Tom Cherry realized how strong his wife was long before she called him from the side of the road, two bones sticking out of her left arm.
Breast cancer will do that.
“It set my priorities in a different direction,” Cheryl Cherry said. “All of a sudden, you begin to look at your life and look at things ahead of you and think, ‘I want to enjoy what might be ahead of me.’ The thing that it really does is make you realize you can go through a lot more than you think you can.”
A quarter-century after her diagnosis, Cherry, 67, is not stopping.
About 3 1/2 years after becoming a cyclist, she captured gold and silver medals at the National Senior Games last year in Minnesota. The senior nationals are every two years, with Birmingham, Ala., hosting in 2017.
“I just had a knack for it,” Cherry said. “I don’t have any fear of speed, so being on that bike and going up Sugarloaf Mountain in Clermont the first time … Coming down was a thrill I never had experienced.”
Cherry’s path to becoming a national champion is no accident.
Her husband, a retired high-school football coach who played at Penn State and briefly with the Pittsburgh Steelers, helps with her workouts. Cheryl researches training methods, equipment and nutrition online. The Cherrys have been vegans for three years, and they plan race strategy on whiteboards in their garage.
“Did I ever see this coming? No,” said Cherry’s son, Derek Snowden. “Not in a million years. Well, maybe in a thousand years but not in a million years.”
Cherry, who started cycling to lose weight, hold state records in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. She is expected to go for her fourth consecutive sweep of the 5K and 10K time-trial gold medals at the Georgia Golden Olympics in Warner Robins in September.
“She has discovered the energy, the lightning bolt of competitive spirit,” Del Moon of the National Senior Games Association said.
In her early 40s at the time, Cherry was a single mother when she moved to Seattle so her daughter, Jennifer, could train with the ballet. Less than a year later, tests revealed she had breast cancer.
Cherry said she underwent nine surgeries.
“It was a rough time in my life, but I am a very, very forward-thinking person,” Cherry said. “I don’t look back. I don’t get depressed. I wanted to make it positive, and I wanted to have good memories of my time in Seattle. That’s what I did.”
Jennifer Yamsek, a retired professional ballerina, lives in Atlanta.
“I appreciate what she did a lot more now as an adult than I did at 17,” Yamsek said. “Now that I’m 40 and I’m a mom, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, if that happened to me, I don’t know if I could have been as strong as she was.’ To know how close I came to losing her is scary.
“At the time, she didn’t make a big deal of it.”
Besides cancer, Cherry has undergone neck fusion surgery and a knee replacement. Then she crashed her bike a couple of years ago.
“She called me on her cellphone and said, ‘Honey, I need you to leave work and come get me. I broke my arm,’ ” Tom Cherry said. “First thing I said was, ‘How do you know it’s broken?’ She said, ‘Because I am sitting here, and I can see the two bones sticking out of the skin.’
“From that day on, every time I talk to someone about her, I say, ‘She is one tough woman.’ ”
And an accomplished cyclist who averages about 23 mph during a time trial.
“Every day, I say to myself, ‘It’s time to step out of this comfort zone. I need to go farther,’ ” Cherry said. “The excitement of doing that at this age has turned my life around.”
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