Former Olympic sprinter on the illness that has confined her to bed five years after Tokyo, and why she is speaking out despite the risk to her health.

Beth Dobbin, who ran for Great Britain at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021, now spends more than 22 hours a day in bed as she battles myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), BBC Sport has reported.

The 32-year-old, who also represented Scotland at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, told BBC Sport’s Katie Falkingham that she wanted to raise awareness of the condition even though the interview itself could set her back for months.

“I’ve done little things like attend a blood test at the doctors and been in bed for months after,” she said. “So doing this interview, chatting away for 30 minutes, that could have an impact on me in 2027. But I felt like it was really important to do that to get the message out.”

Dobbin now leaves her bed only to eat and use the bathroom and has left the house on just five occasions this year. ME is a chronic, fluctuating disease that causes symptoms including sleep problems, pain, difficulties with thinking and memory, and severe, persistent fatigue that does not improve with rest. Something as simple as a conversation, a bright light or a loud noise can trigger a “crash” lasting anything from 24 hours to months.

“I feel like I’ve lost everything,” she said. “I have still got my family, but I’ve lost my independence, my health, the ability to work, the ability to exercise.”

Her illness began with back-to-back Covid and glandular fever infections in the winter of 2021-22, which she only discovered through retrospective tests. At first she noticed little more than slightly slower times, extra sleep and sore glands in her neck and armpits. Tests by British Athletics doctors found nothing, so she carried on, assuming it was lingering glandular fever.

Dobbin qualified for the 2022 World Championships, Commonwealth Games and European Championships in a condensed season, but her health worsened at each one. She struggled with a painful throat and disrupted sleep at the World Championships and was dizzy while running at the Commonwealth Games. At the European Championships she false-started after losing all feeling in her legs in the blocks, and afterwards told BBC Sport of her “year of hell”.

Her symptoms piled up after that season. She returned to training after six weeks but managed only three more. Four or five specialists, looking at symptoms across multiple body systems, all concluded it was ME, a condition with no known cure or specific treatment.

ME is also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, a label Dobbin rejects. “I wish it was just fatigue, that would be a walk in the park,” she said. More than 400,000 people in the UK are thought to have ME, although the true figure could exceed one million.

Her parents and younger sister Faye, who joined her for the interview at the family home in Doncaster, described the toll on them. Her mother Jean said: “You wake up every day and just feel sad. She should be building her life, living her best life.”

There is no specialist NHS service for ME, and Dobbin said she has found herself educating GPs about the condition. After her British Athletics funding ended she waited 22 months for a face-to-face appointment with a private specialist she found herself.

Faye will run the Yorkshire Marathon on Sunday (Oct 18) to raise money for ME Research UK.

Dobbin is realistic about the future. “It’s very bleak, unfortunately,” she said, though she believes the medical community has “woken up” since the Covid pandemic, which has brought more attention and research funding.

She added that she feels a responsibility to speak out. “Unfortunately, athletes are believed a lot more than the average person,” she said. “I’ve got a slight platform. If this happened to most people they wouldn’t be able to speak about it, so I do feel like I’ve got a bit of a duty to do that.”

Read the full interview on BBC Sport