When you are young, fit and training for a marathon, cancer is the last thing you expect to experience in a doctor’s office. So when a 31-year-old runner first dismissed weeks of stomach pain as nothing more than something already in the mix — a grueling norovirus bug traveling through friends and neighbors, maybe? She experienced nausea, cramping, loss of appetite and relentless fatigue — nothing that screamed impending danger, at least not to someone who had spent years pushing her body through long-distance races. But as the days wore on, a sense that things were amiss deepened.
At first she was doing what most healthy young adults do. She tried to power through. She blamed dehydration from training. She blamed stress. She blamed lack of sleep. When the pain on her lower left side would not subside, she consulted Google to see that it was a virus. All around her, people thought the same thing — who is worried about colon cancer at thirty-one? But her symptoms didn’t fade. They intensified. She lost weight without trying. Her energy collapsed. And soon, she realized this was no ordinary stomach bug. This was something deeper.
When she entered urgent care, she was pale and weak from exhaustion. Looking at her history — active lifestyle, no significant medical problems, young — the doctor could not bring herself to give up on a recalcitrant infection. But the bloodwork was telling a different tale. Her iron was dangerously low. She was severely anemic. And anemia in a young woman with no clear cause set off warning bells. She was sent for scans. Then came the colonoscopy. And then the phone call that turned her entire world upside down.
It’s overwhelming to be told those words, at any age. Listening to them when you’re barely in your thirties and have just achieved a personal record marathon time feels nearly impossible. She says she sat in a daze, trying to figure out how her whole life had shifted so violently in a single second. She remembers thinking: How could someone this robust have cancer this advanced? How did nobody spot it sooner? How could I manifest symptoms that resembled a virus when something absolutely crushing was going on?
Her doctors told her what more and more patients under 50, the recommended age for starting regular screening, have learned in recent years: Colorectal cancer is increasing in young adults at an alarming rate. Lots of them are not reporting symptoms early because they think it’s food poisoning, stress, IBS or an infection. Some do not see a doctor until it is so bad they can hardly stand it anymore. And because doctors also tend to assume the youngest patients are least likely to be very ill, diagnoses often arrive later than they should.
In her situation, the tumor had been growing silently for months. Her symptoms only made sense in retrospect — the fatigue, the nausea, the stabbing stomach pains after meals and constantly feeling like something was not sitting well. She was completing half-marathons while her body battled cancer internally.
Treatment started immediately. Surgery. Chemotherapy. Follow-ups that felt endless. Her marathon dreams vanished overnight, supplanted by an endurance challenge of a different category that she had never trained upon. The most difficult part wasn’t physical. It was the emotional burden of reconciling what she thought she was — a young, strong and indomitable athlete — with what she had just been told.
Having travelled down this path, she also discovered how many others shared her story. Young adults, runners, teachers and parents in their 20s and 30s — all blindsided by colorectal cancer. Many had heard what she’d been told: “It’s probably a virus.” Others were let go because of age. And many said they wished they had pushed harder to get answers sooner.
Now, she is speaking out about what happened to her, because she doesn’t want others to dismiss symptoms just because they are young or “too healthy” to worry. She urges people to listen to their bodies even when the symptoms are easy to dismiss. She cautions athletes not to confuse pain tolerance with invincibility. And she advises people with chronic stomach problems, unexplained weight loss or changes in digestion to get checked — not later, but now.
Her story isn’t one of diagnosis alone. It’s about how much life can change overnight even if you’re sure that you are doing everything right. It’s about the fact that serious illness doesn’t abide by age edicts these days either. And it’s about how early detection can be the difference between something that can be treated and cured, and something fatal.
She still calls herself a runner, even though the miles under her shoes look different these days. Her greatest race would become one she never registered for — the race to defeat cancer. And because she caught it then, she’s giving herself a chance not just to compete in every race that still awaits her but to win, too.
