They'll celebrate two long journeys with a marathon

After he was diagnosed with leukemia in 1990, Robert Brown asked the most frightening question of his life. What were the odds of surviving, of living longer than the mere 20 years he'd already had?

Brown didn't know the grim statistics. The five-year survival rate for his type of cancer, acute myelogenous leukemia, was only 14 percent. But Dr. Carolyn Collins didn't believe in fixing a number on something so personal. "You either survive or you don't, period," she told him. "Today, you are surviving. Yesterday, you did the same thing. Every day that you continue to survive, you have a 100 percent chance."

That mindset has helped Brown relish 20 years since his treatment ended, an anniversary he will mark on Monday. A few weeks later, Tyler Boese -- who was 19 when he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in June 2009 -- will commemorate one year since the bone-marrow transplant that extended his life. Both will celebrate by running Sunday's Twin Cities Marathon, logging another 26.2 miles on a pair of journeys that keep moving forward despite the odds.

Brown, of Edina, and Boese, of Lakeville, prepared for the race through Team In Training, a training and fundraising program affiliated with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The two men found strength and inspiration in each other. Sunday, they hope to share that with others, along with the $16,500 they have raised to fight blood cancers.

"An endurance event is a very good analogy for surviving something like leukemia," said Brown, 41, a Carleton College graduate who works at Target's corporate headquarters. "You need to get through it. You need to deal with the good days and the bad days. You need to rely on the support of others, but still own your day-to-day activities.

"Just the fact that I exist 20 years later is something that can provide hope to people. You can overcome adversity. You can persevere. And you can do things that maybe you don't think are possible."

A native of Renton, Wash., Brown was a Carleton junior studying in England when he began bruising easily and feeling fatigued. After ignoring his symptoms for a while -- as young men often do -- he saw a doctor and was stunned to hear he had cancer.

He began chemotherapy on March 3, 1990. Without a close match for a bone-marrow transplant, Brown endured four rounds of chemo that destroyed his immune system, left him weak and thin, hospitalized him for weeks at a time and caused abscesses on his brain. But he was cancer-free when he left the University of Washington hospital on Oct. 4, 1990, and he has never had a recurrence.

Brown wasn't much of a runner until 1998, when he decided to do the Chicago Marathon to raise money for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Boese took up the sport at Lakeville South High School, where he participated in track and cross-country. During his first year at the University of Minnesota Duluth, he routinely took off on 20-mile runs just to enjoy the smell of the woods and the bracing wind on his face.

That was what Boese missed most when he was hospitalized in June 2009. While he underwent chemotherapy and the bone-marrow transplant at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, he harbored a secret desire to try his first marathon when he regained his health.

"I knew what I was capable of doing before I had cancer," said Boese, 20, who is attending Normandale Community College. "It was a natural goal to get there again. It didn't matter whether I was as fast as before. After what I'd been through, even being alive felt like a great accomplishment."

Boese and Brown met through Team In Training, which provides a training plan, coaching and group workouts for participants in a variety of endurance-sport events around the world. Both are telling their stories in detail and raising money for leukemia research through websites; Brown is at www.leukemiasurvivor.com, and Boese has a page at www.teamintraining.org.

Though Brown hasn't run a marathon in 10 years, he will follow Sunday's run with the Dublin Marathon three weeks later. As challenging as that will be, he knows what it takes to keep moving forward.

"Even at my darkest points, it never felt like there was an option other than surviving," Brown said. "I was going to get through it. A marathon gives you plenty of opportunities to say, 'I can't do this,' but you can make a choice to persevere. When I finish on Sunday, I know it's going to be emotional."

Rachel Blount • rblount@startribune.com