Athletic passion helps runner through cancer challenge

<p>As much as Catherine DuBay runs -- around stadium tracks, far into the hilly countryside, or on a 199-mile relay from Calistoga to Santa Cruz -- you'd assume she likes it. And maybe she does.</p><p>She's just not sure.</p><p>"I don't know if the act of running itself is what runners enjoy," said DuBay, a lean and amiable mother of two who's lived in Santa Rosa all her 45 years.</p><p>What she loves for certain is what running has done for her -- even before she received a breast-cancer diagnosis last February. As arduous as the fight was, she's grateful she went into it fit, supported by her running buddies and familiar with what it takes to finish a painful and difficult challenge.</p><p>Especially as a cancer patient, DuBay was happy she's a runner. "In my pregnancies, at stressful times of my life -- my mother's death -- in all of those times, it helped to be healthy and be positive," she said.</p><p>She took up running at Piner High in the late 1970s because she couldn't shoot a basket to save her life, nor hope to dance a routine and yell "Go Prospectors!" at the same time. It was former Piner track and cross-country coach Jim Underhill, for whom the school's stadium is named, who encouraged her to run.</p><p>DuBay found her athletic passion and went on to run competitively at Santa Rosa Junior College, San Diego State, Sonoma State and UC Davis. "Not hugely successfully," she allowed, "but I enjoyed it."</p><p>Everyone in her family was happy that running brought her joy, certainly her father, Tom DuBay. Now retired, the longtime Rincon Valley math teacher ran, according to his daughter, "before running was cool."</p><p>Catherine DuBay left college thinking she'd become a teacher, too. But she discovered on a tour of Parkpoint Health Club two decades ago that she was drawn to the fitness and vitality business. She's now in her 19th year at Montecito Heights Health and Racquet Club, where she's general manager.</p><p>About the time she began her career there, she also started competing in road races. She made herself into a champion. Though she'd achieved only moderate success as a collegiate track and cross-country competitor, she became the woman to beat at races throughout the region.</p><p>Eight times, she was fastest woman in The Human Race 10-kilometer run. She finished first nine or 10 times among women in the YMCA's Harvest Fair Run, and the Kenwood Foot Race.</p><p>Other great finishes include: 47th female in the 2005 New York City Marathon, first female in the 2005 Avenue of the Giants Half-Marathon, and first place among 7,000 runners in the 2006 San Francisco Nike Half-Marathon.</p><p>Despite her high level of fitness and her healthful diet, the discovery last winter that she had breast cancer was not entirely a surprise. The disease took her mother, Bette, in 1991.</p><p>"I knew there was a family history," she said. The diagnosis of an aggressive form of cancer was a life-altering shock to her young family.</p><p>DuBay remembers the Friday night -- always family pizza night -- when she and her husband, Mark Mathewson, decided it was time to break the news to their daughters, Melanie, 11, and Mackenzie, 8.</p><p>"My 11-year-old just freaked. She started screaming and crying," DuBay remembered. The younger girl looked at her dad and said, "Are we still having pizza tonight?"</p><p>Friends and relatives of DuBay say it was an inspiration to watch how she dealt with the cancer. Without self-pity or hesitation, she had a double mastectomy and commenced chemotherapy -- and regularly picked herself up, tied on her shoes and hit the pavement.</p><p>She said she had to keep at it, "even though it was slow and miserable." She felt most confident that she'd beat the disease when she was in her running clothes, much more so than in her street clothes.</p><p>Last May, while she was enduring surgeries and regular cancer treatments, a corps of 120 running friends and relatives donned "Team Catherine" T-shirts and accompanied her to the Human Race, the huge community fundraiser sponsored each year by the Volunteer Center.</p><p>DuBay managed a 44-minute 10K, only about seven minutes off her best time. Her six-month cancer fight didn't slow her very much, nor did it cause her to leave Girls on the Run, the program that boosts the self-confidence of girls in the third through fifth grades by preparing them to finish a five-kilometer run.</p><p>DuBay has now completed the last of her surgeries and treatments, and her doctors have told her the tests look so good she needn't come back for a check-up for a year.</p><p>And she's running as strong as ever. She was the first woman across the finish line at the Harvest Fair Run this month. Days earlier, she won the Cancer Survivor category and finished sixth overall in the Susan G. Komen 5-kilometer Race for the Cure.</p><p>Whether or not she likes to run isn't an issue she gives much traction. What she does like is this: "If you can accomplish running, you can do a lot of other things in your life."</p><p>Staff Writer Chris Smith can be reached at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.</p>