Canberra breast cancer survivor Allyson Martin aims big for her ironman comeback

Following a two-year cancer battle, her hunt to make that goal a reality began back at the very event that marked the beginning of her cancer journey, days before COVID-19 gripped Australia.

The 34-year-old's ironman dream began when she first fell in love with triathlons back in 2016, and with the encouragement of her sister, joined a Canberra club. Her focus then shifted to competing in the longer-form events, half-ironmans.

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By 2020 she had competed in three, and had signed up for her first full-length event, before everything changed that February.

After her fourth half-ironman, she discovered a lump in her breast that evening.

Once she returned to the ACT from the Geelong event, she visited her doctor, leading to multiple scans and a biopsy, which confirmed she had an aggressive type of stage 2 breast cancer.

"I just happened to feel a lump in my breast. I didn't do regular breast exams so it was just an accident, and I thought I better get that checked out. I didn't ever suspect it would be cancer," she said.

"I found out that it was cancer on the Thursday, met with the surgeon on the Friday, and then the following Friday I went into surgery and had a mastectomy.

"The week I was diagnosed was also when COVID started becoming a really big thing and we all started going into lockdown, so trying to deal with all of that was a lot."

After a week-long stay alone in hospital, her oncologist told her being active would help her manage the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. So despite her ironman dream being put on the backburner, she returned to training with her ACT club JT Multisport.

Martin initially ran, before it turned into a walk, alongside others in her club rehabbing injuries to keep active during treatment.

"It was extremely important to me to keep doing that. Especially while I was doing chemotherapy and radiotherapy for two reasons. So one, probably the more important one, was my mental health, as there's a lot of things you can't control about your treatment," she said.

"The other part of it is that it really helps you manage side effects and that's one of those things ... the all-consuming fatigue from chemotherapy and radiotherapy is beyond what you can imagine, just being tired. I fell asleep while I was walking, that is how tired you are.

"All I could to do to get through it was focus on the things I could do, and that included going to training, and doing what I could as long as I could. Because you don't want to completely lose your sense of self and the things that you like doing."

Martin has returned to training during her remission, but will continue hormone therapy for the next five years as part of her treatment. And she is eyeing a return to the Geelong half-ironman event, where her cancer journey began two years ago, on February 20.

If all goes well, she plans to be competing in her first full-length ironman three months later in May, some two years on from her cancer diagnosis.

"There's really no physical reason why I can't do these things, and really I like to think I'm pretty resilient, pretty tough in being able to do that," she laughed.

"A couple of weeks after I finished radiotherapy I didn't really have any physical reserves, but I really just wanted to get back to some normalcy in my life and part of that was starting training. I literally started from nothing, it was 15 seconds of running. So that's sort of the level we started at, I had nothing to give.

"Even now, I also had some pretty significant complications from my surgery that have really restricted my range of movement. So getting back into swimming was really difficult, and it's taken probably a full year - and even now I still have some some of those complications that I'm working through.

"The other part of it is I don't have those physical reserves that most people have to handle a really large insurance load. I don't recover very quickly, and I do need a little bit more rest. And it's taken a while to figure out when I need to do that."

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