Nearly nine years have come and gone since John Bruner, then 19 years young, collapsed and died while running the Missionary Ridge Road Race. Her son soon buried in a cemetery near the family’s Dalton, Ga., residence, Margie Bruner would run about 2.5 miles each day to his gravesite, “cry for hours, then run back home.”
If you want to know why the 54-year-old Bruner is putting her cancer-ravaged body through today’s Sunbelt Bakery 70.3 Ironman Chattanooga competition, her late son is the answer.
“Every time I run,” she said Saturday morning, “I run for him.”
But how she hopes to run for 13.1 miles, swim for 1.2 miles and bike for 56 miles while fighting a brain tumor is another matter.
“I’m a little afraid I’ve bitten off more than I can chew,” she said. “I’m pretty nervous.”
No one should have to chew through the pain and hurt and fear that Bruner, her husband Greg, their daughter Megan (29) and son Andrew (24) have had to swallow since Aug. 4, 2007, when John died from a coronary artery anomaly, a condition so rare it reportedly occurs in 0.01 to 0.05 percent of the population.
Before his death, he had been the Dalton Daily Citizen’s co-male cross country runner of the year in 2005 and was a member of the Georgia College track and cross country teams – eager to begin his sophomore year at the Milledgeville school.
“I think about him all the time,” Margie Bruner said. “It still feels like yesterday.”
Mark WiedmerBut as life does, it continued. Megan graduated from the University of Georgia and married, she and her husband now living in St. Louis and soon expecting their second child. Andrew graduated from Dalton High in 2010, then followed in his sister’s footsteps at UGA. Greg continued his work at Shaw Industries. Margie coached cross country at Dalton State, all of them soldiering on as best they could.
Greg and Margie even took on a 44-mile run/walk around the rims of the Grand Canyon.
“October 27, 2012,” she said. “It took 17 hours. Probably the hardest (athletic) thing I’ve ever done. Very powerful emotionally.”
Bruner’s running history is certainly powerful. She’s mastered the famous marathons in Boston, New York and Chicago. She’s completed the Chickamauga Marathon locally. She estimates she’s probably run 10 to 12 total over the last 35 years.
Even the August morning she lost her son, she won the women’s masters division on the 4.7-mile course.
But in 2014, Bruner’s lifetime of running was stopped in its tracks by a diagnosis of breast cancer. She beat that – “I’m cancer free from the neck down,” she says – but the cancer metastasized in the brain.
“I was beginning to have neurological issues,” she said. “Id lose my train of thought, stuff like that.”
Treatments at Vanderbilt soon began. Radiation and trials. There were seven lesions a year ago. She has had two more radiated within the last month. If the danger isn’t completely gone, its pace is at least slowed.
“I take six Tykerb pills a day,” she said. “Every three weeks I have an infusion of Herceptin. I’ll have to have treatments for the rest of my life.”
Her life’s prognosis is all over the map. Two years. Five years. Eight or longer. Just this past week her oncologist told her that the medical community is getting much, much better at dealing with this form of cancer, which should surely lift her energy level when she dives into the Tennessee River around 6:50 this morning.
Yet whatever the future holds, the goal to one day compete in the Ironman, to, in her words, “get this off my bucket list,” caused her to solicit the help of fellow Dalton State cross country coach Andy Meyer – a past Ironman conqueror – to defeat today’s 70.3 Ironman.
So three times a week, despite the cancer treatments, Bruner has kept swimming, biking and running. And most of the time it’s worked pretty much the way she and Meyer expected it to, to the point, “I’m feeling pretty prepared.”
But because the Ironman is run under the unpredictable eye of Mother Nature, there was at least unwelcome surprise on the second weekend of April as she participated in a camp that gave its participants a trial run over today’s course.
“It was cold and windy,” she said. “When I jumped in the water, I freaked out. I felt like I was in the ocean. Every time I took a breath a wall of water hit me in the face.”
Now she’s about to hit back against the Tykerb pills and Herceptin infusions, the endless grief of a lost son, the uncertainty of her future.
“I just hope I get done,” she said. “I just want to finish. I don’t know what will happen, but I know I feel a lot of love and support.”
A few seconds later she asked if she could put in a plug for the Run For John race staged each spring in Dalton by the Bruners’ church: St. Joseph’s Catholic. Its ninth edition completed on April 30, the race has now raised more than $95,000 for Dalton-area runners, race volunteers and parish members in or bound for college.
“John would be so proud,” she said.
But no more proud than her friends and family surely are of John’s mom.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com