“Just getting to the gym is 90% of the battle,” said Jordan Valcourt, a BODYPUMP instructor at Dartmouth’s Penhorn Plaza Club.
Of course, she means that to be the case for everyone. For Jordan, however, just getting to the gym became something that should have been more difficult, by anyone’s standard, after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer.
A few months earlier, Jordan, 57, found a lump in her breast. When the biopsy results came back, she was told that she had a form of triple-negative breast cancer, meaning that its growth is not sustained by the hormones progesterone or estrogen, nor by the HER2 protein. This not only meant a poorer prognosis than with more common forms of breast cancer, but also that treatment would likely come in the form of a combination of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Despite the diagnosis and a new world of information to learn and navigate, Jordan felt physically great, and she had no intention of giving up her time teaching group fitness.
A full-time real-estate agent, Jordan has been teaching BODYPUMP regularly, three times per week, for the past five years. Even throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s had a loyal and tight-knit group of Members that have been with her for much of this time. This familiarity made breaking the news to them that much more difficult.
“It’s the same, dedicated group all the time,” said Jordan, “so I want them all to know that I have breast cancer, and I want it to come from me. I didn’t want to disappear for a few weeks or months and to have the rumour mill start running.”
Recognizing that there was no good time to tell her Members, Jordan bit the bullet, and announced her news just before the start of class.
“We normally have a great banter in this class, but you could have heard a pin drop for the first 30-minutes that day,” she said.
At the end of the class, Jordan spoke up again.
“People have been asking me what they can do for me, and so I want you to do two things,” she said.
“One. I want you to go and get checked, and tell all of the women in your family to get checked, too.”
“And two,” she said, “send me jokes, because I’m planning on laughing my way through this year!”
As it turns out, though, laughing wasn’t the only way that Jordan was going to push through her first few months of cancer and treatment. To everyone’s surprise, including her own, Jordan was back in the studio, ready to teach, just one week after her first chemotherapy treatment.
“I discovered after my first treatment that I really only had one day where I felt sick, so by the following week, I felt more than ready to come back,” said Jordan.
Jordan believes that the tremendous support from both her Members and her fellow GoodLife Associates is what gave her the strength to return so quickly. If everything continues to go well and COVID-19 restrictions allow, she plans to be back in the studio, three days per week, throughout her treatments.
By mid-March, in the weeks leading up to her second round of chemotherapy, Jordan had just begun to lose her hair. This reality, though, was even more motivating for her to come back to the Club.
“I want people to see me as the bald instructor on stage,” said Jordan. “This is cancer, and it happens everywhere. You might not always see it, but it’s everywhere. And if I can go to the gym with a bald head, through chemo, then you can get there too."