British cyclist Becky Storrie’s journey with chronic fatigue
“It was a normal week of training. Tuesday morning, I got up to go swimming at 5:30am, something I did every day for years, I got out of bed, and I woke up on my living room floor.”
Becky Storrie had just collapsed. She had no idea why or what had happened. At the time, she was on a sports scholarship at the University of Stirling with dreams of pursuing a career as a professional triathlete.
Storrie would later find out that she was suffering from chronic fatigue. Now a professional cyclist with Team DSM-Firmenich, her diagnosis would flip her sporting career on its head.
“I was really, really confused. I texted my coach and said I’m not feeling too well today but I didn’t tell him that I’d collapsed. I was just like, ‘It’s no big deal. I’m just not feeling myself,’” she recalls.
“The next day we did a long run. I felt amazing. But I got back to my training partner’s house and collapsed in his front door.”
That was the second day in a row that Storrie had collapsed, and this time, surrounded by her coach and partner, there was no hiding it. She set about on the long road to diagnosis.
“I spoke to lots of different doctors and had all my blood tests, I had MRIs, I had everything done. We couldn’t put a finger on what it was,” Storrie says. “Through elimination of all illnesses they said, ‘I think you’re experiencing extreme fatigue.’”
But Storrie was at one of the best sports universities in the UK with all the facilities and resources to make a career in triathlon at her fingertips. So how did her chronic fatigue go unnoticed for so long?
“Sport has been my whole life for as long as I can remember”
Since her childhood, Storrie has always been involved in sport in some capacity. From football and tennis to ballet and badminton, she’d tried them all.
It was swimming Storrie did most competitively, even swimming for the Isle of Man. This provided her with a strong grounding for success in endurance sports.
“I got to 14 and we had a local triathlon on the island,” remembers Storrie. “Being a swimmer, everyone was like, ‘Oh, you should give it a go, you’ll probably be really good.’”
Having never ridden a bike before, it was a plunge into the deep end for Storrie. But, assisted by fellow Manx professional cyclist, Lizzie Holden, who lent her a bike for the race, it was a plunge that initiated her triathlon career.
“I crashed, it didn’t go very well,” laughs Storrie. “But I just got that triathlon bug. Once you’ve done one, you’re hooked and it very, very quickly escalated from there.”
“I’d never even heard of it before”
Storrie attended university to pursue her career as a triathlete alongside studying a degree in Sport and Psychology. Not only, then, was she studying full-time, but also training full-time with 25 hours plus each week committed to triathlon.
“I was an 18/19-year-old, training with all the guys thinking that my body is invincible, and it can handle anything,” she says.
While she remained in denial for months, it was towards the end of her first year in May 2018 that Storrie first began to experience the symptoms of chronic fatigue.
“When I look back, I think about all those signs like napping after training, getting pain in my lower legs, heart palpitations, loss of appetite leading to weight loss,” she tells the Sports Gazette.
“I didn’t even think about it. I hadn’t had my period in six months, but I thought, ‘That’s not a big deal, happy days, that’s amazing.’
“I was snappy, I didn’t have much patience. I should have just listened to my body before it completely broke down and gave me no other option but to stop.”
But how was Storrie expected to recognise chronic fatigue when all these symptoms have become normalised for women?
While hindsight might tell us these signs always indicated something was not right, a lack of awareness around conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, which disproportionately affects women, means that even doctors struggle to recognise the symptoms.
“I didn’t really know who I was without triathlon”
Following her diagnosis, Storrie was advised to take a prolonged period of rest from sport to allow her body to fully recover, leading to a nine-month absence from any sporting activity.
“It was denial in the beginning, because you just think, ‘I’m going to bounce back. I’ll just take two weeks off, and I’ll be fine again,’” she says. “You go straight to the internet. Can someone give me a timeline? When can I get back to training and racing?”
Storrie found herself switching between battling debilitating fatigue, then during her better days fending off urges to get back on her bike. The hardest challenge, however, came in the mental aspect of losing her identity.
“It was just too much time in my own head. I hated it. I absolutely hated it,” reflects Storrie. “Sport was my social circle so suddenly, you feel very, very isolated.
“My whole life had been sport and I always thought that it was going to be my job. You start to question everything, are my friends still going to want to be friends with me because they’re athletes? Is my boyfriend still going to want to be with me because that’s how we met?
“I’d always been ‘Becky the triathlete’. I didn’t really think I had anything else to give.”
Throughout this period, Storrie was left without any support. Once again, the lack of awareness of chronic fatigue meant she found herself without anyone to turn to who had experienced what she was going through.
“I was just happy to be on the start line”
When Storrie was eventually allowed to return to sport it was not in the capacity she would have initially hoped.
“I ended up changing sports,” says the DSM-Firmenich cyclist. “I did try to build triathlon back into my life, but it was so hard to balance the three sports.
“I couldn’t do the early morning swim sessions and running just battered your body, I couldn’t cope with it. So cycling was the easiest thing for me to do and I’ve always loved cycling.”
The switch to cycling allowed Storrie more balance to her life as her training no longer takes up the entire day.
“When I look back, was I actually enjoying it, or was I just running from one hamster wheel to the next just going through and through and through?” she asks.
Storrie now focuses on training smarter, rather than harder, which certainly seems to have paid off. In 2023 alone she has made the step up into the Women’s World Tour, moved countries and extended her contract with DSM-Firmenich.
“I don’t want to let it define me as an athlete”
At only 25 years old, Storrie still has a career in cycling waiting to be written. Her experience of chronic fatigue may have set the Manx cyclist on a new path, but it is an opportunity that she refuses to put limits on.
“Having the perspective of how quickly everything’s changed in the last two to three years, I try to not look too far ahead,” Storrie says. “I don’t want to set expectations because anything can happen.”
Storrie’s experiences with chronic fatigue have shed new light on her approach to sport. In sharing her story, she hopes no one will have to face what she did, but she remains appreciative of the fresh outlook it has provided.
“There are days where the weather is a bit rubbish and I’m feeling a bit tired, but I remember those nine months, when going out wasn’t even an option. So, I just suck it up and be grateful. I feel really privileged to have that mindset.”
