Wasn't sure if this should go under California, Health Issues, Open Topic, or Triathlon . . . so, feel free to move this post if necessary.

Check out the link for some inspiring photos.

http://www.sacbee.com/384/story/1671877.html

Whitmore: Thought hamstring was hurt
smcmanis@sacbee.com
Published Thursday, Mar. 05, 2009

An old photograph of Jamie Whitmore, reprinted often in triathlon publications, shows her crossing a bridge on her mountain bike. She is leaning forward out of the saddle, mud-splattered from toe clips to pigtails, as the river roils beneath her.

What's striking is not the weather conditions, but the doggedness of Whitmore's expression: eyes fixed ahead with laserlike focus, teeth gritted, visage grimly determined to mask any pain.

Whitmore ended up winning that race, in Milwaukee, as she had done so many other times during her career as a professional Xterra triathlete. The Sacramento native won the 2004 World Championships, the 2007 U.S. title, and notched nearly 40 off-road triathlon victories from Saipan to South Africa.

Now take a look at Jamie Whitmore in 2009, a sight even more inspiring and, frankly, jaw-dropping than any image from her glory days spent swimming, biking and running against all comers in all conditions.

It is a recent weekday afternoon at California Family Fitness in Folsom. Whitmore, 32, already has put in a good hour on the elliptical trainer and is making her way through the weight-training circuit. She moves haltingly, gripping her cane and kidney-drainage bag in one hand. The Beastie Boys are blaring from her iPod Shuffle, as Whitmore shuffles her left leg, encased in a brace and a pink anklet reading "cancer sucks," to the "glute" weight machine.

Gingerly, she lowers herself, chest first, onto the apparatus that exercises the gluteus maximus (butt) and hamstring muscles. She reaches down to position her left foot on the extension bar, then grasps the shoulder-high handles. And she adopts that same Whitmorean look: eyes wide and fixed on a distant point, lips pursed, nostrils flaring.

Moments later, her left leg slowly moves the 10-pound weight 3 inches. And when Whitmore steadies her thigh with her hand, she adds another 3 inches. Then she lowers the leg, exhales, and does it again.

Think of it: Jamie Whitmore is using a glute machine … without having a glute!

Doctors removed her entire left gluteus maximus last July during a second surgery in three months for spindle-cell sarcoma, a rare and life-threatening cancer that, if not aggressively treated, can move quickly to the organs and effectively shut down the body.

The cancer was discovered as Whitmore was preparing for the 2008 Xterra season. Doctors removed a tumor and nearly all of Whitmore's sciatic nerve in her left leg last April, limiting her neural function to the quadriceps and leaving her with little or no feeling. Then the cancer mounted a counterattack in July, forcing doctors to take out the entire muscle and the last piece of her nerve, making Whitmore carry a pillow with her in order to sit without discomfort.

Her triathlon career, of course, is history. Whitmore realizes that.

But her life is not.

So you'll see her often at her health club, cane and kidney drain and all, working out to make herself as strong as she can. What else can she do? That's just the way this woman operates.

How Whitmore does that glute exercise with no glute – or is able to bend her left knee at all – amazes her doctors. And such resolve reinforces to friends her fierce competitiveness.

"I like to push the boundaries a little bit," Whitmore says with a wink, as she ambles to the next weight circuit. "Actually, there are some nerves in the quads that engage (the muscle) a little. That's how I'm doing it. It's not easy."

Not easy? There's an understatement. The past year has been an epic test of will even for someone with the work ethic and the strong religious faith of Whitmore. The speed with which her life has changed has been dizzying and potentially demoralizing.

In January 2008, she thought she just had a nagging left hamstring injury after a disappointing (for her) third-place finish in the 2007 World Championships. After a series of doctors and tests and inaccurate diagnoses (herniated disc, ovarian cancer), specialists at UC San Francisco Medical Center found a barbell-shaped cancerous growth choking off her sciatic nerve and wrapping around her pelvic bone.

Next thing Whitmore knew, she had entered a world of hospitals and oncologists and close calls.

Whitmore acknowledges she almost died on several occasions. She says she "almost bled out" during the biopsy for the tumor because it was encased in blood vessels. She also nearly succumbed to sepsis from a postoperative kidney infection. And for months she's been saddled with a tube that drains waste from her kidneys because of a blockage.

There have been dark days, no doubt. Her well-ordered life plan has been drastically altered.

Once, Whitmore had it all worked out. She'd continue her Xterra career, which afforded her and husband Courtney Cardenas (a construction contractor and downhill mountain biker) a comfortable income, until she was 35. She'd take a break to have a baby, then return to action with a vengeance, her growing family cheering her on.

