by Jo Pavey
I’m never keen on wearing a running vest (as opposed to a crop top) – they look better with baggy shorts, and remind me of PE at school, though I’m not sure why I worry about that when I wear long socks, which is not a good look either – but the decades-old vest proved to be a lucky charm. I knew I was running under the time I needed and I went on to win in 32 minutes and 11 seconds, well within the European Championships qualifying time. I was absolutely delighted, exhausted, soggy, cold, jubilant and relieved all at once. In little over half an hour I had gone from nowhere to National Champion. And I’d won selection to run in the Europeans for my country in my first race back from having a baby! It was bonkers. I congratulated the other girls. Sophie Duarte finished second and Beth Potter had run a brilliant race for third to be the second Brit to guarantee selection. I embraced Gav. We were thrilled but laughing in sheer surprise. Alan shook Gav’s hand, shaking his head wryly.
We had an hour or so for the podium ceremony and celebration with friends before the long drive back to Devon. I was summoned onto a sofa for an interview with Tom Bedford, and we had a laugh because Gav thought it was a chat, not a piece of media footage, so he kept barging into shot, at one point opening a beer and taking pictures.
Just after 11 p.m. we set off for home, happy my running career was still on course and our flexible training methods had proved successful. The conversation switched back from athlete/coach to our concerns as parents, juggling children and careers. I couldn’t wait to tiptoe in to see our children asleep in their cot and bed, and to read the amusing notes Mum would have written about how things actually materialised despite my original list of ideal food, bath and bed times. I’m not obsessive about routines; we have an understanding with both sets of grandparents that as long as the kids are safe and happy, that’s the important thing. It would be amusing to hear how it had panned out.
Chuckling about the vest drama, Gav and I couldn’t help but sense how life had come full circle. It seemed so fitting that I came to wear that old vest in the 2014 National Championships because now, at the grand age of forty, I was more than ever like the free-spirited runner who first discovered a love of racing wearing that Harriers vest in the late 1980s. It had been stored away for two and a half decades, a period of time in which many medical experts suggested I give up running and various people tried to modify my approach or make me into a different kind of runner. I continually rebelled (politely) and now – after I had had kids and moved back to Devon, after I had thrown away piles of orthotic insoles and training gadgets, after my support team had shrunk to just Gav – I had rediscovered my own instinctive, uncomplicated version of running. The experts I had worked with along the way had helped me develop as an athlete. Equipped with that self-knowledge, I had reached a point when I could let my circumstances dictate my training. All I had time to do was to get out there and run . . . My staple run was the five-mile loop I ran as a child; my track sessions were completed at the same Yeovil ground where I’d set a British junior record. It was thrilling to think I’d won my come-back race in the vest that symbolised my innate love of running. Now I had returned to running for pleasure, I was never going to let go of that simple passion. My 2014 season was under way, and little did I know, it would be the mother of all seasons.
CHAPTER 2
The Green Flash Years
My mum, Linda, loves telling people about how as a toddler I never stood still. She says I ran back and forth all the time; there was no stopping me. My parents have this 8mm cine film of me from 1975. The footage is old and fading, but the movement is distinct: it is me, nearly two years old, running up and down pushing a toy cart with great determination. I was too young to be able to recall that day now but my earliest childhood memories are of dashing around. Look at any playground and you see young kids running – milling around, darting backwards and forwards, chasing each other. At that age running is fun, exhilarating, natural. For me, a good thirty-five years on from my playground years, there’s still no better feeling than running freely in fresh air, when my body seems weightless, movement effortless, energy is flowing. Pure joy. I fell in love with running right from the off and I haven’t lost that passion, even though I’m now also mindful of getting my foot plants right and hitting my target times.
