How 100 Marathon Club member Lisa Jackson used running to survive unbearable grief
When Lisa lost her beloved husband, Graham, along with her father and sister, in a devastating 17 month period, she was determined not to lose running as well
“To imagine a future without him was inconceivable. I’d never lived my adult life without him by my side.”
Lisa Jackson is talking about her husband, Graham, who sadly died from mesothelioma in 2021.
Graham’s passing came at the start of a heart-breaking period of 17 months in which she also lost her father and her sister.
Their story is part of Lisa’s latest book, ‘Still Running After All These Tears: A Runner’s Journey Through Grief’.
In it, the serial marathoner and Runner’s World columnist outlines the part running played in helping her reclaim her life.
Marketed as a survival manual for the brokenhearted, and a celebration of the redemptive power of running, ‘Still Running After All These Tears’ is a departure from Lisa’s previous literary efforts.
In ‘Running Made Easy’, she showered readers with hints and tips to help even the most green of beginners embrace the sport.
That was followed up by her first memoir, ‘Your Pace or Mine?’, which charted Lisa’s journey from avid non-runner to the verge of 100 marathons.
She’s since gone on to complete a total of 110 marathons, as well as finishing the gruelling 55-mile long Comrades Ultra Marathon in South Africa - where she grew up - twice.
Despite that mind-boggling number, Lisa’s running story is not about stats. For every race she’s finished, she has more than one memory of the brilliant people she’s met along the way, with her trademark pink flamingo hat meaning she never goes under the radar.
And she’s had plenty of time to connect with fellow runners. A self-confessed slower runner, Lisa has finished last in over 20 of the marathons she’s completed - wearing that achievement with pride.
But somewhere in the midst of her grief and having suffered a debilitating injury, Lisa lost her running mojo.
When she eventually found it again, running was to provide her with the future she thought she’d never find again.
Embracing positivity in the midst of ‘aggressive, terminal, devastating’ illness:
While running is - and was - a central element of Lisa’s life, Graham was always a reluctant runner. In fact, Lisa goes as far to say he even “called himself a running hater”.
“Anyone who is in my ambit finally gets converted to running,” she added. “All my friends and my colleagues will attest to this. I’m so enthusiastic about it, even though I find it extraordinarily difficult - and I sometimes call myself a running hater as well.
“But it’s one of the most joyful, life-affirming things you can ever do, and I think people see me, after a run, just not believing I’ve actually done it but being very self-congratulatory.
“And I’m very proud of myself, and I just glow with happiness - and then they go, ‘oh, I’ll have a little bit of that too’.”
What Lisa says people don’t always see is how she looks and feels when shuffling along like a “punch-drunk boxer, cursing and swearing and questioning all my life choices”.
Despite his opposition to the sport, Graham was far from an occasional runner, completing several marathons - including Rotterdam in under four hours - and the Comrades Ultra.
Lisa said: “He trained so little for any of the marathons he did, and there were many people in my running club who turned up five times a week who couldn’t come near to the times he did.
“But he just said, ‘I hate running, it’s horrible, and the faster I get to the finish, the quicker it’ll be over’. That was his approach to running.”
For Lisa, meanwhile, the joy of a marathon is taking as long as it takes, “getting value for money” while meeting with and chatting to fellow runners.
The couple first met at university in South Africa, where Graham had been Lisa’s tutor: “He was a feminist, and I hadn’t met many men who treated women as equals - and Graham really did, despite being my tutor.
“It was love at first sight. I just though he was absolutely extraordinary.”
Lisa was attracted not only by Graham’s feminist credentials, but by his intelligence and values, and the fact he was very well travelled.
“We had the same passion for knowledge and curiosity about the world - and also sense of humour,” she said. “Graham was extremely funny. He just could make any situation hilarious.
“I do notice that about myself now. I feel much more like my old self after all these bereavements, but the thing I don’t do is laugh as much as I used to.”
It was after going for a run that Graham first started to think something was not quite right. On returning, he was struggling to breathe - despite having only made it as far as the end of the block.
The next day, he had a chest X-ray which showed shadows on his lungs. A procedure to remove fluid from them followed, but the news was to get worse - and quickly.
