The qualities that made British Columbia’s Krista Guloien Temple an Olympic rowing champion are the same characteristics that have seen her through the most harrowing experience of her life: fighting stage four cancer.
March 9 was an ordinary day for the 44-year-old wife and mother of two. She worked out, she went grocery shopping and, while making lunch, she grabbed a jar of pickles. Opening that jar snapped a bone in her arm, although she didn’t know it at the time.
The pain took Temple to the floor. Convinced she had dislocated her shoulder, she called 911 and was taken to the nearest emergency room.
It was there she learned the devastating news that the breast cancer she had fought and beat in 2022 was back with a vengeance, spreading to her bones and causing six lesions from her head to her waist.
“When I went to the hospital that day, it felt like time stopped,” Temple said in an interview with The Epoch Times. “And the first thing I said was, ‘I don’t want to leave my babies.’ It was the first thing that came out of my mouth.”
A cancer diagnosis was not what Temple expected to hear that day. Leading up to March 9, she had been having some pain in her shoulder, but chalked it up to a muscle strain from walking a neighbour’s dog that often yanks hard on the leash. And although she said she hadn’t been “feeling awesome, nothing was awful enough” to raise a red flag.
Her first reaction upon hearing the news was fear of leaving her children, a six-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. Her second instinct was to escape.
“I wanted to just run. If I could have, I would have run out of the hospital and said, ‘no this isn’t for me,'” Temple said. “When you hear a stage four diagnosis you feel like you’re going to die tomorrow.”
Fear may have been Temple’s initial reaction to her diagnosis, but it didn’t take long for the character traits that made her an Olympic champion—courage, perseverance, and a never-quit attitude—to surface and pull her through the past six months.
Temple’s doctors identified her as a prime candidate for intratumoural immunotherapy, a cutting-edge but expensive course of treatment that targets cancer cells directly within the bone.
She has since undergone two treatments in Florida at a cost of more than $100,000 each.
She has also started hormone suppression therapy at home in B.C. and is currently waiting to see the results of her treatments.
“Testing is what’s next and, from there, we see where we’re at, and then make adjustments,” Temple said. “And that’s really what anyone in this situation does. It becomes a long game of monitoring and trying to figure out what works best for your body.”
Fundraising Run
Treatment in the U.S. comes with a hefty price tag that would be insurmountable without help from her friends and community.That’s why Temple’s long-time friend Matt Christopherson will run from Vancouver to Whistler beginning Sept. 6 in a bid to raise $250,000 to help cover her treatment costs.
Christopherson had already completed one run in March to support Temple, raising more than $50,000, but has decided to take on an even more challenging run with the hope of garnering more funds to help pay his friend’s medical bills.
Temple first met Christopherson at Simon Fraser University, but the pair hadn’t talked in years prior to her diagnosis. They reconnected after Christopherson heard what she was going through.
“We weren’t keeping in touch or seeing each other,” she said. “It’s amazing who steps up for you in these situations, and who comes out of the woodwork, and who becomes your pillar people.”
In addition to Project 125.1, Temple’s family and friends have also launched a fundraising campaign with a $250,000 goal.
If both campaigns are successful, they will help fund Temple’s past and future treatments.
Sometimes, the attention surrounding the cancer diagnosis can be difficult, Temple said.
“I don’t like being called stage four, because I feel like that doesn’t resonate with me, it’s not my title. When people feel sorry for me, it’s hard,” she said, adding that it’s a type of attention she isn’t used to. “I’ve had, I guess it’s like, imposter syndrome.”
Applying Athletic Training to Cancer
Cancer has also taught Temple that there are not always quick fixes in life, but she said she continues to face her current journey in a way similar to how she approached transitioning out of her life as an Olympic athlete.She retired from rowing at the age of 32 after spending her entire adult life as an elite athlete. Prior to that she ate, slept, and breathed rowing.
“I was all in,” she said.
Training for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and the 2012 Olympics in London was all-consuming but it paid off for Temple when she and her team won silver at her final Games in England. It was then that Temple knew she had reached the pinnacle of her career and decided to step away from being a professional athlete.
“At first I was like, ‘hey, who am I now? What am I going to do?’” she said. “It’s humbling. It’s a fall from grace, in a way, because you’re the top of your field, and then all of a sudden it’s being asked if you’ve ever folded T-shirts at The Gap kind of vibes.”
“I remember feeling like I came out of the rowing bubble,” she said. “Even the way I drove was like I was picking a line because I was so trained to move that way throughout my day. Everything had to be efficient. Everything had to be quick. I was so high strung, I was just like that level all the time.”
While she said she is a very different person now from who she was after retirement, she also said she is thankful to fall back on the discipline she learned during her many years of training.
“A core part of my personality, which allowed me to be successful in that high pressure environment, is helping me now,” Temple said.
In many ways, she said, the years of training that led to her Olympic success are similar to fighting cancer.
“Since I was diagnosed, the amount of sport reminders I’ve had, and how much that foundation has strengthened me as a person, physically and mentally, even though sometimes I don’t feel that strong, it’s had an impact,” she said.
“There’s no quick to-the-finish. You can’t rush your way through it. You can’t do one thing and it works overnight. And as much as you want it to, you have to sit in it and be in that pressure state and somehow keep your head on straight.”