When I was a child, running competitively was not my forte. At the annual primary school sports day we would have the traditional egg-and-spoon and sack races, and a sprint, but the other girls seemed bigger and quicker than me. I never won a race; I never expected to. While I enjoyed it as much as anyone else, I didn’t stand out. I had not had the chance to discover distance running, however I loved to challenge myself in my spare time. I used to come home from school for dinner seeing if I could skip non-stop all the way without interruption. I’d find lots of ways to push myself. I loved climbing up to the very top of the fir trees that used to be at the back of the playing fields. I’d sit there, clinging on to the twiggy branches up at the very top, swaying in the wind. On reflection, it was so dangerous! My dad, Bob, was an environmental health officer and my mum went back to work as a maths teacher when I was 12 and later worked as a primary school class teacher. Dad was keen on football and cricket as a boy but had been hindered by poor eyesight in the days before contact lenses became the norm. Mum says that she was always the last girl to be picked to be in a team at school, though at the transport café her family ran in Leicestershire she was always nagging people to play ball games with her in the car park. We laugh because she runs with her arms straight! Physically, though, I can see I have inherited attributes from both my parents. There are certainly no professional athletes in my family history, though Dad’s brother, Mike, worked as a PE teacher and ran soccer schools in the United States and wrote a coaching manual. Back in the 1930s, my grandad Alec finished in the top 40 in the national cross-country with very little training. Living in Nottingham with my grandma Stella, he would become my biggest supporter, offering me unusual bits of advice, such as how he used to have a raw egg in some brandy just before a race, and sending me cuttings from athletics magazines with important results underlined in red pen.
I grew up in the pretty village of Feniton in rural East Devon – about 12 miles or so from Exeter. St Andrew’s Church – which dates from the thirteenth century, and where Gav and I were married in 1995 – lies at the heart of the village and the surrounding lanes are lined with high hedges and whitewashed thatched cottages. The nearest town of Ottery St Mary is world famous for its annual tar barrel event on Guy Fawkes Night. The tradition dates from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and attracts thousands of visitors each November. It’s great theatre and always provides a fun party atmosphere. Every pub supplies a barrel soaked in tar, which is set alight and carried through the streets. Only people from Ottery are entitled to carry a flaming barrel. In the weeks leading up to it, we’d come out of school and see how much higher the town bonfire had been built that day. As teenagers we’d cycle in from Feniton and get stopped by the police on the way home for not having lights on our bikes. We used to wonder how they could reprimand us for that when there were people running around with barrels of flaming tar on their backs.
The town has quite a quirky history, which made it a hilarious subject for comedian Mark Steel’s In Town programme on BBC Radio 4. He uncovered lots of local eccentricities and had fun undermining our claims to fame. Ottery is also celebrated for being the birthplace of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, so loads of local amenities are named after him despite the poet apparently describing his childhood in Ottery as the most miserable years of his life!
Like most people lucky enough to grow up round here, it was the complete opposite for me – I had a very happy childhood. We lived on an extensive, open-plan estate, built in the 1960s to the west of the original village, so me and my friends Becca, Sarah and Kathryn and all the other kids came together to play. There was a lovely community spirit.
Feniton was a pretty quiet and safe place to grow up, but one of my earl
iest memories is the Salston air crash. A plane approaching Exeter Airport ran out of fuel and crash-landed right beside the River Otter. Everyone went to see it. My cousins from Derby were staying at the time and we all trekked down to hear the story of the heroic pilot who had managed to land the plane safely away from houses and roads. The only casualties were two sheep.
My two younger brothers, Matt and Jon, and I were out playing or exploring every day. Mum was not one to stay in the house either. She liked to walk in the fields or take the route around the country lanes we call ‘the five-mile loop’ that I still train on today. The first marker is the lamp-post outside my parents’ house, then the route runs out through the village lanes towards Sherwood Farm, up as far as Payhembury, then back by the station, past the shop and back up to the lamp-post. It’s hilly but in a good way; tough but doable, and very scenic. The lanes can be caked in cow muck but you can never let that slow you down. When I was young I would use the loop as a marker for my fitness, and I still do so even today. I get nervous about running a good time. Bizarrely, I ran my quickest time on Christmas Day one year. I don’t know whether it was due to being fuelled by some strong plunger coffee and lots of chocolate or the fact that Gav, who was following me in the car so that I could see the way with the help of the headlights, had my brother sitting next to him and I had an audience!