Lisa said: “They removed about a litre of fluid, and there was still another two or three left. The doctors were quite surprised that he could breathe properly at all.
“Subsequently, he was told he had mesothelioma, which is asbestos-related lung cancer. It came as a massive blow as that cancer is always described as aggressive, terminal, devastating.
“They didn’t mince their words when they talked about it, and Graham was told he only had between 18 months and five years to live.”
Lisa said the news came as an “enormous shock,” putting paid to well-nurtured plans to spend their anticipated retirement travelling the world, backpacking and enjoying everything life had to offer.
Graham’s diagnosis was not only a very tangible blow to their present lives, but it ripped that future away from them.
“We experienced unbearable pain at that point,” Lisa said. “I’ve never been more upset, more terrified in my life, especially since I’d known Graham since I was 18.”
That was when they made a decision that would define how they dealt with Graham’s illness. They decided to live in hope rather than be swallowed up by a world full of fear.
Faced with the worst scenario anyone could imagine, Lisa and Graham decided not to sit and rehearse how he was going to die but to embrace whatever positives they could find.
“We couldn’t just spend time thinking about whether he was going to die in pain, would he be on oxygen, would he suffocate to death,” Lisa said.
“It was ruining our present, and right at that moment - once he’d had all the fluid removed - he was actually back to normal.
“I just said, ‘we have to live in hope’. And, thank goodness, Graham fully embraced that concept. I said, ‘you might as well die right now if any time you have left is just going to be consumed by fear’.”
Their immediate answer was to start a positivity book, noting down every positive thing Graham had been told about his illness. This included that he had been told he had one of the least invasive forms of mesothelioma, that he didn’t require a blood transfusion, and that he had a strong immune system thanks to all the running he’d done.
They also set out to thoroughly research the condition, powered by Graham’s skills as a research analyst for the Foreign Office, and Lisa’s as a journalist and author.
“I did most of that because I didn’t want Graham to read the terrible prognoses,” Lisa said. “Some of the things I read were very upsetting.
“The latest, most groundbreaking research - therapies that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds - extended people’s lives by a week or a month.”
But while much of the research was harrowing, it also helped the couple discover which surgeries would best help Graham and that one of the best surgeons in the world was based in London.
As Lisa continued with her quest for knowledge, the couple wrote each other little messages of positivity in their new book, came up with mantras that Graham would say to himself each day, and made a conscious decision to seek out only positive people.
“We sought to lead our lives with as much joy as we possibly could,” Lisa said. “We did a lot of travelling together once he’d had the surgery and recovered from the chemo.
“We ran several half-marathons together. That was, in fact, the way he celebrated at the end of his chemo. He ran a half-marathon in the Czech Republic, where I was booted off the course for being too slow.
“He got a medal and I’m surprised that he managed to fit through the doorway. His head was so big, he was so proud of himself, and he said, ‘not bad for an old man who’s just finished chemo’.
“I was so proud of him. Honestly, I really, really was.”
The pain that powers assisted dying campaign:
Lisa said Graham approached any treatment he needed courageously, but sadly the cancer spread to his brain - something which only happens in three per cent of mesothelioma cases.
The news was so unexpected that doctors missed it at first, discharging him after he went to hospital having started to suffer with co-ordination issues.
Lisa said: “It was only later, when he went to a hospice for a consultation about his pain, that he had a brain scan.
“That’s when we received the devastating news that his brain was riddled with tumours.
“I was absolutely shocked that Graham could still speak and walk and drive. He was even driving with a head full of brain tumours. It was really shocking.
“And then we knew the end was nigh. But we still stayed positive right until the end.”
The pain Graham suffered during his final days has left a lasting impression on Lisa. Earlier this year, she joined the campaign for assisted dying to be legalised, including attending and hosting rallies in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill.
The Bill would have seen adults over 18 with a terminal illness, who are deemed to be of sound mind and expected to die within six months, be able to request medical assistance to end their own life.
But despite having passed through the House of Commons, the legislation ran out of time in the Lords after a raft of amendments delayed its progress. It has since been reintroduced into Parliament.
Lisa said she will continue to fight for assisted dying “because I think everybody deserves a choice”.
She added: “There is a limit to how much current pain relief drugs can eliminate pain, and they couldn’t do that in Graham’s case.
