Running Podcaster Ali Feller Shares Breast Cancer Recurrence, Stage IV Diagnosis
Michelle Milliken
Ali Feller, the host of the popular running podcast "Ali on the Run Show", finished treatment for breast cancer last year. In an emotional update earlier this month, she announced that she’s had a recurrence and the cancer has spread.
Feller, a 40-year-old mother of a recent kindergarten graduate, took to Instagram to tell her followers that she’d been experiencing “intense, debilitating” pain that had gradually been getting worse, reaching a peak during her 40th birthday celebration in May. She said by the end of the day, she could barely move.
Her surgeon was at her birthday party and felt a painful bump that had developed near her sternum, and soon after, the surgeon’s office was calling to schedule appointments. After a whirlwind of ultrasounds, biopsies, and scans, Feller learned she had stage IV breast cancer that has spread to her bones.
She wrote, “I am overwhelmed. I am up to my eyeballs in cancer admin. I am sad. I am scared. I am as delusionally optimistic as ever. I am angry.
“I am convinced I’ll be an exception and not a statistic.
“I am residing fully in the denial phase, with a commitment to start the fighter phase next week.”
She added, “I was so unafraid of recurrence. I thought my absence of fear was some kind of superpower, or at least an armor. And here we are. Metastatic. Incurable, by definition. Could I have prevented this? Should I have done something — a million things — differently?
“I was living my best, happiest life. I had the dreamiest spring. It crashed down so hard, so fast, so unexpectedly.
“It’s a lot. It’s too much.”
Feller, who has the BRCA2 gene mutation, had already undergone a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy between 2023 and 2024, before being declared cancer-free in September. She chronicled all of the ups and downs of treatment with her followers. Now, she’s begun to do so again, with a post on her first chemo infusion shared a few days after her announcement. She also shared how emotional she was over removing her hair extensions, which had helped provide consistency to her post-chemo hair.
If you’d like to follow along with her new treatment journey, or her running content, you can visit her Instagram page.
