An eight-year breast cancer survivor, Ansheles, 45, sees running as a good analogy for battling cancer. “You’re supported by friends and family,” she says, “but you’re the one who has to take the medicine and you’re the one whose body is going to keep going or break down.”
Ansheles, a self-employed workplace skills trainer with Catalyst & Co. in Portland, was shocked when she realized she’d have to fight cancer. She found a lump in July of 1999 but didn’t think much of it because her mammogram had been clear. She waited until her annual physical in the fall to report it to her doctor. Even then it was a relatively unimportant third on her list of things to discuss. She was told it was likely a cyst and nothing to worry about, but when she asked the doctor what he would do if it was his wife, it was determined she should see a specialist.
She got her biopsy results on Dec. 19, the night before the finals for her master’s degree. The cancer was also in two lymph nodes. She had a lumpectomy on Jan. 6, then went through six months of chemo and seven weeks of radiation.
“It’s about taking care of your own body,” says Ansheles, who had a neighbor shave her long, straight hair and saw it come back wavy. “That, I definitely learned.”
Unfortunately, Ansheles had plenty of experience with the disease. Her mother had been diagnosed in 1998 and the mother of her best friend from college died of breast cancer in 1995. Still, she didn’t think it could happen to her. “I was already too aware of the issue to think I would get it,” she says.
Ansheles, who spends summers with husband Steve Cohen on Great Diamond Island, can remember times when she had to prod herself just to walk up the stairs or to circle the block with her dog. But after finishing her treatment she set a goal for herself — to run the Beach to Beacon 10K one year later. She aimed to finish under an hour and came in at 59:59.
Next she joined her college friend at the Race for the Cure event in Richmond, VA, which she runs yearly, and enlisted a 65-year-old survivor and her former Vietnamese exchange student, Tu, to form the Tu + Two team at the Daskin Triathlon this past July.
“In the beginning it was such a huge part of my life, but I want to be more than my breast cancer,” says Ansheles, who is a buddy to another cancer patient through the Cancer Community Center and is always willing to talk to the friend of a friend who has been diagnosed.
Her fear about finishing the half-marathon is that someone will then ask when she’ll be doing the full race. But really, she’s already been through far worse than 26.2 miles.