Listen to the full conversation here…
I’ve got a life threatening lung disease called cystic fibrosis (CF is a genetic condition where two parents have to have the faulty gene. And it predominantly affects your lungs and your digestive system), which is why I run. I was born with cystic fibrosis and throughout my teenage years, I was constantly told that I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that or I’m never going to have a career. I’m never going to have a life. It’s been a driving force for me and a big reason behind me wanting to chase my goals, build a career and simply live life to the fullest, which is where my career as a coach has come from and obviously then running marathons around the world as well.
I was born 10 weeks early as well. So I was tiny, 30 weeks. And my sisters were also born premature. So the hospital just said to my mum, “you’ve done this before, so off you go”. And then at four months old, I just wasn’t thriving. I was still about two pounds and was just very unwell, and I consistently stopped breathing. My mum knew there’s something different here compared to the other two. And the doctors wouldn’t listen. And it was actually a nurse who discovered it because she had a daughter with CF and because people with CF have slightly salty skin – and she recognised that in me. So the nurse went behind the consultant’s back and got me diagnosed.
There’s a phrase that’s never left me, they said it was like bringing up a child to die because they were told I wouldn’t make 16 years old, I’d be living in hospital so forget having a life, forget having a career, forget doing anything that I might enjoy because it’s not going to be good for me because of the bacteria that could then affect her lungs and cause lung infections and lung damage and all these different things. But fortunately for me, my parents kind of looked at it and thought… “hang on – if you’re saying her life is going to be shorter why don’t we actually just let her live and do as much as possible”. You never know what’s around the corner.
My dad said to me – if we’re going to look after your lungs, we also need to use them because that’s the only way we’re going to get them stronger and keep them clear. And so he encouraged me to start running and I started competing at 400 meters on the track. And I did that for quite a long time until I was about 21. I finished 13th in the country. And then I was like, all right, I suppose I should go and get a job now.
The beauty of being a child or a teenager is that you don’t really register in your mind the struggles in the same way you do as an adult. You just get on with it.
When I was teenager, I had a doctor sit down and say to me – you’ve made it to the age of 16, but forget thinking you’re going to make it to 30. And I was like, here we go again. I just moved the goalpost because I’m still alive. And I thought to myself, do you know what? When I’m in my thirties, I’m going to do a challenge. And so I set the challenge of 36 marathons in 36 days.
I don’t really know how I managed to do it. But after 12 days, your body adapts and the marathon becomes like a 5K, like in a morning run, like it’s nothing. And you know, if you can remain injury free, which I did, by the time you get to 36, you’re so adapted to it that I could have carried on running. I was absolutely fine.
I flew out for work to run the Cape Town marathon and an hour before the race, the race director cancelled the race, which has never happened to me before. The reason they gave was that it was windy. However, my friend and I decided to continue running a marathon despite it being cancelled. So we set off in beautiful sunshine and about 4k in I felt a bit weird and then it suddenly felt like having an electric shock go through my brain and then the next thing I know I had a paramedic with me and I was told that I’d hit my face as I had a seizure. It’s left me with a really strange relationship with running in the sun, which is sad because I love running in the sun. And at the time I’d also lost 30 % of my lung function. It was just brought on by an incredible amount of stress. I am now going back and about to run the Cape Town marathon again to face this fear and hopefully get over it.
The advice I would give other young girls with Cystic Fibrosis is to live as fully as you can, and do what you love. Because for me, if CF suddenly turned around and said, that’s it, there’s nothing you can do, I know that in my heart I have lived fully and I’ve lived hard. And I’ve done so much in the time I’ve had that I can make peace with that.
