This story will inspire you if you are an Asthma patient and an Olympian. Who always up beaten her condition.
Laura Trott is Great Britian's most successful Olympic female competitor, having won both the team pursuit and the omnium at both the 2012 and 2016 games.
It wasn’t just the normal effort of powering her slender frame to victory in the velodrome but a symptom of the asthma that the 20-year-old has suffered from since childhood.
But she was born four weeks prematurely with a collapsed lung and immediately whisked away to an intensive baby-care unit. Her mum Glenda didn’t even have a chance to hold her new daughter.
“They had to operate to insert a tube so my lung could be inflated,” Laura said, speaking in 2013. “It was a very traumatic time and I think my parents feared the worst.”
“It was six weeks before I was well enough to go home and even then I was in and out of hospital for a few months.”
“I still have the little teddy bear that my older sister Emma brought me during one visit.” Gradually Laura made progress but when still a toddler she was diagnosed with asthma, which is an inflammatory disease of the airways.”
“It sounded like I had a permanent chest infection because I was always wheezing when I breathed. Because I was so young I couldn’t start taking medication straightaway but I began using an inhaler when I was six years old.”
Doctors advised Laura’s mum and dad Adrian to start her on a regime of exercise to help regulate her breathing. Soon Laura was swimming, trampolining and cycling, a sport which she started when she was just eight down at her local track in Hertfordshire. LAURA showed promise at all three sports but over the next few years swimming and trampolining both fell by the wayside.
“I got bored with swimming when I was about 14,” she says.
“I was close to national standard at trampolining but then I started passing out when I was doing somersaults so it became too dangerous.”
It’s thought the cause was dehydration but it meant that she was able to devote all her attention to cycling.
She remembers being thrilled when she won her first race and was awarded a prize of £2.
“Looking back I do feel that having asthma actually spurred me on rather than hindered me,” says Laura, who captured the nation’s heart during the Olympics with her boundless enthusiasm.
She also clinched gold in the team pursuit in the UCI World Track Championships in Minsk two weeks ago.
“I was thrown into the sport at a very young age to strengthen my lungs and once I started doing well I just didn’t want to stop.”
“I hope that I can inspire other people my age who have asthma. It doesn’t have to hold you back.” Laura won gold medals in the cycling team pursuit and omnium events at her first Olympics but still uses inhalers. She’s learned to cope with the coughing fits which follow races or strenuous training sessions and has been lucky that she’s only ever suffered two serious asthma attacks.
“Both happened when I was 17 and just sitting on the sofa watching television,” she says. “Suddenly I couldn’t breathe and started to panic. At the time it was very frightening and I remember thinking ‘this is it’ but as I’ve got older I’ve learned to control my asthma by using medication.”
Laura, who is dating fellow cyclist Jason Kenny and lives in Manchester, carries two inhalers. One is a preventer for daily use which reduces long-term inflammation, the other is a reliever to help open narrowed airways and reduce breathlessness after training.
“During the Olympics I needed the second inhaler pretty much all the time because it was so dry and hot in the velodrome that it made my chest tight and I couldn’t stop coughing,” she explains.
There are more than five million asthma sufferers in the UK.
Eight out of 10 of them aren’t exercising enough, often because they worry it will trigger their symptoms. Yet if asthma is controlled, exercise usually improves lung capacity. Tests before the Athens Olympics of 2004 showed that one in four members of the Great Britain team had asthma but it was no barrier to them competing.
The achievements of Laura, whose exploits in 2012 were recognised with an OBE, are all the more remarkable because she also suffers from a build up of excess acid in her stomach.
“It’s like a balloon filling up. Sometimes when I train hard it makes me sick,” she says.
"The condition resulted in one embarrassing moment during the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.”
“I’d just beaten my personal best in the individual pursuit by six seconds and they showed me on the big screen. I promptly threw up.”
“It was awful. I used to take tablets to try to control the vomiting but they made me feel worse so now I just live with it.”
Training six days a week and competing keeps Laura, who weighs just over 8st and is 5ft 4in tall, in perfect shape.
When she’s riding flat out on the track she can reach speeds of about 45 miles per hour. “Cycling is great exercise,” she says. “I burn about three times as many calories as a normal person which is ridiculous so I tend to eat foods which give me energy such a pasta and rice.”
“I love prawns and chicken and I drink so much milk it’s unbelievable. My favourite food is spaghetti hoops on toast. I love veg but I hate the texture of fruit, especially bananas, so I take supplements. I also have a very sweet tooth and I’m a chocoholic. My diet’s horrendous really.”
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