A Runner Learns To Race - And Live Against The Clock
From The Melbourne Herald
By GERARD WRIGHT
CHRISTINE Griffiths refers to it, by way of introduction, as “this particular thing”.
Her doctor, Jeff Szer, calls it “a time bomb” and offers some daunting odds about the likelihood of it being overcome: 50/50 and 4/1.
It is known as chronic myeloid leukeamia and is every bit as serious as it sounds, although not as bad as it could be.
It is a cancer of the bone and the blood. Left alone, it can kill its unwitting host within three years. Most often, according to Dr Szer, it occurs because of a chromosonal abnormality.
Next March or April, Christine Griffiths’ body will be given some assistance to fight the cancer through a transplant of bone marrow from her sister Carmel.
In the meantime she has her plans: to go to the beach, watch some television, train hard for the next month, at at 7.30 am on Saturday, January 30, take her place in the only women’s team for the Doxa Two-Ton Run, a two-day, 200 kilometre team relay around Port Phillip Bay.
At 38, Christine Griffiths is to weekend fun running what Bob Hawke is to social golf - a part-timer and borderline obsessive who finds friendship, fitness and satisfaction from a largely solitary pursuit.
She has run 50-60 kilometers a week for the past eight years since she took up running as an asthmatic, fitting her training between stints of part-time secondary school teaching at Epping and nursing at Latrobe University’s Chisolm college.
In mid-winter this year she found that try as she might, she could not progress. In fact, she was going slower, in defiance of her body’s best efforts.
She told her training partners that she was just taking it easy, and herself that she was tired from training and the fun-runs she competed in each weekend.
The diagnosis at the end of August crystallised a few ambitions. “One of my aims when I found I had this particular thing was to run in the Veterans Games and to go in this (Doxa) run.” And give to those who knew her a picture of remarkable emotional resilience.
“She’s very determined when she’s racing,” her friend Jill Robinson said. “When she’s running, nothing will get in her way.”
Says Christine of the disease: “You just have to accept it. It’s not going to go away.” Her options for treatment are simple.
“This disease is a bit of a time bomb,” Dr Szer said. “You are eventually going to die of it unless you have a transplant. That’s the only way out at the moment.”
Christine agrees. “The chances are 50/50 that I will come through, or not be able to tell the story. I want to live to be an old person, rather than disappear off the face of the earth.”
Chemotheraphy is the treatment that will both traumatise and cleanse her body. Running has seen the balm for her spirit.
Last Saturday she covered 10 kilometers around Princes Park in 47 minutes and 26 seconds, her fastest time since April.
That, she says, was because she has always had things under control. “I have never stopped running the whole time, even when it was taking me an hour to run 10 kilometers and it was harder to do it then than when you are really running hard. That was what kept me going. I would go out feeling awful and come back feeling good.”
Complicating the affliction and her proposed recovery is a problem with her renal system.
Some people are born with fatalism, others have it thrust upon them. Christine’s attitude, is, if anything, even more positive for these setbacks.
For the bone marrow transplant, the chances are one in four with each brother or sister, that their marrow will be compatible with the recipient.
With those odds, Christine considers the fact that her sister was compatible with her a head start.
She talks of chemotherapy and morphine drips with a candor that many people would find off-putting. Her friends say this is her way of helping people come to terms with her illness.
In the meantime she will live very much for the present.
“I don’t really want to think about how bad it is because I’ll face that at the time. You enjoy things now and when the time comes, put up or shut up if you can.”
(Photo Caption)
OUT FRONT: Christine Griffiths leads the women’s relay team in training for the 200km Doxa Two-Ton Run around Port Phillip Bay
PICTURE: BRUCE HOWARD