But I’m jumping ahead a bit. When I was six, I had an accident that could have threatened my ability as an athlete before I’d even discovered distance running. We had a baby gate positioned a few steps up from the bottom of the stairs to prevent my little brothers from going upstairs. It was normal for me to climb over it when I wanted to get to my bedroom or go to the loo. In those days, baby gates didn’t swing open when released; my parents had to take it off its fittings at night and set it back in place in the morning. One day I came downstairs, straddling the gate as usual as I was small and my feet didn’t reach the ground, and the gate became unattached. I leant forward to get off it, but the whole thing – including me – crashed into the large window panel at the bottom of the stairs, smashing the glass into daggers. It made such an almighty crash the whole street heard and Mrs Trim, the newspaper lady, abandoned all her papers to run up to the house to see if everyone was alright. I remember the incident so vividly. The first thing I did was shout, ‘Sorry, Mum.’ I thought only very naughty people broke windows. She rushed to me, anxious to check I was all right, and we both looked down at my left leg. The glass had sliced my thigh from my hip to just above my knee, right down to the bone, leaving the flesh on either side hanging open. My mum grabbed my baby brother and ran across the road to the neighbours who had a car, and in a matter of minutes Mr and Mrs Blackmore were rushing me to hospital with a tea towel stuffed into the gash in my leg. I was lucky not to have severed the femoral artery, which would have meant a very rapid, life-endangering loss of blood. At the hospital, I was stitched up with two layers of stitches because the cut was so deep by our GP, Doctor Ackroyd, dressed in black tie on his way to an evening do. The deeper layer was dissolving stitches; the top layer I had to have taken out at a later stage. I healed quickly, as you do as a child, but I still bear a large scar down my left thigh. Other athletes and physios often ask me about it, assuming I’ve had surgery as it’s so straight, rather than a jagged injury-type scar. The damage has never affected my running, but I think it could have weakened my left leg’s basic mechanical capabilities. I would end up having surgery to my left knee, owing to bad tracking of the kneecap (the quadricep muscles in the front of the thigh pull on the kneecap). I would later also have problems with my left Achilles and foot, and have had to battle against the feeling that my left leg is weaker than the right – the sense of it wanting to collapse inwards, which leads to me putting more bio-mechanical stress on my lower leg. However, I was so lucky the injury was not worse, or that I had not gone through the window head first.
Before I discovered running, my first sporting memories are of running after footballs or chasing after my younger brothers in a game of tag. I absolutely loved football and would always be rounding up the kids on the estate for a game in the street, putting out jumpers for goalposts. I would go and watch my brothers play at a local club and I was very jealous that they had the opportunity to play in a team while I, as a girl, could only watch from the sidelines. They were good – Jon won player of the year one season – but my footballing career was restricted to informal kick-abouts, while Matt and Jon got to play proper matches on marked-out pitches with goal nets that would billow out satisfyingly when the ball struck the back. If I hadn’t found running, I would have loved to go into football because I adored it. It’s great that today there are opportunities for girls to play, and wonderful role models in England’s women’s football and rugby teams and other sports.