"I knew at some point I'd have to retire as a pro, but I imagined myself racing well into my 70s," she says. "It's been kind of an identity crisis. I've always been an athlete. I know what it's like to be fast. I'll never be near that caliber again. And I often wonder, 'Am I going to be OK with that?' "

All indicators are that she's coping well. In fact, a new, more flexible life plan already is in place.

Before the surgery, Whitmore had 14 of her eggs harvested from her fallopian tubes in hopes that she eventually will be healthy enough to have an embryo implanted and get pregnant.

"And if it doesn't work out, my best friend from high school has offered to be a surrogate," she says.

And, with that same make-the-best-of-it attitude, Whitmore figures that if she can no longer compete in off-road triathlons, at least she can coach other pros.

Coaching, after all, will bring in some money. Finances have been difficult, considering the medical bills and steep income drop. But she and Cardenas have been able to hold on to their home in rural Somerset, El Dorado County. Cardenas had to sell his construction business and now works for the new owners.

One constant amid the tumult has been Whitmore's religious faith.

"You can't go through something like this and not ask why it happened," she says. "Ultimately, I think it had to happen. It's changed not just my life, but so many other peoples' lives. I get e-mails that say, 'Jamie, I didn't walk at all in this race and ended up PRing (setting a personal record) because I knew you couldn't run and it inspired me.' "

Cardenas says Whitmore is treating her rehabilitation as if it were a race. He says he's seen his wife vulnerable only a few times. The first time was right after surgery, when Whitmore learned she had lost the use of her left foot.

"The physical therapist came and (Jamie) didn't want to get out of bed," Cardenas recalls. "They told her on a Friday she might have to go to a rehab center on Monday if she couldn't make progress. That night, Jamie said, 'Dad, get me out of bed. I want to walk.' All weekend long, she walked three times a day …"

Whitmore finishes the sentence for her husband: "Because there was no way I was going to go to one of those places."

That was a good sign, Cardenas says, a return of Whitmore's feistiness. That's the only side she shows to her legions of friends and those following her progress on her blog (www.jamiewhitmore.com). Vulnerability is dealt with privately.

"I was waiting for the shoe to drop. You know, 'When is she going to get pissed off about this?' " says Davis triathlete Cliff Millemann, a close friend. "She went from being healthy to, almost overnight, boom, you've got cancer. But she has maintained a positive outlook. It's refreshing to see.

"But she's a realist. She knows what's going on. She told me, 'It sucks. My clothes don't fit, and I can't do what I want.' But then she picks herself back up."

Frustration seeps into Whitmore's bubbly personality when it comes to the little things. She launched into a mini-rant about having to give up wearing flip flops, her comfort shoe of choice.

"I refuse to get rid of any shoes in my house," she says. "I can't wear anything open-toed; it'd fall off. If I get rid of them, then I'm saying I'm never going to get any better, there's never going to be a miracle or modern science won't fix it.

"I always hold out hope that I'll wake up one day and the nerves remember how to work. I know you need to accept where you are and be realistic and not live in la-la land. But there's always something to look forward to. I try to remember that."

In recent weeks, Whitmore has bolstered her spirits by attending off-road duathlons and mountain bike races at Folsom Lake presented by Total Body Fitness Racing. The director, Mark Shaw, who has staged several fund-raising races to benefit Whitmore, says it's the other competitors whose spirits get bolstered.

"She's got kind of a rock-star quality," Shaw says. "People are drawn to her. Even before she got sick, she was always so down-to-earth and accessible. She always gave back to the sport. What's she's doing now is showing the rest of us how to push ourselves to places we weren't sure we could go."

She keeps pushing, all right. She'll spend hours at her gym, take a break for a Jamba Juice smoothie, then head to physical therapy at a nearby facility. Some mornings after a lengthy workout on the elliptical trainer and rowing machine, Whitmore will wake up feeling intense soreness in her left quadriceps, which are forced to do all the work.

But she's right back at it.

"It's not that I think I'm better than people," she says. "It's just a drive I have not to accept my limitations. I wouldn't change what I've gone through for anything. My eyes were completely opened. I was like a thoroughbred horse with the blinders on, always focused on what's ahead. Everything was racing, racing racing. It was a good life, but …"

But circumstances change, and so does Whitmore. And she's excited, she truly is, about the possibility of getting an elliptical trainer in her home, so she doesn't have to always make the 45-minute trek to Folsom.

"I never dreamed I'd be one of those people on an elliptical," she says, laughing. "But, hey, the other day, I did six miles in 56 minutes. Not bad for a gimp."