Hammer thrower Chris Bennett “wondered if I had any future in the sport” and took a full-time job to sustain himself during the Covid-19-enforced lockdown.
Bennett, 30, works as a supermarket delivery driver after the suspension of athletics left him with no income.
The Scot claimed a silver medal in the British Championships last week, his first event since March.
“I took a full-time job because I wasn’t making any money,” Bennett told BBC Radio Scotland’s Sportsound.
“I was delivering shopping for a supermarket. I am still working part-time for them. So it was hard to fit in training at the start, I was training twice a week, sometimes once.
“I wondered if I actually had any future in the sport because I didn’t know how long lockdown was going to be, you didn’t really know what was going to happen with sport.”
Working part-time in tandem with training has given Olympic and Commonwealth athlete Bennett an important daily routine, and stopped him succumbing to bad habits.
Since the onset of Britain’s lockdown six months ago, he has lost 19kg in weight, after eliminating his daily consumption of three litres of whole milk.
“At the start of lockdown, all I would do would be to go training at 14:00 but I’d been up until 04:00 watching box sets because there was nothing else to do,” he said. “That’s not sustainable.
“I made the choice to go part-time and thankfully I can afford to do that. I only work 19:00-23:00 now. It lets me train during the day, come back in, I’m not sitting in the house snacking. I was 154kg at the start of lockdown, which is way too heavy. I’m now down to 135kg.”
