This Mum Runs

by Jo Pavey

  CHAPTER 6

  Engaged and Married

  On 21 December 1992, when I was nineteen and Gav was twenty-one, we became engaged. Unbeknownst to me, Gav had bought a ring and carried it around with him for about a month. He wanted somewhere special for the proposal and then remembered this romantic spot on Dartmoor called Dr Blackall’s Drive. In the 1880s, the doctor from Exeter who owned nearby Spitchwick Manor cleared a drive above the beautiful Dart Valley to make it possible to enjoy the remarkable views. So Gav and I hiked along this two-mile stretch of stony pathway on the moors and sat on a rocky outcrop overlooking the deep, forested, V-shaped valley with the river sparkling in the sun at the bottom. Gav pulled out a ring from amongst the sandwiches and flask he’d packed, and went down on one knee. He popped the question. It was a lovely, romantic moment and I said yes immediately.

  Not all Gav’s romantic gestures had such perfect endings. One time, he was taking me to Ilsington on Dartmoor, to see the Old School House where he and his brother Alex were born. He borrowed his parents’ brand-new blue Ford Fiesta – the only new car they have ever bought – and we arrived in the picturesque village, with its narrow lanes and rugged free-stone walls. In his enthusiasm to point out the window of the room where he and his brother were born, Gav drove too close to the garden wall and we heard the unmistakable sound of metal on rock as the entire left side of the car scraped along the granite wall. He couldn’t believe it. After manoeuvring it away from the wall, he got out and ran his hands down the paintwork to inspect the damage. I knew it was bad when he buried his face in his hands with horror. When we got back to his parents’ house, Gav’s mum said she guessed as soon as she saw him that he’d done something to the car because his face was still smeared with blue paint!

  We started arranging things for our big day while we were still at university. There we were, still studying, cramming for our final exams; arranging weddings was hardly top of most people’s priority lists at that stage in life. And we were incredibly fortunate because our parents helped out too. In the lead up, Gav and I were both busy with summer jobs. In fact, we always had summer jobs and evening jobs. At one point we both worked at Burger King in Exeter. Strangely enough, I did enjoy the challenge of making burgers as fast as I could. Gav often did labouring work, too, and I worked at a neural rehabilitation centre.

  We got married the summer after I finished at university, in 1995, when I was twenty-one and Gav was twenty-three. It seems a frighteningly long time ago now, as we celebrated our twentieth anniversary in 2015. As we were both from Devon, and we both still felt very much that it was home, we planned a traditional white wedding in my local village church in Feniton. I was so happy to be marrying the man with whom I had fallen in love at a young age. The service was followed by a reception in Escot House, a private Grade II listed nineteenth-century house with surrounding parkland designed by Capability Brown. It is now a tourist attraction, open to the public – and our daughter Emily loves visiting the red squirrel reserve – but in 1995 it was the closest wedding venue to Feniton and somewhere I’d often run past. The setting was indisputably grand – and we had a vintage car to match – but we made it a fun wedding with all our friends from university as well as friends from home and our families. Our bridesmaids were my childhood friend Becca (just three weeks after being hers) and my college friend Julia, and our brothers did a brilliant job as ushers. Everyone enjoyed the speeches – my dad reminiscing over my early years and Gav having everyone in fits of laughter as he scrolled through his notes saying, ‘No, I can’t say that,’ as he lost his nerve to tell his pre-planned jokes. Our best man was Chi Man Woo, our great friend from Hong Kong. He was Gav’s university friend and arrived speaking only a few words of English but went on achieve a first-class degree. His speech was hilarious thanks to his foreign sense of humour. We all danced until the early hours of the morning; our guests probably thought we were never going to leave. We had a fantastic send-off and set off on honeymoon, but then had to get the driver to return a few minutes later as we had forgotten our hotel key. Just a bit embarrassing . . .