The gaps in age between my brothers and myself are four and six years respectively, so I was very much the big sister, but not a bossy or competitive one, I hope. I’ve always had a great relationship with my brothers. All three of us loved roller skating and skateboarding – I got my first pair of skates when I was seven, and would spend hours and hours just skating up and down the slope on the road outside our house, often with my friend Lizzie. We used to mark out courses on the pavements with chalk, using different symbols to indicate where we had to do twizzles and so on. We timed ourselves over the course, always trying to beat our previous best. We were lucky to have tennis courts in the village, and I’d spend hours there too with my friends Lynne and Laura. By the time I was twelve, it wasn’t uncommon for us to cycle the 13 miles to Sidmouth. My bike was my freedom. I’m very fortunate my parents gave me that scope – though I recall one sunny evening Laura and I were having such a great time on the beach at Sidmouth that we didn’t come home on time. It didn’t occur to us that our parents would worry. It was such an innocent time. When we finally made it back they were extremely cross, but also extremely relieved.
My brothers preferred skateboarding. That soon became their passion, even more than football, and they worked hard to become skilful. They could do tricks down flights of stairs and jump over dustbins. They made skate videos, and they were serious about practising. I used to watch them work at mastering a trick for hours and hours until they’d nailed it, and admired their single-minded determination.
As siblings, we were a unit, often going to the playing field together to burn off energy. We trusted each other implicitly and were dead against the idea of ‘telling tales’ on each other. One day Matt and Jon were mucking around on the field when they stumbled over a bin bag full of soft-porn magazines. They were far too young and innocent to understand what they had found. They just thought the images were funny and brought them to show me. Being older I understood a bit more and knew this was not ideal reading material! I was determined not to tell my parents about it. I felt protective of them; the boys trusted me and didn’t realise they could get into trouble. So I got rid of the magazines myself. I wasn’t always doing them a favour though, a few years later, after I’d started running, my brothers joined the same school and the PE teachers expected them to be decent runners too. When Matt then came last in a cross-country race questions were asked and it turned out that he’d given up on the run halfway round and gone for a swim in the river with his friend Neil! I hope my reputation as a runner didn’t make their antics more noticeable . . .
I had nice friends, Laura and Lynne, and a girl called Julia. At primary school, I was moved up a class with another girl who the teachers thought was doing well. Initially it was fun because Becca, my friend from up the road, was in the older children’s class, but she moved away to another part of Devon and I suffered from that move. Our parents arranged sleepovers for us and we had lots of fun planning our midnight feasts, but not having Becca at school left me feeling a bit isolated. In the year before I would progress to secondary school in Ottery St Mary, I had to rejoin my rightful year group, and repeat the year. The problem was that everyone had already formed
tight friendship groups so it was a bit tough at first – you know what it’s like at that age.
It was at my secondary school, the King’s School, that I was introduced to the idea of running as a sport. The school had an excellent PE department, and one day my teacher, Mrs Sexty, asked us to run a couple of laps around the sloping grass track of the school sports fields. I took off, went to the front and ran as fast as I could. I can remember as clearly as if it were yesterday. I did my laps and looked back and saw the other kids were still some way from the finish line. Mrs Sexty and the other PE teacher, Mrs Parkin, looked pleased with my performance. Today, there are cross-country clubs at primary school, but in my day it wasn’t until we were at senior school and asked to run a winter cross-country or do a couple of laps of a field that natural distance runners stood out. In the playground, you’re mostly doing short bursts of running suited to sprinter types. I was surprised when Mrs Sexty took me aside and recommended I join a running club. She’d obviously seen a lot of girls at PE and I was flattered that she thought I showed promise.
The nearest local athletics club was Exeter Harriers, a club that was founded in 1904 and which had 250 or so members across all ages. A neighbour called Caroline offered to take me with her sons, who’d been going along to the Harriers for a while. That in itself was a stroke of luck. When Mum got a teaching job, she arranged for Caroline to be in our house to give my brothers and me a snack when we came home from school and stay until Mum arrived back from work. Caroline suggested she took me to the Harriers’ Tuesday- and Thursday-evening training sessions. She and her husband Jim rotated lifts with other neighbours, the Gibbses, whose daughters had also become club members. Living in a rural village without much public transport to rely on could have seriously restricted my development, but I was lucky in that our village seemed to be full of parents willing to spend hours on the endless task of chauffeuring their kids around.