It makes me sadder if I don't exercise, it absolutely does
| Published date | 16 April 2024 |
| Publication title | Huddersfield Daily Examiner |
"I've got a 25-year-old daughter, who is an exinternational track and field athlete, and I can still beat her on core exercise. I can still beat my 17-year-old son, who plays really good rugby, on core stability and core exercise," she says.
MEDAL Sharron at the 1980
Sharron, who famously held the Commonwealth Games record for the 400-metre individual medley event for 18 years, goes to the gym four times a week, cycles and walks now but, "I'm not an obsessed exerciser", she says, "I used to do six hours a day, I now don't do six hours a week."
With her history in competitive sport (she won a silver at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and was Commonwealth champion twice), a stint on the original series of Gladiators as Amazon, and now as patron of Disabled Sport England and SportsAid, exercising is simply part of who Sharron is.
"It's always been a part of my life. It's almost automatic." But keeping active is especially important given the problems she's had for a long time with her right knee. She first damaged it aged 12, getting her foot stuck in a pothole and tore her ACL (anterior cruciate ligament). Thankfully, being a swimmer (a nonweight bearing sport) it didn't affect her ability to train or compete.
"Then in 1995 I was doing Gladiators and a very lovely police woman, terribly apologetic, fell on my knee sideways and whatever was left of my ACL went."
Sharron had an ACL reconstruction that year and nine further operations since then. "I have no cartilage left in that knee, whatsoever, it's just bone on bone," says Sharon, who was also diagnosed with grade four osteoarthritis in her knee about a decade ago.
"The last [operation] was seven years ago, when a piece of cartilage that was left flew off and went into the joint, I couldn't straighten my legs.
MOSCOW: celebrates OIYMPICS "That was unbelievably painful. I used to sit at nighttime just rubbing my knee watching the telly. It almost got to the point where I was doing it subconsciously all the time because it would get swollen and achy, and I would just live with [the pain]".
In September 2022, she had a treatment called Arthrosamid -pain relief via a single injection for knee osteoarthritis.
While it doesn't cure the condition, patients can expect to see...
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