big races, so I never got the chance to be over-raced." In a twist of fate, in 1991 she jogged the race along with Lebow who at that stage was in remission from brain cancer. Later he was to die from the disease.
Long before her cancer developed, Waitz had got involved in raising fitness awareness. Despite popular belief, Norway is no longer the super-fit nation of outdoor sports lovers it once was. "We like to think that. Scandinavian countries are facing the same problems as the rest of the western world. Too little exercise, people are getting more unfit."
In her bid to change women's mentality, she set up the Grete Waitz Run in 1984 around Oslo that at one stage attracted 40,000 competitors. But she has taken the campaign beyond Norway. Last year in New York three races were put on in her honour including a Troll Stroll for two to ten-year-olds.
Waitz grew up with two elder brothers, which is what she puts her liking for physical fitness down to. It was to lead to a staggering roll of honour: four world marathon records, two world track records, an Olympic silver and world gold. That's not to mention the five world cross-country titles.
Waitz's name is synonymous with a golden era in women's athletics of which she was very much a pioneer. No woman before her had run 100 miles a week. She was the first woman to breach the 2hr 30min barrier for the marathon and set her final world record in London in 1983.
She vowed last year she would be back this year to complete the New York race in whatever way she could. If Lebow could do it at 60 and less fit than her, then so would she. But Jack said this week that it would not be possible. She is shortly to start another series of treatments that would rule out covering 26.2 miles around the streets of New York this autumn. The fight goes on.
 
 
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Grete Waitz: Battling Cancer
by Michael Butcher, 8/19/2006 |
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