  We went on honeymoon to the beautiful village and resort of Ölüdeniz on the Turquoise Coast of south-west Turkey. With a lovely sandy beach next to a lagoon perfect for swimming, it was quiet and beautiful. The area has since become much more developed, but there was only one hotel to stay in when we were there. We had fun exploring and driving miles and miles up into the mountains on a rickety old truck to go paragliding. In tandem with an instructor, we had to pretty much run off the cliff and sail down above incredible landscape only to land a short while later practically outside our hotel room.

  That September I started a job as a newly qualified physiotherapist at the Royal United Hospital in Bath. They were fun times. I loved the camaraderie of the physio department, the laughter in the staff room during breaks. Gav, meanwhile, had secured a job as a quantity surveyor, and together we rented a flat. It seemed like this was it: jobs, rent, a grown-up life. Running properly seemed like a distant dream. But during those lost years, memories of winning the English Schools and Amateur Athletic Association titles as a teenager kept that flame burning in the back of my mind. It never went away; it was always there. If I could win those titles, setting new records, maybe I had the innate talent to make it as senior athlete? If I had that potential, if I had that ability, I could find it again, couldn’t I? I could push harder, go faster, be stronger. That little voice, that intrigue in the back of my mind, counted for a lot. It made me curious. What if I try again? What if I get through these injuries and put a good season’s training together? Maybe I could make it. Maybe not. But would I ever want to look back and think I didn’t try? Who wants to look back at their life and see a big, gaping missed opportunity? I desperately wanted to know. Could I make it as an athlete? Could I represent my country as a senior athlete?

  When I started studying for my degree, my running ‘career’ – if you can call my schoolgirl exploits that – was over before it had fully launched. So when I started out as a physio at the Royal United Hospital in Bath I thought that would most likely occupy the rest of my working life. I had lovely colleagues who soon became good friends. On Friday evenings we’d all go to the Old Crown pub and have the same meal every week, cod and chips, or ‘whale and chips’ as we referred to it because of the generous portions. Then we’d head out to a club afterwards. It was a Friday-night ritual and a lovely team environment with Ross and Dana, Kol and Mel, Dave, Sally, Celia . . . I found the physio work rewarding. As with my running, and my own bid to regain fitness, I loved seeing physical improvement in my patients, who weren’t all seeing me for sports physio treatments. If I’d continued and was working as a physio now, I’d have liked to specialise in rehabilitation, treating patients who had had a stroke or a head injury. In that role, you have the chance to truly make a difference to people’s lives. You might be able to help them stand or walk again, or relieve their pain and frustration. Watching people start to regain function is very rewarding and you can see the improvement as you work.

  So there we were, Gav and I, in our twenties. We had our degrees, we had career paths, we were married, we rented a tiny flat right off the Royal Crescent in Bath, we’d saved our money. The natural next step was to buy a house, to fill one day with kids. When I’d been working as a physio for eighteen months, we thought we ought to get on the property ladder. So we embarked on a house-hunting mission and found a lovely place near Bath, in Midsomer Norton. It all happened so fast. We put in an offer, which the owner accepted. And then something made us think twice.

  Earlier that year, I’d managed to put together a few weeks of training, and raced the 1,500m at the National Championships. I wasn’t fully fit. I was still in the midst of those long and frustrating stop/start years of injury, but I finished in a time of 4:21. It was not a notable time compared to elite runners, but it was an eye-opener. Gav reckoned that, with proper consistent training, I’d run at least 10 to 15 second
s quicker, and that could earn me qualification at elite level. He thought I had the talent to improve and make it as a professional. One morning we looked at each other over the mortgage offers and surveys and letters from estate agents piling up on the kitchen table and said, ‘What are we doing? We’re still so young! Is this it?’ Buying a house and getting tied into a mortgage might be the natural next step, but we didn’t have to do it just yet, did we? Shouldn’t we go and live a little? Explore all life’s possibilities? Before we knew it, we’d quit our jobs, booked round-the-world flights and packed a couple of rucksacks.

