Fairview Park woman runs through cancer

FAIRVIEW PARK -- If you're looking for Jenny Goellnitz, chances are she's running.

"Running gives me meaning," Goellnitz said. "It's like freedom."

Goellnitz, 28, runs about 100 miles a week, usually on trails along the Rocky River.

"This is why I love being down here," Goellnitz said, while overlooking the river on a sunny day this week. "As a runner, you really appreciate the outdoors."

Goellnitz never appreciated running outdoors more than this past year.

Just one month before her 27th birthday last year, Goellnitz was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that is most common in people ages 10 to 30.

"You don't think at that time in your life that you're going to have cancer," she said.

Goellnitz had just graduated from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and was planning on beginning her career as an attorney.

Instead, she started a grueling eight months of chemotherapy that forced her to quit her job.

But there was one thing she refused to give up and that's running, and she decided she would run through her chemotherapy.

"Running was how I kept in touch with the world," she said. "When you have cancer, it's like everything kind of falls apart in your world. The rest of the world goes on and you want to go on with it."

In her early attempts at running during chemo, Goellnitz struggled.

"At first I couldn't even jog around the block, but as the chemo would beat back the Hodgkin's disease, I got stronger and stronger and I was able to run better and better," she said.

Goellnitz said her 16-treatment chemotherapy was like going on a 20-mile run.

"You kind of approach it one-mile-at-a-time," she said. "It was one-treatment-at-a-time. Get through this [treatment] and then you worry about the next one. You get through this mile, then you worry about the next mile, and you just keep going."

On Sept. 21, 2007, Goellnitz got through her final chemo session.

That's when she set her mind to the following spring and a goal of running 214 miles in one week in honor of the day she was diagnosed with cancer, February 14th or 2/14.

"Why not stop at a number that had a lot of meaning?" Goellnitz said.

Nearly a year after she was first diagnosed, Goellnitz started running on March 3rd, her 28th birthday.

One week, 33 hours of running and more than eight marathons later, Goellnitz completed her run, often times breaking up her day two or three runs at a time.

And nothing could stop her from finishing, not even the Blizzard of 2008, which hit on the final day of her run.

"I felt like I actually did something," she said. "I felt like I beat up Hodgkin's disease a little bit and beat up cancer a little bit."