“Graham begged to die, he said people wouldn’t treat an animal in that way. I saw unbelievable suffering, the scars of which have stuck with me to this day.
“And, obviously, the person who had to endure it the most was Graham. He had such a high pain threshold so for him to say, ‘this is unbearable’ and that it was like holding his hand in a flame was awful.
“To witness what he went through, and not be able to offer him anything to help him, and the medical staff having nothing to help him either, is why I’ve campaigned tirelessly for the assisted dying bill.
“Obviously, palliative care needs to be improved, but I was told a lie. I was told no-one in the 21st century should die in pain. But there are certain types of pain that cannot be medicated, and Graham’s pain was one of them.
“It’s not about shortening someone’s life, it’s about shortening their death, and shortening their suffering.”
Rediscovering running and finding new goals:
“I always knew I wanted to write another running book, but I never expected it to be a book about grief and running.”
Lisa said the pull of writing ‘Still Running After All These Tears’ came from a desire to help others going through the same journey she did.
“I had to write this book - it was more I had to write it as opposed to wanting to write it,” she added.
“I’d spent so much time researching how to live with a terminal illness, how be as healthy as you possibly can through a cancer journey, how to deal with grief and bereavement, and I didn’t want all of that knowledge to go to waste.”
Lisa said she probably read a metre-high pile of books as she attempted to navigate a way through Graham’s illness.
The end of the book features a list of useful information, books and resources on everything from coping with grief to living with a cancer diagnosis.
“I wanted to celebrate Graham’s life as well, and I wanted to celebrate my father,” Lisa added. “My mother’s life is celebrated in there as well, and my sister’s, so it is a tribute to them.
“But it’s also a tribute to running, because my relationship with running was completely redefined through all these experiences.”
Lisa said she is a different runner now to the woman who obsessively collected marathon finishes.
The book explores how she went from running a marathon every second weekend in 2015, completing 28 over the year, on her way to joining the 100 Marathon Club, to not running a single one for seven years.
Lisa said: “I lost my running mojo for marathons, and sometimes I lost my running mojo completely.
“It was actually really interesting for me to explore how to get your running mojo back, because I hadn’t read a book about that.
“It was important to share that with people. There’s a lot of shame among very keen runners if they fall out of love with running, and they feel they’ve lost something - and they have.
“But they don’t really talk about it because it just feels embarrassing. I want people to know they’re not alone.”
That idea of helping readers feel that they are not on their own on whatever journey they are facing, whether that be fronting up to cancer or trying to rediscover their love of running, is central to the book.
It deals openly and honestly with issues such as friends who disappear when confronted with a terminal diagnosis, and how to work with medical professions who don’t always want to listen.
“I hope the book is very reassuring to people,” Lisa said, “and I hope it’s inspiring.
“Now that I’m back as a runner, I don’t want to do a marathon every second weekend. I’ve got other goals that I might want to achieve.”
Those ambitions include completing a Half Ironman and running the Camino de Santiago, while completing both 100 half-marathons and 100 parkruns remain on Lisa’s bucket list.
“All these goals are valid,” she added. “Your goals don’t have to be extraordinary, groundbreaking goals all the time.
“But it’s important to have goals. They pull you into the future. I just wanted to remind people of the joy of running, because I really rediscovered that.”
‘I don’t have anything to prove - I’d rather spend my time really enjoying running’:
From the early moments of Graham’s illness, Lisa suspected that running may be her salvation.
She hoped the sport would help relieve the stress of the situation, as well as helping her process bereavement when it came.
Graham’s love had always supported Lisa through her running journey. Whenever she returned from training runs he would greet her at the front door with “a big hug”.
Lisa would look forward to those moments so much that she wouldn’t let herself in the house, instead waiting for him to answer the door.
“I used to just fall in love with him all over again,” she said. “Every time I did that, my heart used to leap in my chest.”
And the couple used the sport to keep them going in the early stages of Graham’s illness, including with that post-chemo half-marathon that gave him such a boost.
After suffering such a horrendous sequence of bereavements, Lisa realised running was such a central part of her identity that if she wanted to find herself again, she would need to embrace the sport once more.
Her return to the sport came via small steps. The woman who ran marathons at the click of a finger started out again by tackling a single mile.
