National champion, World Indoor 4×100m relay bronze medalist, and once one of Britain’s brightest rising stars, Hannah Williams seemed destined for greatness. But just as she approached the peak of her career, everything began to crumble. “I never really thought that one diagnosis would change my life so much,” said Williams as she revealed the real reason she walked away from sprinting for good last year: a looming fear of complete kidney failure.

The former British 200m champion, in a conversation with Athletics Weekly, revealed that a rare kidney condition forced her to cut short her athletics career. Reminiscing about her 2023 Birmingham World Indoor Championships, she shared that it marked the turning point of the health troubles that she initially chalked up to food poisoning in 2019.

After placing third in the 200m in Birmingham, she returned home satisfied, but shortly after arriving, she suddenly fell ill. “I was so weak I couldn’t eat or drink. I was just sick all the time, and I struggled to get downstairs because of the pain,” she said.

A few days later, her condition worsened to the point where her family had to take her to a doctor. To her surprise, she was told that her kidneys were damaged and was advised to get admitted. However, after spending three days in the hospital, she was discharged without an official diagnosis. “They were like, ‘The only possible reason for this is that you were severely dehydrated,’ but that just wasn’t possible because I wasn’t,” said the former athlete.

After a conversation with John Rogers, a sports medicine consultant for UK Athletics, Hannah Williams became certain that something was wrong with her body. Finally, during a consultation with a second doctor, she learned that she was suffering from anaerobic exercise-induced kidney failure. Essentially her body struggled to break down the lactic acid built up during training and competing, which meant the level of creatinine in her body was way too high, which led to kidney damage.

“The veins in my kidney essentially spasmed after competitions,” Williams says starkly. “If something like that continues and you don’t stop, then you may even need a kidney transplant. The diagnosis was a relief because it’s quite hard to have something going on, and there’s no explanation for it. I didn’t really feel sad in any type of way just because I’d already come to the realization that I couldn’t keep on doing the 200m or 400m.”

After the diagnosis, Hannah Williams understood that sports had become a no-go for her. However, she couldn’t let go of her athletic ambitions. Williams decided to switch from the 200m to the 100m for the rest of the 2023 season. That wasn’t all; she even tried long jump and high jump just to compete. However, nothing worked, leading to her retirement in March 2024.  So, what did she do after that? Let’s hear it from the former champ herself.

Hannah Williams found solace in doing new things in her life

Heartbreaking. That’s how Hannah Williams described her post-diagnosis life. All day, she found herself thinking about why it had to be her. But that didn’t mean she stepped back from doing what she does best. It’s simple; she kept fighting back. Uploading a video on her Instagram, she expressed that after every race, her body was reacting differently until the diagnosis came. “When I stopped, honestly, I was so lost on what to do next in my life.”

A dark chapter of her life ended when she discovered modeling. “I kind of fell into full-time modelling, which I never really expected, but over the past years it’s honestly gone amazingly. Since stopping track, I lost all joy in all exercises and any training, and I didn’t move or exercise my body for about six to eight months. I found it so hard not to, and not really have a goal which I was working towards every day, and I found it hard. I find exercising fun now.”

Since then, Hannah Williams has been frequently documenting the journey on her Instagram, expressing her renewed love for running. In one of her Instagram posts, she shared several shots after a run with a caption that read, “falling back in love with movement again <3”. Slowly but surely, she is getting back on track, and who knows, someday she might run once again.