100 in 100: Jean Hanks- Day 22

June is National Cancer Survivor Month. For Day 22 of 100 Stories in 100 Days, I want to tell you about Jean Hanks — one of the first people to walk through our doors, and one of the strongest I’ve ever coached. Not because of what she’s lifted. Because of what she’s carried.

She never thought of herself as an athlete

Jean didn’t grow up training. She enlisted in the Army out of high school and served from 1977 to 1980 — and as she tells it, basic training was “about as much fitness as I could handle at the time.” After that, by her own account, she didn’t really work out at all until after her daughter Lily was born — she was tall and thin, never thought about fitness or food, and figured she’d better start doing something as she got older. So she went to Jazzercise with a couple of friends. “It was fun, and it was musical, and it was social,” she says — “but you lifted up five pounds in each hand, and you did that for five years.” Then a few years at Boston Sports Club, only ever the classes, never the equipment, until she was, in her words, bored.

Then a friend, Ann Andrews, called: Amy McDougall thought they should try a new gym that had just opened. Something called CrossFit. Jean didn’t even know what it was — she had to call Ann back to ask the name again. They put one free Elements class on the calendar.

That was 2012. She was 53.

What hooked her wasn’t the workout

“When I started, I was here six days a week for like the first year,” Jean says. “Monday through Saturday. And it just made me feel better and better and better.” But the thing that actually pulled her back the next day — brutally sore — wasn’t the training. It was the people.

“Nobody cared about me before,” she says of every gym that came before this one. At Prototype, people sat next to her, showed her what to do, acted like they cared what she was doing. “It became not just work, but a lot of fun, too,” she says. “It was like my second home.” She’ll still name that early crew — the 8 AM ladies, “a lot of chatter” — like family.

Somewhere in those early years, she stopped being the person who finished last. She started running — something she’d never done before CrossFit. She hit PRs, built stamina, competed in the CrossFit Open, and built her deadlift all the way to 235 pounds. “Who would ever think this old lady could come in here and lift 235 pounds?” she says. “But I did.” New friends. New confidence. CrossFit had stopped being a workout and become a way of life.

The first setback

Before cancer, there was a knee. Jean tore her ACL skiing in 2013, barely a year into CrossFit — the first of what would become both ACLs and both menisci over the years. (She snowshoes now.) It was a devastating blow: an eight-to-nine-month recovery. But our coach Jessie Dimick got her back, and did something that told you everything about this place. “He would come in every Friday,” Jean remembers, “and let me do my PT there, so I could see everybody.” It wasn’t a normal setback, because she was never actually away. That turned out to be a rehearsal for something much harder.

And then 2014

“The end of September of 2014, that’s when I got the news that I had cancer,” Jean says. “The minute you hear that word, it just shatters you, because you don’t know if your life’s over or not.” The next day, at the doctor with her husband Brian, her blood pressure was through the roof.

It was an aggressive, invasive breast cancer. The plan: chemo, radiation, surgery, and more chemo. Jean’s response is one I’ve never forgotten. “I have a lot of females in my family,” she said. “I’ll take one for the team — but don’t let anyone else get it.”

She made one rule

There were things she gave up. She stopped taking her mother to bingo. She gave up volunteering at the senior center on Tuesdays — her immune system couldn’t risk it. “But I’m not giving up CrossFit,” she said. “That’s the one thing.” And so she came in — most days. “Even the day after chemo was one of my best days,” she says. “I would even go in that day.”

Here’s the part that still stops me. We went back through thirteen years of her training records, and 2014 — the year she was diagnosed — was the single highest-volume training year of her entire time at Prototype. 213 sessions. More than any year before it, and more than any year since. Most people’s training falls apart under that kind of weight. Jean’s peaked.

She had exactly one condition for us. She sent a message to everyone: this is my strong place, and you need to let me be strong. “I’m an easy crier,” she explains. “I don’t want to cry at CrossFit, because it’ll interfere with what I’m trying to do. So just treat me like you always have, and we’ll all get through this.”

She means it literally. “I told you guys not to treat me any different,” she says — and then, with the honesty that makes this story hers and nobody else’s: “and there were times when you didn’t, and I was ready to kill you. But that’s what I said, because this was my strong place.” She remembers being on a rower, Jessie and me beside her yelling faster, harder, push — feeling like she might be sick, swearing at us in her head, and not saying a word out loud, because that’s exactly what she’d asked for.

The community showed up anyway

Not treating her differently inside these walls didn’t mean we sat on our hands. People made her hats for the winter when she lost her hair. There was a head-shaving party at her house — and a lot of us, me included, shaved ours with her. “It was a very emotional day,” she says, “but it was a good day, because there was so much love around me.”

Jean has a bigger wish that came out of all this. “If I could just go around and talk to all these chemo patients who think you have to lay on the couch all day to get better — yes, sometimes you have to rest when your body tells you to. But you can go to CrossFit for an hour. You can do this.” She’s living proof: “I don’t think I would have done as well with my recovery if it wasn’t for CrossFit, because I was strong before I went in.”

She made it through

Jean made it through. When she came out the other side, her daughter Lily put it in a way that has stayed with all of us:

It became a family thing

That mention of Lily isn’t incidental — she’s woven all the way through this. Lily started in our kids’ classes at 12. She wasn’t a confident kid, Jean says, and she’d dealt with a growth-plate issue — but CrossFit changed that. “She started doing things she never thought she could do,” Jean says. When Lily had to write a school paper on someone who inspired her, she wrote it about her coach, Jon.

It didn’t stop there. Jean started in September, Lily that November, and Brian the following January. “At first I was like, this is my thing,” Jean laughs. “And then it became a family thing.” Their entertainment budget and their fitness, all in one place.

Still here

That was more than a decade ago. Jean is still training. More than 2,000 sessions on the board — 2,053, to be exact. Fifteen Murphs — including one on Memorial Day in 2020, in the middle of COVID, out on the Westborough High School track with Lily right beside her. She and her longtime training partner Cathy even found themselves back on a competition podium in their sixties. “We just figured we were done,” Jean says. “I don’t know how that happened.”

Thirteen-plus years in, Jean trains because she wants to keep being able to. As she puts it, she sees herself “doing CrossFit in some way, shape, or form until I can’t do it anymore.”

When I asked her how she got through 2014, her answer is the reason I wanted to tell this story this month:

The full conversation

A few years back, Jean sat down with me for one of our Community Conversations and told this whole story in her own words — the journey, the knee, the cancer, the family, the cards she still makes by hand. It’s worth your time.