Through cancer, she kept running, smiling and cheering — right up to her last breath
Though she was a star sprinter in high school and attended North Carolina Central University on a track scholarship, Dawn Davis Calhoun felt she didn’t start moving toward reaching her full potential as a runner until the year she turned 45, long after her first breast-cancer diagnosis at the age of 38.
From that point on, according to those closest to her, the Charlotte wife and mother of two didn’t stop trying to move forward — didn’t stop pushing herself, didn’t stop encouraging others to push themselves, didn’t stop believing she could beat her disease, which returned in 2015 and eventually spread to other parts of her body — until she died on Sunday night.
She was 52.
On Monday, the morning after Kevin Calhoun made the late-night announcement on Facebook of his wife’s passing, tributes flooded the various streams that she had been an anchor in: from athletes she’d trained with through her participation in women-focused organizations like Charlotte-based Tri It For Life and the Charlotte chapter of Black Girls RUN!; from others she’d inspired to try three sports at once through her role as a regional ambassador for the Black Triathletes Association; from lifelong line sisters in the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; from current and former fellow dance moms at Miss Donna’s School of Dancing, which was a second home to daughters Danyale and Lauryn for years.
“You’re a real life superhero. You did the work of a thousand people.”
“I thank God for the chance to get to know her and watch her show us how to give cancer a run for its money.”
“You didn’t just let cancer take you out. You gave him a black eye and a couple of bruised ribs before you chose to leave.”
Dawn Davis was born in the borough of Manhattan in New York City on Nov. 5, 1967, and raised mostly by a single mother who eventually moved across the Hudson River to Englewood, N.J. As a girl, she danced competitively, and as a high-schooler, she ran for Englewood’s Dwight Morrow High School and helped her mom Doreen bring up her younger brother Jay, who was 10 years her junior.
She fell in love with North Carolina after migrating south for college, but fell in love with Kevin Calhoun first; the two started dating while he was working toward a mechanical engineering degree at N.C. State, and married four years later, in 1993.
Professionally, she spent her career working for a variety of big Charlotte banks in jobs almost exclusively related to project management and information technology. Away from the office, Dawn Calhoun was devoted — first and foremost — to loving on her daughters, and — probably secondly — to finding ways to see the world with her husband.
Her passion for globetrotting was so intense that, back in the late ’90s, she took on a side hustle before side hustles were even a thing, by creating a travel agency. It also was one of many examples of her dedication to helping others realize their dreams, and she continued to plan dream vacations for people until almost the day she died.
“Right before the holidays, she’s laying up in bed, sick, can’t move, can barely get up and get to the bathroom, and she’s calling hotels in Paris, she’s putting together travel trips, she found a black history tour of Paris...” Kevin says. “She was determined to make sure they had a great time.”
Cancer struck first in 2004, the diagnosis coming after she found a lump during a self-breast exam and persisted in advocating for herself through two doctors’ opinions that there was nothing to worry about.
Her disease didn’t change her life nearly as much, however, as did her decision to change her lifestyle as she confronted age 45, having not been consistently active in years. In 2012, Calhoun signed up to train with Tri It For Life for the Ramblin’ Rose Women’s Triathlon, which consists of a 225-yard pool swim, a nine-mile bike ride and a two-mile run.
The bug bit her hard.
A few years later, in January 2016, she ran her first marathon (in Miami), and the following September she tackled the Ironman 70.3 Augusta triathlon, which covers 1.2 miles in a river, a 56-mile bike course, and 13.1 miles of running. She also eventually crossed the finish line at marathons in cities from Las Vegas to Chicago, New Orleans to D.C., and continued to enter races while undergoing punishing chemotherapy treatments after her recurrence.
And to think, her husband Kevin says, that she had for decades held onto a fear of running long distances dating to an asthma attack she suffered back in high school, when a coach made the sprinters do a longer-than-usual run during practice one day.
“We used to have this debate, and I said, ‘You can do it.’ And she’d say, ‘No, I had asthma — it’s gonna literally kill me,’” he recalls, noting that she’d never run more than a mile at one time before taking up triathlon in her mid-40s.
Once she overcame her fear, she never had a can’t-do attitude again, and after surging across the finish lines of half Ironmans and marathons in the wake of her second diagnosis, she told her husband, “Well, if I can do these things, then I can beat cancer.”
These are just a couple examples of her resolve — though those whose lives she touched suggest there may be thousands like them.
One, from 2017: During a trip to Jamaica for the Reggae Marathon in Negril (which she helped organize, for hundreds of running tourists, through yet another organization she was involved with called Reggae Runnerz), Dawn Calhoun planned an excursion with Kevin that saw them hiking six miles to the summit of 7,402-foot-tall Blue Mountain. Starting at midnight. In order to see the sun rise in the morning. While she was battling the crippling effects of her chemo treatments.
Another, from this past Oct. 5: At the Susan G. Komen Charlotte Race for the Cure — which she and her husband had probably done together close to 10 times before — Dawn was miserable, Kevin recalls. Very sick. Very cold. Very tired. Probably 40 pounds lighter than she’d been just six months earlier. Yet she was determined to be there, and as they started out together that day with Kevin pushing her in a wheelchair, Dawn was smiling.
“Her pride at being there was obvious,” says Molly Grantham, the WBTV News anchor who helps host the annual event and who snapped a photo of Dawn that inspired thousands of Grantham’s followers after it was posted on her Facebook page. “There’s about 20,000 people there and so you see a lot of things ... but her smile — and her husband’s smile, too — stood out so much.”
Dawn’s favorite phrase, says one of her closest friends, Nannette Christian of Harrisburg, was “I got s--- to do.”
“She was like, ‘I cannot stop. I got stuff that I need to do.’ She lived like a true warrior. She did not let the cancer get her, and she truly lived her life ... literally up until the time she took her last breath.”
In fact, even as her health declined sharply late in the fall, she was organizing a group trip to Morocco — for the Marrakech Marathon, which is on Jan. 26 — so she could pursue her newly conceived dream of completing a marathon on each of the seven continents. She had also, Kevin says, recently made arrangements to take a trip to Jamaica right after attending their older daughter Danyale’s graduation from N.C. State in May.
And even as her racing days drew to a close, she never stopped showing up to cheer on others.
In November, despite her terribly weakened condition, Dawn insisted on traveling to Panama City Beach, Fla., to support three friends participating in Ironman Florida, a race consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run. It’s a distance Dawn had a burning desire to tackle, but would never get the chance.
“She made sure that she was at different places on the course,” says Geri Jackson, a close friend (and herself a breast-cancer survivor) who was racing her first Ironman. “And the last time I saw her out there, she was bundled up in blankets and sitting on the back of this golf cart, and I’m coming past and I’m running really, really slow, and she says, ‘Hey! You better keep your butt movin’!’ She said, ‘You got a finish line to get across! ... You better go! You better get it!’”
It gave her all the motivation she needed to finish — and reminded her of a moment years earlier, when Dawn Calhoun was waiting for Jackson at the finish line of a mock event designed to help women training for their first triathlon.
“I had my pink survivor shirt on from the Komen walk ... and when I crossed, Dawn hugged me and she whispered in my ear. She said, ‘You beat your cancer. And now look at what you just did.
“‘You,” Dawn told her, with a big smile on her face, “can do anything.’”
This story was originally published January 8, 2020 at 1:21 PM.
