The willingness to overcome moves mountains

​In 2015, the writer Eric Frattini met up with his friend Luís Miguel Rocha in Brazil. The latter confessed that he had an intense stomach ache, which they did not take seriously at first. Rocha died of stomach cancer that same year. The night that his death was announced, Frattini saw a television interview with a woman who had suffered from breast cancer, made worse by morbid obesity. Her doctor recommended that she should exercise and the patient, based on her willpower, ended up running the New York marathon.

This testimony lit the writer’s creative spark. “Why don’t we take women who have suffered from cancer to face up to high mountain challenges?”  he said to himself. No sooner said than done. Frattini explained his idea – which was also a tribute to his departed friend, to Pelayo Seguros and they decided to support him in making his dream come true. And this is how a project came to be that has helped many women with cancer to recover their enthusiasm and to find a new goal in their lives.

In 2023, the ninth edition of the Pelayo Vida Challenge took five women who have beaten the disease to Patagonia. In addition, ASISA has once again sponsored this initiative, which seeks to make society and institutions aware of the importance of investing in research and promoting early detection and screening. Amongst those making the ascent is Yolanda Cerezo, an architect who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was a fortnight away from reaching the age of fifty. As her cancer had a complicated prognosis, she had to get through different treatments that had a serious impact on her health. “For me, it was essential to carry on doing sport,” she explains. Cerezo managed to be selected for the challenge along with another eighteen candidates for some intensive trials in Sierra Nevada. The five women selected came from this event, starting another 30-week training session led by Rocío Monteoliva. This mountain guide was delighted to join the project, convinced that “sport helps cancer patients a great deal: it regenerates on hormonal and psychological levels, making us segregate endorphins.”

Laura Villa, had just come out of her fourth operation when she reached Sierra Nevada. The challenge meant that the health of this school teacher recovered almost miraculously. As she herself explains, “I went from hell to paradise in a few months. I was getting out of breath going up the stairs and in Patagonia my mind found my body.” She was only thirty-five years old, with two children when she was diagnosed with cancer. Her first obsession was to look after those close to her. But during the challenge, she was able to give herself a moment for herself and share experiences with other women who had passed through experiences that were similar to hers.

For Cerezo this has been “an unrepeatable life experience. I have been lucky to take part in something marvellous, creating closer links with my colleagues to transmit hope to other people,” she tells us. She compares the cancer process to climbing a mountain: “It is a tough route, along which there are moments of pain; a pain that at the same time reminds you that you are alive. You have to carry on, kilometre by kilometre, to be able to reach the summit.”

Villa is convinced that having journeyed over mountains and glaciers at extreme temperatures has been very useful to launch an important message to society: “There is life before cancer and after cancer; and there is also a great deal of life during cancer.” She now admits that she lives every moment with greater intensity than before the appearance of the disease. As she says, “my cancer doesn’t keep me awake at night. I am not frightened of a relapse. What makes me more frightened is going through life without living it completely.”