Teen athlete with bones of a pensioner
BOBBY Clay was just 18 and one of the country’s most promising junior athletes when she was told she had osteoporosis.
The shock diagnosis has put her career as a gold-medal winning middle distance runner on the line – and left her living with the bones of an elderly woman.
A student at Loughborough University who had been competing internationally for Team GB juniors since the age of 15, Miss Clay unexpectedly broke her foot while swimming. She was sent for a scan that showed very low bone density in her spine compared with most young women, caused by over-training.
She was running more than 100 miles a week – coupled with an insufficient calorie intake for that level of output. Overnight, her life as she knew it changed.
Miss Clay, now 21, said: ‘I can’t say I had ever heard of osteoporosis. It certainly never occurred me to that it could happen to someone so young or that it would happen to me. It was just devastating. My sport has always been part of my identity. At any one time I usually have three or so fractures, mainly in my lower limbs but I also have spinal issues. Now I can’t even run. It was my body saying it had had enough.’
She has no doubt that social media has a big part to play in the rise of osteoporosis among young people.
She said: ‘You can get so caught up in the world of social media, where you believe everything to be true and you are prepared to abuse your body just to conform to a certain look – what you are led to believe is attractive. But what people forget is that if they can edit their photos and use filters, then other people do too. Life is not what it seems online.’