“I hope people see that you can still make something beautiful and powerful out of a bad situation.” BraveLikeGabe ❤️
“At the end of the day people won’t remember the PRs run or the teams qualified for,” Grunewald’s husband, Justin Grunewald,, “but they will remember that hard period in their life where they were losing hope but they found inspiration in a young lady who refuses to give up.”
“I need advances in medication to live for a long time,” she said one afternoon in May 2018, while getting ready for an eight-mile run from the condo in Minneapolis she and Justin shared, just a block from the Mississippi River. “Knowing that it’s not a given, it motivates me. This crosses my mind every single day, more than once, when I’m trying to sleep at night. I have no idea how much time I have left.
To be sure, professional runners have an unusual relationship with time. Success is based on fractions of seconds. Recovery comes in minutes or days. Training cycles are scheduled in weeks. Competitive seasons are blocked out in months. All of it is neatly planned in four-year increments, shoved into less than two decades of early adulthood.
In the meantime, Grunewald had started a drug that’s awaiting FDA approval for ACC. She took three pills once a day—for a patient without insurance approval, the treatment would have cost an estimated $18,000 a month, she said. “I was just hoping to be in Rio, and now I’m pretty sure that I have metastatic cancer and I could be terminally ill,” Grunewald recalled of that evening. “I could not believe that was my reality.”
As a then-two-time cancer survivor, Grunewald didn’t have the luxury of shrugging off abnormalities. The couple went to the hospital in search of peace of mind. Instead, they learned that Grunewald had competed in the 2016 Olympic Trials with a four-pound tumor growing in her liver, pressing against her diaphragm—a return of the ACC, and her third bout of cancer in seven years.
Grunewald realized it was something she needed to do, to show that a young adult with rare cancer doesn’t have to quit. “I like the word ‘brave,’” Grunewald said. “I am not the perfect cancer survivor. I don’t do everything right. I screw up sometimes…but I am brave most days. It’s not just about cancer—life can be tough for anyone; bravery is required in so many different areas.”
Justin, however, has been Grunewald’s biggest supporter and constant companion through all four bouts of cancer—a loyalty that only deepened in the past three years. The couple met at “the U” and were members of the track and field team. The foundation’s early success has been aided by a chance encounter Grunewald had during a run in Central Park while in New York for treatments. A dedicated HGTV fan, she spotted Chip Gaines, who hosted the showShe approached him casually and they chatted briefly about running. Grunewald ended up writing a marathon training plan for Gaines.
Because this cancer is under-researched, medical professionals find it difficult to give a prognosis to patients. And Grunewald preferred to remain optimistic—during her final week, despite lab results that Justin described as “incompatible with life,” Grunewald insisted she wasn’t going to die.She lived nine more days, but not long enough to try more experimental treatments.
She may have felt too fatigued to log any miles this spring, but make no mistake: Grunewald’s competitive spark was still there in April.
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