It was through a combination of habit and hope that Morgan Lake continued to send her father updates on her high jump career, painfully aware that he’d neither read nor respond to the messages.
Track and field had bound them together for so long; suddenly to neglect that would have felt like a loss to them both.
“It was my way of normalizing things, of keeping that connection and keeping hope, I guess, that he was going to get better,” Lake, the British record holder in the women’s high jump, told The Athletic. “I was keeping him in the loop of what was going on and coming back and saying, ‘I did this competition.’ He would just blankly look at me.”
It was just over three years ago that the 29-year-old’s father, Eldon, was placed into a near-two-month-long coma. What had started as back pain gradually worsened as the weeks wore on, to the point where he was vomiting, couldn’t walk and could barely leave his bed.
He was later diagnosed with Acute Necrotising Rhomboencephalitis (ANRE), a severe form of encephalitis — an inflammation of the brain sometimes caused by viral infections. In Eldon’s case, it was COVID-19. Though rare — there are up to 6,000 cases in the UK each year — encephalitis is often life-threatening.
Eldon’s memories of that period are hazy, though he can recall vividly some of the hallucinations he experienced while he was in the coma: believing he was a crypto billionaire, for instance, and that his hospital bed was a spaceship.
The family laughs about those details now, but it took weeks for Eldon’s mind and memory to heal. A month into his recovery, he still thought he lived at his childhood address.
“It took time to all wire together, to piece all the bits together, because it was quite fragmented,” said the 57-year-old. “My whole life was in fragments and I tried to put it together, tried to create the puzzle again.
“I knew who my daughter was, I knew who my son was, I knew who my wife was, but I couldn’t fit them all together… My mum came to visit; my sister came to visit; my friends came to visit. I didn’t always know their faces, but it was trying to fit it all together and that took a process of time. Now it’s all come back, but it took a while.”
Mordan Lake with her father Eldon. (Morgan Lake)
As this was ongoing, Lake pressed on with her high jump career. She set the then-British record of 1.99 meters shortly before her father’s diagnosis — a height she has since surpassed — and decided that persevering with the sport between hospital visits was the most meaningful way of staying connected to him.
Eldon, a former triple jumper, had coached his daughter until she was 19, overseeing her rise through the ranks of British athletics as a promising heptathlete and then later a high jump star. A mainstay in her career, he feels proud to have witnessed every one of her personal bests since she was five years old.
Continuing to compete with her father’s health in a precarious position, Lake decided, would be a difficult but necessary step.
“It was hard when I’d go to competitions and everyone was just living their normal lives, it seemed,” she said. “Everyone has different stories of what’s going on back at home. And I remember being like, this just feels so surreal that I’m going out and doing my job and trying to act like nothing’s happening.
“Then I’d come back home and I guess the reality of it all would hit. It was a very, very strange time. But looking back now, I’m really glad I carried on competing and training. It was almost like every competition mattered even more because I really, really wanted to make my dad proud.”
Morgan Lake is the first British woman to go over two metres in the high jump. (Cameron Spencer / Getty Images)
With time, whatever message she had hoped to communicate was eventually gratefully received. Eldon’s rehab continued throughout June and July of 2023 — the peak of the track and field season — and to hear about his daughter’s latest meet was a welcome reprieve.
“We’d talk about the heights and the height progressions and the various competitions and it kind of became normal,” he said. “That’s a part of our relationship — talking about sports, talking about athletics. It was great. I needed that.”
Lake went on to place fourth at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest that year, her best finish at the event on a global level. She was unable to improve on her British record that season or the season after, but did finally clear two meters — a famed barrier in women’s high jump — in Zurich last year.
Lake soared over two meters at her first attempt. She remembered it feeling like “probably one of the easiest things I’ve done.”
“It was such a huge moment,” she said. “There have been so many times in my career where I thought: Oh, I think I’m done now. I think maybe two or three times I’ve really questioned if I wanted to carry on.
“The two meters was just such a big milestone, but I think I would have always regretted not giving myself the full opportunity to do that. It was just such an amazing moment.”
Eldon — never one to miss a PB, of course — was watching on from the stands. “The two meters was something that Morgan and I have been praying for and hoping that she’d do for years, since 2014 when we knew it was possible,” he said. “And she did it. It was incredible.”
Morgan Lake finished seventh at last year’s World Championships in Tokyo. (Pawel Kopczynski / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
Father and daughter will be side-by-side at a meet again on Sunday for the British Athletics Championships in Birmingham. Fittingly, it happens to fall on Father’s Day in the UK. Lake is continuing her recovery from a knee injury, but remains the favorite to win an 18th national title this weekend.
Beyond that, there’s the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow — Lake won a silver medal at the 2018 edition — and the European Championships again in Birmingham later this year, plus the regular Diamond League season and the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championships in September.
Eldon hopes to be at as many of those as possible. After all, watching his daughter compete has been a source of joy in the long road to recovery — and that process remains ongoing. His balance remains an issue and he still gets pain and numbness in his hands; there are difficulties with speech and walking can be problematic, though he tries to hit 10,000 steps a day.
The Lakes want to share how their family was affected by encephalitis, partly because there is so little public awareness of the disease, and partly because each individual’s experience of it differs. That makes mapping out a path to recovery a unique challenge.
When her father suffered a stroke in 2019, Lake felt like there was “one fixed route of how to get better — a lot of people had the same symptoms and the same outcome.” But encephalitis was different.
“Even though a lot of the things that he was going through manifested in the same way as his stroke. I think (the hospital) didn’t really know what to do with the recovery,” she said.
Yet each time Eldon is able to sit inside a stadium and see his daughter compete, it feels like a new milestone is achieved in his recovery. Watching her events has been the cornerstone of the family’s summers for so many years, and to keep it going feels like normality resuming its course.
But against the backdrop of the past three years, it’s hard for Eldon to experience these moments without a swirling of emotions.
“I appreciate it more,” he said. “Every competition I go to, every time I see her competing, it’s a blessing — it’s brilliant and it’s special, for sure.”
