Weightlifting helped me survive stage 3 cancer, says Shrewsbury mum

Dawn Williams was fifty-two when she learned she had stage 3 breast cancer. The diagnosis arrived in October 2023, landing just weeks after her split from her partner—a collision of crises that might have flattened most people. She faced a double mastectomy and chemotherapy every two weeks, the kind of treatment that leaves most patients hollowed out and nauseous, unable to imagine lifting anything heavier than a coffee cup.

But Williams had picked up weightlifting during lockdown, and by the time her diagnosis came, she was training regularly. She decided not to stop. Instead, she kept showing up at Evolution Weightlifting Club in Shrewsbury, kept moving weight, kept competing. Two weeks before her chemotherapy began, she competed in the British championships. Throughout the months of treatment that followed, she continued to train in clean and jerk and snatch events. When it was over, she had won three gold medals.

The physical toll of chemotherapy is well documented—nausea, fatigue, the sense that your body has become a stranger. Williams experienced some of these effects. But she noticed something: the strength training seemed to blunt the worst of it. She drank five to six liters of water on chemo days and kept lifting. The sickness that devastates so many cancer patients never took hold of her the way it does for others. "100 per cent it helped me," she said. The evidence backs her up. Research increasingly suggests that physical training during cancer treatment can reduce symptoms and improve recovery outcomes, though it remains counterintuitive to most people facing such a diagnosis.

What mattered as much as the weights themselves, though, was the place where she lifted them. Sam Heenan, the coach at Evolution, had built a community there—the kind of environment where a woman undergoing chemotherapy could show up and be treated as an athlete, not a patient. Williams credits that community with helping save her life. The gym became her anchor, the place where she was still herself, still strong, still capable of winning.

In May 2024, the scans came back clear. No signs of cancer remained. Williams, who works at a pharmaceutical company, now volunteers at a cancer charity. She has become an advocate for what she learned through her own ordeal: that movement matters, that community matters, that a diagnosis does not have to mean surrender. She still attends regular scans—that worry never fully leaves—but she wants other women to know what she discovered. She also wants them to know something else: her first mammogram came back negative, a reminder that screening catches things early, and that vigilance saves lives. Life after cancer is never quite the same, she says. But it can still be a life of strength.