A parkrun followed and before she knew it, Lisa was running a half-marathon in the New Forest.
“I was among these ancient trees, and was thinking, ‘these trees have been here since the Norman Conquest, they’ve weathered all these storms, and they’ve weathered Graham’s death, and my father’s death, and my sister’s death, and probably they will weather my death as well,” she told the Running Tales Podcast.
“It was very, very inspiring being out there, and being in nature again was just so healing.
“I’ve got a different attitude to running now, and I just want to enjoy it. Before, it was very much about proving myself to myself, because I was so unathletic.
“I’ve come last in 25 marathons. I’ve always been slow, ever since I was a child. So, to become a marathon runner was the least likely outcome for me.
“I don’t have anything to prove now and I’d rather spend the rest of my time just really enjoying running, and when I’m not enjoying it anymore, stop.
“Just stop and have a walk, or stop and go home. I don’t feel I have to push through the pain barrier.
“I’ve done it 112 times now, if you include the ultras. And I’ve also got through three bereavements in quick succession, and I just feel I’ve got a bulletproof mindset now.
“I have such renewed respect for myself, but it’s not just me. Anyone can be put in these situations.
“It’s sink or swim, and I didn’t have a choice. I had to survive these things, because people were depending on me to be the strong one, to research their medical options, to hold them and stop them from falling over when they could barely walk anymore.
“I just got on with it. So many people do so much more than I ever did, but I just want to remind people that running does give you superpowers.”
Those running-inspired powers led Lisa to complete last year’s Brighton Marathon in Graham’s memory, carrying his ashes in a bum bag as she completed the race: “It was greatly inspiring wanting to do it in Graham’s honour, because I did my first Comrades in honour of my mother.
“That ‘why’ definitely propelled me forward. I’m not quite sure I would have got to that finish line without a very powerful why.”
This year, she returned to Brighton for her 110th marathon, despite being injured for the majority of her training block. In typical fashion she ran, walked and danced her way round in just over seven hours.
The back of the pack badge of honour:
When asked about being a slower runner and whether she embraces a back of the pack mentality, Lisa laughs.
“I don’t really have a choice, if someone’s asking for tips on how to run slowly, there’s no technique to it - be born Lisa Jackson and you’ll find out soon enough you can’t run fast.
“Obviously, I can run faster, because to run Comrades, I had to train a lot, and I slashed about 40 to 45 minutes off my average marathon time.
“But the way I had to train, I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t like doing speed training, I just don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy doing countless lunges and squats.”
Lisa said she hopes her example has given people permission to run, calling her achievements a “triumph of tenacity over a lack of talent”.
“If I can do it, you can do it,” she added. “You have to want to. When people say, ‘I could never run a marathon’, I say, ‘well, you could. I mean, anyone could’.
“If there was a tiger chasing you, trust me, you could run a marathon. But the fact is, you’ve got to want to. And if you don’t want to, I totally get it.
“I absolutely question my life choices. At points in every single race I ever do, and it doesn’t even have to be a marathon, it can be a 5k or parkrun, I think, ‘are we nearly there yet’?”
Rather than the ‘need for speed,’ Lisa’s love of running comes from making connections and having conversations.
“People say to me, ‘you’d run faster if you stopped chatting’, but then I wouldn’t run at all because there’d be no point to it,” she said.
“If I was running with you, which I wouldn’t be because I’m sure you’re much faster than me, but if we got to the finish line and I had a chance of being last, I would ask you to go a tiny bit ahead of me, so I could have the wooden spoon and the honour of being last.
“It’s a badge of pride, and what most amuses me is meeting people who never run marathons at all, and when I tell them I’ve come last in 25, they go, ‘oh, well, never mind, at least you finished’.
“And I’m thinking, why are you feeling sorry for me? You should say you’re sorry for yourself, because you’ll never know the thrill of finishing a marathon ever.
“And also, you’ll never know the thrill of finishing last, because you get made such a fuss off at lots of races. All the event team are assembled, and they all give you this honour guard, and they’re all clapping for you, and you often get double goodie bags.
“I don’t feel an iota of shame over it. I’m just so proud, because I really am amazed that I’ve even done one marathon, let alone 110.”
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