  I was twenty-three, relatively injury-free and managing to run more consistently than in previous months. I relished every stride. I would go out with Gav, rekindling that love of running now that every trip out in my trainers wasn’t accompanied by nerves about how much it would hurt, or whether I’d have to limp back, defeated once more. After all the years I’d been out of the sport, I had been embarrassed to tell my physiotherapy colleagues and Bristol friends that my secret ambition was to be a professional athlete. After so long out, and only my schoolgirl exploits to refer to, I felt a bit of a fraud. The 4:21 was the catalyst that drove us to go travelling, not just for the adventure, but also to work hard together to see how much I could improve. We’d be giving it a go under the radar, behind the pretence of a once-in-a-lifetime travel adventure, and we would come back knowing which way our life would go. By setting off on a round-the-world trip, we were embarking on our own weird version of a warm-weather training camp, without fully admitting to ourselves that that’s what we were doing. It was a win-win situation. If it didn’t work out, and the training came to nothing – we’d have had an amazing trip, spent some wonderful time together, and return home with memories and photos to bore people with for the rest of our lives. Secretly, though, we had an inner belief that we could make it happen.

  CHAPTER 7

  Round the World

  Our round-the-world ticket took us to Hong Kong, Bali, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii. We deliberately chose places we knew we could train – we weren’t about to pilot as a duo up the Amazon or climb the Himalayas – but the travel meant any training we did had to be very spontaneous. We moved on almost every day, never lingering in one place for more than a night or two. There was so much of the world to see. We blew all our savings on that trip, and yet we didn’t feel pain in spending it. Every day we were training in stunning landscapes and it was truly inspiring. We’d wake up and run a new route into the unknown, wondering what was around the corner. I’d grown up running through tiny, winding Devon lanes with high hedgerows, past fields with sheep and cattle. On our travels, we saw so much more by running than we would have on the tourist trail. Walking and talking you’re sounding out an alarm, but running silently and light on our feet, we could explore in stealth. We startled kangaroos in a clearing near Byron Bay in Australia, passed a wombat at the same spot each time we did a lap on Wilsons Promontary peninsula and came across a clumsy echidna (a tiny spiky anteater) near Melbourne.

  Was it a professional way to give athletics a good shot? Of course not. In Bali, we went to the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Ubud where Gav bought some bananas – classic athlete’s fuel – which we lost when a huge monkey swung from a tree, knocked Gav to the ground and made off with the bananas. On Fraser Island, off the coast of Queensland, a dingo stole our food supplies and we had nothing to eat for a few days. But we weren’t bothered; we just fell into the relaxed vibe of the backpacking lifestyle. We didn’t always know where we would be, whether we could train there, what the terrain would be like. There was no set schedule of a track session here, a long run there, a recovery run in the middle . . . We’d travel, and when we saw a good spot we’d put down our bags and run. We had running shoes, what else did we need? We ran in all sorts of conditions: high humidity in Indonesia and Fiji, stifling dry heat in the Australian Outback, cool southern alpine air in New Zealand. In Australia we ran in the arid red-soil terrain of the centre, in the tropical north-eastern landscape around Cairns, along beaches on the Gold Coast, through the rolling green landscapes of Victoria. In remote spots, we’d laugh about the amount of teeming wildlife apparently waiting to kill us – from box jellyfish to salt-water crocodiles, funnel-web spiders to all sorts of venomous snakes.

  For most of the time we were away we were lugging our big rucksacks around on buses or trains, which must have constituted some strength training. In New Zealand we hired a car for a month to get around and immerse ourselves in an authentic experience of the wilderness. If we saw a sports field, we’d stop the car and dash out to do a session. New Zealand was particularly wonderful, not just for its stunning natural beauty, but because the huge national parks were criss-crossed with well-mapped and -signposted hiking routes so we could easily assess our mileage. We would pick a walking trail, run it, then jump back in the car, find a campsite, put up the tent and cook a meal to eat under the stars. In the morning, we might crawl out of our tiny tent, have a sip of water and then set off again for another run. For me, that was the hardest bit – I need a cup of coffee at the very least before I run!

