PUBLISHED 09/09/2005
Not all stories have a happy ending. Some have a happy middle.
Karen Van Kirk, 41, grew up in Southern California. Her father, Dick Van Kirk, had been a world-class long jumper. When Karen was in junior high, he encouraged her to go out for cross-country. "I was only a front-of-the-middle-of-the-pack runner," she says. "But I loved it."
She ran through college at the University of California-Berkeley and graduate business school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then took a big-league job as a financial consultant at Oracle Corporation in Los Angeles. She was young, successful, and healthy. Which made finding a lump in her breast when she was 33 all the more shocking. A friend of hers, also 30-something, had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, so Van Kirk checked herself almost casually. The lump was malignant.
After a lumpectomy and radiation, Van Kirk read about Team Survivor, a training group for cancer patients affiliated with the Danskin Women's Triathlon series. Excited, she called the group's headquarters and asked how she could contact the branch in Los Angeles.
"What branch in Los Angeles?" was the reply.
"A lightbulb went off," Van Kirk says.
Within weeks, Van Kirk quit her job and founded a Team Survivor organization in Santa Monica. The nascent group's first event in 1999 consisted of Van Kirk and a friend, bald and exhausted from cancer treatment, walking along the beach. Today, the Los Angeles division of Team Survivor is one of the nation's largest free exercise programs for cancer survivors. More than 700 women have joined. Some remain active in the group for years. Others use it as a "transition," Van Kirk says, "a way to get themselves back to a semblance of their old lives."
For her, Team Survivor has provided the foundation of a new life, a calling. It's allowed her to teach about the restorative power of fitness. "After my diagnosis," she says, "I felt happy when I went out for a run. It was one part of my life that I could define and manage."
