Listen to your body. This year

WORDS SIAN PHILLIPS PHOTOGRAPHS MICHAEL POWELL FLIP SIDE ON THE

Solving the mental and physical riddles of parkour helps Olly Powell cope with his IBD

As this issue of Connect hits your doormat, 18-year-old Olly Powell will be slap bang in the middle of his A-level exams. Speaking slightly ahead of that challenging time, Olly says he hopes his Ulcerative Colitis – currently nicely in remission – will not cause him trouble.

“I have found that naturally, with what it is, my Colitis does sort of come back when I’m in stressful situations so I’m optimistically looking forward to my A levels,” he says, laughing.

“But I keep going and hopefully won’t get any flare-ups. I am feeling very comfortable right now. I forget sometimes that I’ve got something

Olly is back to full fitness after injuring an ankle

wrong with me.” As most people with IBD know, this is a great place to be. Olly says his sense of wellbeing comes from eating a healthy vegetarian diet, and his love of parkour – which involves acrobatics such as flips, jumps, twists and turns while moving through, around and over obstacles such as walls or playground equipment.

“Parkour is my way of escaping everything,” he says. “And I have never had to go into hospital for a flare-up. I am very fortunate in that sense.”

It was a different picture two years ago as he sat his GCSEs. “About a month or two before my exams, my grandmother passed away and it was a weird few months … I had quite a few flare-ups then.”

Olly was also just getting used to life with Ulcerative Colitis at that point, having recently received his diagnosis. For a year or two before his GCSEs he’d been back and forth to the doctors. “I was getting a lot of cramps and pains, and it took a lot of the energy out of me – and there were symptoms like blood in the stools and stuff like that,” he says. “I got diagnosed through an endoscopy.” He says he found his diagnosis helpful as he could understand what he was dealing with – although it wasn’t always easy. “I remember being on Movicol for a while, to soften the stools, which was foul. The dosage I had varied on how I was doing and sometimes at school if I was on a stronger dosage of it, I might have been a bit panicky about it,” he says. Although currently on Asacol (an anti-inflammatory), Olly has stronger medication and, if needed, can have enemas should his condition worsen. “Everything is under control for now, and I know that if there is a flare-up I have stages I can go to that help me keep that under control as well.”

I SOMETIMES FORGET THAT I’VE GOT IBD