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Laura Kenny details how cycling dragged her through dual trauma of miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy

Laura Kenny sat down with Orla Chennaoui to discuss the traumas of the last 12 months and how it impacted her mental health Kenny said that returning to riding gave her a release and allowed her to process the traumas of the last year Kenny revealed in April that she had miscarried at nine weeks last November and was forced to have a fallopian tube removed in January

Kenny on ectopic pregnancy heartbreak - 'The scariest time of my life' 00:16:00AdvertisementUpdated 13/11/2022 at 12:19 GMTLaura Kenny has told Orla Chennaoui that riding her bike helped her process the dual trauma of a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy.The five-time Olympic gold medallist revealed in April that .Kenny had previously said that she had considered walking away from cycling after being left at "breaking point" by those traumas. However, ahead of the Mallorca round of the Track Champions League, Kenny told Chennaoui that being an athlete offered a form of respite. “Being an athlete sort of dragged me through it,” said Kenny. “I am just glad I had something else to fall upon because I don’t know how else I would have stopped my brain from overthinking the stuff it was thinking at the time.”Having miscarried in November, Kenny suffered an - when a fertilised egg implants itself outside of the womb, usually in one of the fallopian tubes - in January. She told Chennaoui that it was the scariest moment of her life.

' Just the scariest time of my life'

“The ectopic pregnancy was just something entirely… scary. It was just the scariest time of my life. I went to the GP and did a pregnancy test in the GPs – I did not know I was pregnant at the time. All I knew was I was bleeding and I went in and he says, ‘you are pregnant, come back in a week’. “I kept saying to Jason [Kenny], ‘something is so severely wrong with me’. My temperature was through the roof, the only thing that was taking any of the pain away was lying in a boiling hot bath, and if I'd waited a week, God only knows what would have happened. Because ultimately, I was really very sick. “Then when I walked into A&E, within two hours, they'd taken out [the fallopian tube]. Because of Covid, I was in there on my own. You're signing paperwork, which at the time, I could barely read, like I could barely breathe… they're telling you all this information, and the room felt like it was swallowing me. “I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be in this position, while just going it alone because Jason also couldn't come in and it was just so, so stressful."

' Bike riding gave me a release'

The five-time Olympic gold medallist detailed to Chennaoui the mental toll the last year has had on her, and how returning to riding her bike had offered respite. “In such a short period of time, we had had the miscarriage too. It was the first time that I seriously struggled with mental health. My head wouldn't just pick me back up. Like I was broken, and broken, I felt, as a person. “But I felt like my body had let me down, like something that I relied upon for so much of my career just led me down and it was so hard to process. “But Jase [Kenny] one day just said, ‘just go and ride your bike’. So a week after the operation, he was like, ‘ride your bike, see what happens’, and then I went out. For me, it stopped me thinking because, of course, you're thinking about other things. So all of a sudden, I'm thinking, ‘oh, my legs don't feel that bad’, or ‘where am I going to go?’ It stopped my head from going, ‘why have you let me down? Why did this happen to me? Why am I such a bad person that all of a sudden I'm getting all this bad luck.’ “I would sacrifice any Olympic medal to have those children that we created. It was that that was constant in my head. But bike riding gave me a release.”Kenny added that going out on her bike helped her to switch off and that allowed her – over time – to process the trauma she had been through. “It gave me a release. For those two hours, my head switched off. I wasn't constantly thinking,” she added. "It just gave me the space to basically pick myself up out of home, and just go and ride and I was free. But it also gave me a purpose because once I started to feel a bit like me again, I was starting to have more meetings back with British Cycling. “I started to realise that, actually, I do really still love riding my bike. I think because it gave me a purpose, I then started to be able to process what actually happened because it wasn't 200 thoughts in my head, it was a few. It started to get to a point where Jason I could actually speak about it and then it became a lot clearer.” Related TopicsShare this articleAdvertisementAdvertisement