The bad news is the adversities kept coming in 2023 for Ashley McCallum. Since April, she’s had two operations, including open-heart surgery to repair a condition she described as a “ticking time bomb.”

Just when she started to feel like herself again, and had been on a global stage leading others in intense fitness workouts called body attack and body combat, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She had a hysterectomy on Dec. 4 and learned a few weeks later the cancer had spread.

But if anyone could keep her chin up in the midst of such news, it’s McCallum, a 39-year-old Spotsylvania County woman who’s persevered in the face of baldness caused by alopecia and skin cancer brought on by her bald head’s exposure to the sun. She also had a pretty serious motorcycle accident a few years ago that would have sidelined most mortals.

“She is a fighter. She keeps going with a positive attitude no matter what obstacles get in her way,” said Stephanie Coerper, a Spotsylvania nurse who joined McCallum’s studio, Smash Athletics in Massaponax, at the advice of friends.

Coerper never went to the gym regularly before her first visit in May, but these days, she’s in the studio almost daily due to McCallum’s influence.

“Her positivity is so addictive,” Coerper said. “If I am ever feeling like something is impossible or too hard, I just think of how Ashley would tell me that I can do it. Her impact on people is huge.”

In this together

McCallum and her husband, Jeff, seem more like two teenagers than a couple married for 19 years with four sons. Her hand is almost always nestled between his palms, and when she talks, he looks at her like every word melts his heart.

When she gestures as she talks, her hand leaves his grasp for a moment, but always finds its way back. She says “we” when she describes what’s happened to her because it’s obvious it affects him as much as it does her.

“She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met and we have a ton of faith and the power of prayer is amazing,” her husband said. As every diagnosis changes or impacts her life, she always looks adversity in the eyes, and says, ‘I knew you were coming, what took you so long?’”

In summer 2022, the McCallums learned she had an aortic aneurysm, a bulge in the wall of the main vessel that carries blood from the heart to the body. She wanted it taken out immediately — so she could get on with her life.

Dr. Alex Na, director of cardiovascular surgery at Mary Washington Hospital, cautioned this was not a procedure to enter into lightly. But after the bulge grew, quickly, he agreed it was time to break her breastbone and pry apart her ribs to get into the area around her heart.

Before the anesthesia wore off from the surgery, she was asking if she could go home to heal. Ditto on Day 2 and 3. By Day 4, when McCallum was transferred to a step-down unit, the surgeon agreed to release her, but cautioned that she needed to give herself time to heal.

If she rebroke the sternum — because she did a pushup or burpee too soon — she could die, Na told her.

“That scared me,” McCallum said. 

She waited three months to do any exercise that put pressure on the chest, even though she was on the stage at Smash, leading classes before her official clearance.

Back to movement

On the same day as her surgery, she was invited by Les Mills USA, a fitness company for which she’s a trainer, assessor and presenter, to come to Los Angeles for a Global Fitness Festival.  Videos made that day would become part of toolkits that instructors around the world would view.

The taping was a week after the clearance date Na had given. McCallum hadn’t been able to exercise as usual to that point; she wondered if she would she have the stamina to pull off the event. While others around her pushed their bodies to the limit, would hers literally crack under pressure?

“I had a lot of self-doubt. Body attack is a lot of reaching and running, an aerobic-style strength mixture class,” she said. “When I did it, I was so relieved.”

If her heart was hammering during the workout, her husband’s was in his throat. After the filming, he ran up to the stage and kissed his wife with such intensity, a stranger nearby snapped a photo.

The woman found Jeff McCallum later and sent him the image of the two, their hands clasped onto each other’s cheeks and lips locked.

“There’s a lot of things in my life I’ll remember, but that’s one thing I’ll never forget,” she said. “It was in the moment, all this hard work. All this doubt.”

Jenn Kuehn, a vice president at Les Mills, said she had a “front-row seat to witness” McCallum’s “leadership, commitment and love for helping others.”

“There were moments where she was scared,” Kuehn said. “Bigger than her fear was her unwavering determination, and it’s that determination that inspires us all.

“Ashley was onstage in front of over 5,000 participants once again,” the executive said, “reminding us that nothing is impossible.”

‘Be inspired’

Female athletes often have lighter menstrual periods, but McCallum was experiencing the opposite, and her cycles were getting worse every month. She was anemic and had low iron.

Some measures were prescribed, but her doctor also suggested a biopsy, just in case, even though women McCallum’s age typically don’t get uterine cancer.

When the test was positive, McCallum was devastated. She was mad, angry, she even admitted that she was “kinda down.” She wouldn’t go to the studio for about a week, which was unheard of, for her.

“There’s a quote that says you grow through what you go through, but there are some times,” she said, searching for words. “It just feels like the adversity just keeps coming, ya know?”

What made her diagnosis even worse was that she and her family recently had lost her first cousin, Amber, to breast cancer. She was 42, and the two women grew up together. Then, McCallum’s father was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. 

The only thing that got her through it was “the love and support of the community,” she said, both at Smash Athletics and with her extended family. 

“It was an outpouring of love, just from everybody,” her husband added.

The couple stopped by Smash on the way home from the second surgery, which happened on a Monday. Then, McCallum gave in to her body’s needs, and her husband’s demands that she be still, and she rested for two days.

By week’s end, she was back in the studio, watching filmed workouts of people who are training to be instructors. Every day, she inched a little closer to getting onstage and being involved because, as she says regularly, “Movement is my medicine.”

But her husband was ever vigil, reminding her to let her body heal even as he longed to see her back to her normal self.

“I gotta put the leash on that stallion,” he said.

A few days before Christmas, the McCallums later learned the cancer wasn’t contained to the uterine area. Doctors initially suggested a second surgery but decided to try radiation treatments.

McCallum’s spate of bad news led one gym member, Diana Kirn, to call her Job, the Bible character who repeatedly was tested by the devil, and lost everything, but refused to curse God.

“She doesn’t just get knocked down,” Kirn said, “she gets knocked down by a bulldozer. It’s just like she says in class, life is gonna knock you down, get back up. And she does again and again and again.

“You can’t help but look at her and be inspired.”