The Life We Have

When I last spoke to Rob Shaver, in December 2024, he said he hadn’t had a bad day in 20 years.   

He had previously said the same to film director Sam Price-Waldman, soon after their first meeting. Price-Waldman thought he had misheard him. How could a man who had been living with cancer for two decades, undergone more than 60 radiation treatments (twice the typical lifetime amount) and lost his hair five times to chemotherapy speak this way?   

Price-Waldman was about to direct a short documentary about Shaver, The Life We Have, which would follow the latter’s journey through illness over the years and how the profoundly difficult experience inspired and influenced his love of the outdoors. Though Shaver’s persistence surprised the filmmaker repeatedly over the months of the shoot—running daily despite chronic pain, for instance, or even climbing out of an easy chair to talk passionately with visitors despite feeling exhausted—Price-Waldman was particularly touched by Shaver’s gratitude and presence in the face of constant setbacks.  

The Life We Have is a deeply moving glimpse into the daily life of Shaver, an REI sales specialist since 2016 (he is currently on medical leave), a son and a runner diagnosed with Stage 4 Ewing’s sarcoma at age 28, in 2004. Ewing’s sarcoma is a rare and ruthless cancerous tumor that usually appears in children and young adults. Doctors gave Shaver 15% odds of surviving for five years. He had a burial fund ready.   

For years, Shaver beat those odds, and he kept beating them, even as the cancer returned. 

The Life We Have shows us a tenacious, clear-eyed man who has lived nearly two decades with cancer. The film forces us to look life’s biggest questions straight in the eye: How should we approach the time we have on earth? What is a life well-lived? And how do we go on with purpose when we know our time is near its end?   

The Streak  

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Shaver gained wider attention for his unlikely three-year-long daily running streak – a stretch that saw him covering 7,000 miles. 

“The Streak” began modestly enough: In 2021, despite being exhausted by still another round of treatment, Shaver decided to shuffle one mile around the block. A lifelong athlete who missed using his body. He also missed being outside, after so much time in hospitals. Shaver’s doctor had told him to exercise his lungs, which the cancer had spread to and damaged over the years, or else he’d have to use an oxygen tank soon. He decided he would run a mile every day as long as his body allowed it. 

That first day was more like a walk, Shaver recalled. But one day became two days, then 10 days. One mile became farther. An unbroken string began. He ran marathons around his neighborhood. He undertook multiday runs through the Colorado Rockies. The runs often were hard, and they didn’t cure him. Still, the streak was helping him. As Shaver recounts in the film, “I used to go see my doctor. And he’d be like, ‘Are you having a hard time getting up stairs?’ And I’m like, ‘I ran 7 miles this morning.’” 

A Choice to Live Deeply  

Price-Waldman first envisioned a documentary about running, and about triumph in the face of adversity.   

Very quickly, though, he realized that Shaver’s running streak was the least interesting part of his story. Price-Waldman was much more captivated by the athlete’s philosophy and approach to the time he had left.   

In The Life We Have, Shaver shares this outlook. “It’s about so much more than just running,” he says of the Streak. “It’s literally a choice, daily, to live deeply and thoroughly, and with beautiful effort. Not for results. Not for money or for fame or lifestyle. But for the richness of being alive.”  

In an interview last December, Shaver explained that he ran daily out of a desire to “do justice to the gift that is now.” Cancer has taken so many things from him, but the disease had done him one kindness: It awakened him to a deep, daily gratitude for life.  

Shaver brushed off those who call his outlook special or praiseworthy. “I didn’t have a choice. Either I could live kind of angry and bitter and always find ways that this was unfair, or I could choose to see the ways in which I was still quite fortunate,” he said. “I could use it as an anchor for perspective. I could use it as a pathway to empathy and compassion for others.”   

Shaver told me he hopes that the perspective he found over years of illness might be useful to others in a similar position.  

If you would like to support Rob Shaver and other cancer survivors, please donate to the Cancer Support Community.