Jess Warner-Judd and her husband, Rob, are collectors. Everywhere they go – and international athletics requires a lot of travel – they return with a mug, a postcard, a badge and a fridge magnet. All around their soon-to-be-former Loughborough home – new horizons await after last year’s traumatic summer – are reminders of the journeys they have made together and races they have run. My tea comes in a Starbucks mug from Berlin; Jess’s mug from one of her multiple United States ventures.
Starbucks produce different mugs in almost every region they operate in worldwide. There are hundreds; it is a collectors’ dream. Handily, for storage purposes, they are stackable, although the American ones have recently been displeasingly redesigned, apparently. All of this I learn as the couple’s dogs, Bruce and Bernie, run around breezily parading their favourite toys, and the house rabbits, Bea and Bailey, enjoy an afternoon on the lawn in the unseasonably clement weather.
On the living room wall, above the sofa, a Rome badge accompanies dozens of others attached to the perimeter of a world map. A Rome magnet and postcard make up separate collections elsewhere in the house. Only the Rome Starbucks mug is missing; unprocured in the dramatic events that unfolded last June.
The last anymost people watching from afar will have seen of Jess was a six-second BBC closeup of the Olympian and five-time world championships runner in the closing stages of the European 10,000m final. Visibly struggling as she rapidly faded down the field, her expression appeared strangely vacant before switching to a pained grimace.
Those inside the Stadio Olimpico then witnessed what the cameras missed, Jess worryingly starting to weave across the lanes, steadily grinding to a halt before collapsing about 600m from the finish and hastily disappearing from view on a stretcher. A couple of days later, after two seizures and an extended hospital spell, she posted on social media to explain she had been diagnosed with epilepsy. “I’m not sure what the future holds,” she wrote. “But I’m eager not to let this stop me.”
On the morning of my visit, the latest batch of her Hoka trainers has just arrived, doubling the mountain of shoes overwhelming the already heaving hallway rack. By and large, Jess’s life looks as it always has done, days revolving around running and the calendar pockmarked with races, the next of which is the Berlin Half-Marathon early next month.
Discussing that June evening is remarkably easy for Jess, at least emotionally. The difficulty – and, presumably, the explanation for the absence of overwhelming sentiment – is her inability to remember most of an episode that was more traumatic for those around her.
She can recall an unusual inability to concentrate before the race and a feeling of disconnect with her body once it began. After that, a couple of discrete flashback images: attempting to work out how many laps remained and trying to pull a tube out of her nose in the medical centre. Then nothing until she woke in hospital the following day.
It is Rob, therefore, who sheds lights on the incident. Alongside Jess’s father, and coach, Mike, in the stands, he spotted something amiss almost instantly. “Less than halfway in we were already trying to shout to Jess that she needed to stop,” he says. “She was still in the front group at this point, but it didn’t look right. Part of me wanted to run on to the track and drag her off.”
So concerned were they that by the time Jess collapsed and suffered her first seizure – a focal seizure in the left side of her brain – Mike had already bypassed stewards and pushed his way on to the track. Rob quickly joined, before Jess was taken to the medical centre in the bowels of the stadium. It was the last they would see of her until they were allowed into the local hospital’s intensive care unit in the early hours of the morning.
While the focal seizure affected one side of her body, Jess soon experienced another seizure – a full-body, tonic-clonic seizure – that prompted doctors to sedate her. “That was when I realised this could be really serious,” says Rob.
The epilepsy diagnosis, though, provided some relief to a puzzling situation that had initially arisen three months earlier, when Jess suffered a similar seizure in the closing stages of a 10,000m race in California – the first time she had failed to finish a race. A series of blood, heart and neurological tests proved inconclusive – epilepsy is often difficult to diagnose – so she returned to running and had arrived in Rome with medal aspirations.
A misguided belief she could still compete at the Paris Olympics the following month was quickly shattered when she went for a run a week after the European Championships and required 20 minutes to travel two miles: “My body just wasn’t working and my brain would shut down to protect itself.”
The couple instead booked a rare summer holiday to Mexico and she watched minimal amounts of the Paris action. “When I started trying to run again, I was really worried about my career because it just wasn’t happening,” she says. “It took ages to start feeling like myself so I didn’t know whether I’d ever get back competing.”
Through daily medication, adjustments to food and sleep, and the support of her younger sister Jodie – who had been diagnosed with epilepsy eight years earlier – she steadily learned to train properly again. Now, all she needed was a race.
A Mid Lancashire Cross Country League meet a few weeks after the conclusion of the track season is not an Olympian’s usual domain, but it was here, last October, that Jess opted to return to competition, carefully selecting the race for its low-key environment and familiar course and with Rob’s parents in attendance.
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“It was a nice one to start,” she says. “But I do remember, when we got there, I cried in the car. I said to Rob it felt like I was back in the beginning when I was 11 years old.
“It was lovely that so many people came up and said: ‘It’s so nice to see you back running again.’ But that was also the hardest bit, because every time someone said it, it brought back how far removed I’d been.”
Despite not pushing too hard, she beat the next woman by more than a minute, before increasing intensity through two more cross-country outings, two 10km races and two international half-marathons, most recently finishing as the top European at the Barcelona Half-Marathon despite suffering from Covid: “I feel like I’m back to normal and going into races saying: ‘I want to get this from it.’ Whereas before it was: ‘Can I get round without anything happening?’
Rob, who doubles as her training partner, has also needed to adjust. “It’s really hard to separate the husband perspective from wanting the best for Jess as a runner,” he says. “I’ve found that hard. I’ve had to rein in checking if she’s too tired. But the more races Jess has done has helped me feel confident that it’ll be alright.”
The original plan had been to step up to the marathon this year having competed at the Paris Olympics. The Rome ordeal means she will instead return for a final summer on the track, aiming to make the World Championships in September: “I want to finish my track career on my terms, not epilepsy’s.”
All being well, she will do so in new surroundings. A ‘For Sale’ sign stands outside the front door with a move nearer to Rob’s family in Lancashire on the cards. The conclusion of her PhD in regenerative medicine in December means she will leave the town she has studied in for more than a decade.
“I feel like we need a fresh start,” she says. “It’s a natural thing, especially after everything that happened, to want to have more people around. You start looking at things differently. I love running, but the world does not revolve solely around running. I learned that last summer.”
She just needs to find an excuse to return to Rome at some point. There is a mug waiting for her.