Olympic sprinter bedbound 22 hours daily after ME diagnosis

Beth Dobbin ran for Great Britain at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Five years later, at 32, she spends more than 22 hours of every day in bed. The only time she leaves it is to eat or use the bathroom. She has myalgic encephalomyelitis—ME—a chronic illness with no cure, and she is speaking about it now despite knowing that the act of speaking, the simple exertion of a 30-minute conversation, could trigger months of deterioration.

It began in the winter of 2021-22, when she contracted both Covid and glandular fever in quick succession. She didn't feel particularly ill with either one; she only discovered she'd had them through retrospective testing. Her sleep deepened slightly. Her running times dipped a little. Nothing alarming. But as weeks passed, her glands became sore. She felt off in a way she couldn't quite name. British Athletics doctors ran tests. The tests revealed nothing. She assumed it was lingering glandular fever, the kind of thing that eventually resolves on its own.

That year's athletics calendar was unusually compressed—a backlog from the pandemic meant the World Championships, Commonwealth Games, and European Championships all happened in rapid succession. Dobbin qualified for all three. Her body, meanwhile, was failing. At the Worlds, her throat burned and she woke at strange hours. At the Commonwealths, dizziness overtook her mid-race and her muscles ached beyond what training could explain. At the Europeans, she false-started in the blocks because she'd lost all sensation in her legs. After that race, she gave an emotional interview to BBC Sport about what she called her "year of hell."

She rested for six weeks. The symptoms didn't retreat; they accumulated. Standing became difficult. Sleep consumed her days. When she tried to return to training after that rest, she managed three weeks before her body forced her to stop again. She saw four or five different specialists. Their symptoms crossed multiple body systems—neurological, immunological, muscular—and every specialist said the same thing: ME. Nobody wanted it to be ME because there is nothing to do about ME. There is no cure. There is no specific treatment. Patients manage it with off-label medications, trying to control a condition that can produce more than 200 different symptoms: nausea, headaches, cognitive dysfunction, brain fog, and a fatigue so profound it bears almost no relation to the word itself.

Dobbin rejects the alternative name, chronic fatigue syndrome. She has known fatigue her whole life—she balanced eight-hour work shifts with elite athletic training before turning professional. "I wish it was just fatigue," she says. "That would be a walk in the park." If she ranked her symptoms, fatigue might not make the top twenty. What she experiences instead is a sensation of her entire body shutting down, as though she is days away from death. A conversation can trigger a crash lasting 24 hours, 48 hours, or in severe cases, months. A light too bright. A sound too loud. A blood test at the doctor's office can confine her to bed for months afterward.

More than 400,000 people in the UK are thought to have ME, though the true number may exceed one million. Severity ranges from people who can still work or study to those requiring round-the-clock care and tube feeding. Dobbin falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, though the middle is still largely horizontal. Even sitting upright for an extended period exhausts her. She lies propped in bed, which doesn't eliminate her symptoms but makes them, as she puts it, "less hellish." Often she feels too unwell to sleep despite spending nearly all her time in bed, and she requires medication to help her rest.

Her family sits close by during this interview at their home in Doncaster. Her father, Jim, played professional football for Barnsley, Grimsby, and Doncaster Rovers. He says he would take her anywhere—America, anywhere—if it might help, but there is nowhere to go. Her mother, Jean, wakes each day feeling sad. Her daughter should be building her life, living it fully. Instead, Jean worries every morning about what kind of day Beth will have, and she worries about what comes next: who will care for Beth if her parents cannot? There is no NHS specialist service for ME. When Jean goes to the GP, there is nowhere for them to send her. The condition sits at the back of the queue for research, funding, expertise.

Dobbin has had to educate her own doctors about what she has. She waited 22 months for a face-to-face appointment with a private specialist she found herself, after her British Athletics funding ended. Her younger sister, Faye, will run the Yorkshire Marathon on Sunday to raise money for ME Research UK. "It feels like grief," Faye says. She worries constantly about Beth—what kind of day she's having, whether she'll ever improve, whether she might get worse, whether another virus might strike. Dobbin, asked about her future, is direct: "It's very bleak, unfortunately." But she adds a small note of possibility. The Covid pandemic and the emergence of long Covid—which shares significant symptom overlap with ME—have awakened the medical community. Research funding has surged. There may be something in the future. She speaks out despite the risk because athletes are believed in ways that ordinary people often are not. She has a platform. Most people with ME, she says, are not believed; they're called lazy. She has never experienced disbelief, and she feels a duty to use that credibility, to raise awareness for the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer in silence.