I first met Jane Tomlinson at the Sports Personality of the Year awards in
Birmingham shortly before Christmas. I was dressed as a chauffeur and
wearing an ill-fitting excuse for a chauffeur’s cap, behind the wheel of a
gleaming Citroën C6.
The plan was that I’d write an article about what it was like to rub shoulders
with sport’s most high-profile stars: Zara Phillips, Jenson Button, Kelly
Holmes, Jonny Wilkinson, Amir Khan. But as I hovered outside the Crowne
Plaza hotel, it was Tomlinson, tiny, shivering and wrapped in a long wool
coat, who was the first passenger to slide into the C6’s back seat.
And as we chatted on the way to the ceremony at the NEC, it quickly became
clear that Tomlinson made a much more interesting story than the one I’d
originally had in mind.
“It’ll be a bit of an anti-climax if all you get is us,” said Mike,
Tomlinson’s husband, on hearing that I was from The Sunday Times. Tomlinson
laughed and agreed. But although she’s no celebrity and could walk down most
streets unrecognised, hers are the most remarkable sporting achievements of
all.
Despite having been diagnosed with terminal cancer six years ago, Tomlinson, a
radiographer and mother-of-three from Leeds, has competed in three London
marathons, several triathlons, cycled from Rome to Leeds, from John o’
Groats to Land’s End, and last year completed her incredible fundraising
odyssey by cycling 4,200 miles across America.
Last year she cycled further than she drove — about 2,500 miles more. Even
though she is unable to stand while pedalling because of the cancer in her
legs, and had to fight constant pain on her nine-week ride from San
Francisco to New York, she still can’t wait to finish her latest bout of
chemotherapy and get back in the saddle. “To me cycling is like reliving
your childhood,” she says. “It’s all that hard work you do for the uphills
and then that great roar down the hill. I have a lot of disease in my bones
so I’m not going to bounce very well if I come off. But you still don’t put
on the brakes. You put your head down and try to get up to 30 or 40mph.”
Her one-year-old Ford Ka — the first car she has ever called her own — is no
match. “It probably has less than 2,000 miles on the clock,” she says. “I
don’t really enjoy driving. I don’t feel secure. I have a friend in York,
about 25 miles away, and I’d rather cycle to see her.”
Tomlinson spent much of her childhood cycling around Liverpool, where her
father was an NHS dentist, and despite her reservations behind the wheel she
has fond memories of cramming into the back of her parents’ Hillman Imp with
all eight of her siblings (there are now nine). “It wouldn’t be the done
thing now. Two of us had to sit on the back shelf.”
When she was about 12 the family moved for three years to Australia, where she
remembers driving for three days from Adelaide to Perth, all of them in a VW
station wagon in the days before air-conditioning or in-car entertainment.
“I was about 12 or 13,” recalls Tomlinson. “It was 11 of us and our camping
kit. There was a picture taken and you can see the suspension’s been jacked
up as much as it could be, but the car was still very low. There was no road
then, just a dirt track, nothing but red earth, a few bits of scrub and no
buildings.
“I think Mum and Dad gave me that feeling of ‘you can set off and do something
if you want’.”
It was a lesson that would serve her well. Tomlinson was 26 with two young
daughters when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a
mastectomy but the cancer returned three years later, and in 2000 she was
told it had spread to her bones and lungs. By then she had a third child,
Steven, now 10.
She was given six months to live. But Tomlinson is stubborn. She decided to
take control. She’d always thought about running and cycling and she decided
to follow her parents’ lead and “set off and do something”. “Because of the
way my life turned out, and with being poorly quite young on, I think that’s
what made me more determined,” she says in her soft Yorkshire accent. “You
have to make your own way. You have to prove yourself.”
She started out with the 5km Race for Life in aid of Cancer Research, in 2001.
By 2003 she had finished the London marathon. She has since run it twice
more, along with the New York marathon and three triathlons, and is the only
person with incurable cancer to complete a full Ironman (2.4-mile swim,
112-mile bike ride and full marathon to be done inside 17 hours). Her
efforts have raised £1.5m for her charity, Jane’s Appeal, which donates to
children’s and cancer charities.
Reluctantly, she has announced that the Ride Across America will be her last.
She admits it was “very hard work”.
“My health deteriorated throughout the nine weeks we cycled,” she says. “I was
in a lot of pain and losing weight, due to altitude and my illness. It was
horrible. You start taking painkillers at 5 or 6am to make sure you are well
enough to get on the bike. You take painkillers during the day and then you
run out by the time you’ve finished a day’s cycling, and you’ve still got
nine hours to cover. On the really bad days I had some morphine syrup to try
to get some rest.”
Mike wanted her to stop. “But most of the money comes when you complete an
event, so I kept thinking, ‘I’ve only got to carry on for another three
weeks, another two weeks, another seven days’. I think just because I’m ill
does not give me an excuse to give up.”
Last week she and Mike launched Jane Tomlinson’s Run For All, a 10km charity
run in Leeds, which will take place this June (see www.runforall.com for
details). But this time Tomlinson won’t be taking part. “I can’t take on
more challenges — I know there is part of me that means once I’ve started I
won’t give up.”
Last month Tomlinson was voted “person of the year” in a Sunday Times/YouGov
poll. “And that is strange,” she says with genuine bafflement, “because I
come home and just go back to being myself; I go back to work.”
As I pulled the C6 up alongside the red carpet at the Birmingham NEC Tomlinson
noticed Kelly Holmes posing in a hail of camera flashes. She decided to wait
a minute. “Let’s give her her moment,” she said indulgently, pulling her
coat close for the dash through the cold. “They’re not bothered about us.”
On her CD changer
I’m listening to Radio 5 Live at the moment because the battery on my iPod has
gone. When it is working it’s always on shuffle mode and I’ll be listening
to anything from Pearl Jam (right) to Gorillaz, and Pink Floyd to Wolfmother
Jane Tomlinson MBE, 42, was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 26.
Ten years later she was told the cancer had spread to her bones and lungs
and was incurable. Despite this, she has continued her work as a paediatric
radiographer and has raised £1.5m for charity. She has run the London
marathon three times, is the only person with incurable cancer to complete a
full Ironman triathlon, and last year cycled 4,200 miles across America. She
lives with her husband Mike in Leeds and they have three children and one
granddaughter.
