‘Every time I go for a run, I’m sticking two fingers up to cancer,’ says Caroline Frith. The 45-year-old will be on the start line at the London Marathon in April, despite being diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer last year.
A member of East London Runners, Frith was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, aged 36. ‘I was watching a TV programme about a young woman with breast cancer, realised I never checked myself, found a lump and went to the doctor’s the next day,’ she says. Initially, the outlook was very positive. The lump was removed, the cancer had spread to only one lymph node, which was also removed, and the risk of the cancer returning was thought to be very low.
In the following years, Frith threw herself into running. ‘I loved how I could literally just pull on my running shoes and get some headspace, endorphins and stress relief from my job as a vet,’ she says. She also became one of the founder's of Roding Valley junior parkrun, near her home in north-east London. Along the way, she’s inspired her two children to run and they’ve since gone on to compete at the London Youth Games and represent their county. ‘It’s great to have passed on the love of the sport,’ she says.
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But Frith and her family’s world was turned upside down last year when she discovered another lump. ‘This time, it was one of my lymph nodes near my collarbone,’ she says. ‘I immediately contacted the hospital and, within a week, they told me it was cancer. But at that point, I didn't know that it had spread elsewhere. I had loads of scans – CT scans, ultrasound, bone scans – which all came back negative. Then I saw an oncologist, who ordered a PET scan. It confirmed that the cancer was in my skeleton.’
The outlook was far starker the second time around: stage 4 cancer, or metastatic, classed as incurable. ‘I was told I had five years,’ she says. Frith, however, refuses to let the diagnosis dictate how she lives her life. ‘Running is my way of saying “screw you” to cancer. I’m living my life as I would without cancer.’
For Frith, that means training for a marathon. Like many, she’d tried for years to get a place in the London Marathon via the ballot. So when she failed again this year, she decided to go down the charity route. The choice was an easy one: Maggie’s.
‘It was set up by a woman called Maggie, who also had a diagnosis of secondary breast cancer,’ says Frith. ‘She was appalled that she was essentially told in a consulting room that she was going to die and then thrown out into the hospital corridor. There was no nice place for her to go and just process it or people to talk to or anything like that. Maggie’s fills that gap by providing free cancer support and information in centres across the UK and online.’
Specifically, Frith is raising money for Maggie’s Bart’s in London. ‘It's just a place where you walk in, there's comfy chairs, there's tea and coffee, there's biscuits. And I can just go there and talk to people, or have some alone time, or enjoy a Tai Chi class on the roof in the sunshine. Maggie’s also provides psychological support, which a lot of NHS areas don’t have the funding for.’
Frith’s original fundraising target was £3,000. She’s now raised over £9,000 and hopes to eventually break the £10,000 barrier. Really, though, she’s just happy to be able to run. Not least because she believes that doing so has kept the side-effects associated with her treatment to a minimum, while also allowing her to stay connected to her running community.
She does, however, have to keep a close eye on her weight. ‘I lost 4kg in two weeks last summer when I became quite unwell just after starting chemo again, and I have literally spent the entire time since then trying to regain it. It’s ridiculous how hard it is to gain weight.’
Via her blog, Frith shares stories of her cancer treatment and ambitions for the year. Among these is the aim to complete Swim Serpentine so she can get her London Classics medal, awarded to people who have completed the swim event, along with Ride London and the London Marathon. After that, who knows, she says, maybe even a half Ironman triathlon. It’s an ambitious year by anyone’s standards — but don’t call Frith inspirational.
‘I hate the “I” word,’ she says. ‘If somebody sees what I’m doing and thinks, “If she’s training for a marathon, then I can put on my running shoes and do the couch to 5K”, that’s great. But that’s not why I’m doing it: I’m living my life – and running is a huge part of that.’
