I want to finish my career on my terms, not epilepsy's

Jess Warner-Judd has rebuilt her health after seizures and a hospital stay in Rome last June and is planning for one final summer on the track, she tells Ben Bloom

- Ben Bloom

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 a traumatic summer last year - are reminders of the journeys they have made together and races run.

My tea comes in a Starbucks mug from Berlin; Jess's mug from one of her multiple US ventures. 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 any people watching from afar will have seen of Jess was a six-second BBC close-up 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, her expression appeared strangely vacant before switching to a pained grimace.

Those inside the Stadio Olimpico then witnessed what the cameras missed, Jess 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 a 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.