  Sometimes our routes were urban. One day in Sydney, we’d had a busy day sightseeing, undertaking the kind of slow plod from sight to sight that you do around cities that leaves you more knackered than running miles. We were trudging on weary feet back to our hostel when we saw a lovely hilly park, beautifully lit up by the street lighting. We couldn’t resist that kind of opportunity so down went our bags, and we did a hill session there and then even though it was ten o’clock at night. God knows what passers-by must have thought when they saw these two mad people sprinting up and down a hill with rucksacks as markers when most people were turning into bed. Another memorable hill session was in Indonesia – largely because it wasn’t a hill but a volcano. An inactive one, I hasten to add, though we did joke that if it had been likely to erupt, that might have made us pick up our pace.

  Sometimes on that trip it was tough to run owing to perilously steep or tricky surfaces, or it was just ridiculously hot – but we took the view that anything harder would toughen us up. When we visited Ayers Rock – Uluru – we couldn’t resist breaking into a run there too at 4.30 a.m. in the morning. The other people in our group thought we were completely nuts.

  None of those sessions had anything to do with paces or measuring distances; there were no GPS watches back then. We were simply working away on fitness and getting miles in our legs. Every interval session we did was based on ‘perceived effort’ – working as hard as we could for a set period, but not bothering to work out what our actual pace was. That would be meaningless anyway when the terrain or gradient or surface was different from one day to the next. Over the last couple of years Gav had moved away from running seriously himself to focusing on helping me with my training.

  Our running was interrupted by trips – a few amazing days learning how to sail on an America’s Cup yacht – and plenty of hangovers, but our travels didn’t all go entirely smoothly. We were staying on an island off Fiji when a cyclone hit and we had to hole up in our little beach hut. The setting – just metres from the azure sea – was beautiful, even if the accommodation was definitely backpackers’ budget style. The cyclone, funnily enough, was called Cyclone Gavin. Before the storm hit, the locals were laughing about this chap called Gavin who was bringing in his own cyclone, but the experience was terrifying, and heartbreaking ultimately for many of the islanders who lost property or their livelihoods. Sadly there was also loss of life. The sound of a cyclone is intensely physical. We were huddled under a bed, pushed up against a wall, while wind-bowled coconuts battered the roof of our tiny beach hut. The force of the winds whipped the walls so loudly you had to yell in each other’s ears to be heard. I was terrified we might die, and we were moved to scribble notes to our families in case we didn’t survive. Once the cyclone passed, the morning broke with a near-supernatural calmness, and we emerged to find utter destruction on our p
aradise island. The jetty had disappeared and the beach was gone, the sand sucked away by the wind. We were pained to see many of the islanders’ fishing boats minced, floating like thousands of pieces of driftwood. We were stranded on the island for two or three days as there was no boat to get back, with only cyclone-harvested coconuts to eat, though our travails were nothing compared to the islanders who lost everything.

  We also got lost once or twice on our runs. How could we not, when we were running new, unfamiliar routes every single day? But we felt young and free. We had each other and no dependents, so if we became lost for several hours – as we did in the rugged Blue Mountains, west of Sydney – we shrugged as we sought to find a way out. There are worse places to get lost than in a stunning landscape of steep cliffs, eucalyptus forests and waterfalls. The worst case of disorientation came on Mount Batur, an active volcano in Indonesia notable for rock formations made of solidified lava flows from previous eruptions. We chose not to have a guide in order to save money. How hard could it be, we thought, to walk to the top and back? Running up was fine; we found a nice stretch ideal for hill reps so did a session. Coming back down was something else. The lava flows resembled natural paths so we followed one down the side of the mountain only to discover a sheer drop where the flow ended. So up we went again, back to the top, and down again on another stretch of rocky trail that looked more likely. Same thing: another precipitous drop at the bottom. Up and down we went until it started getting dark and we began to fear we’d be spending the night on that volcano, though at least it was warm, and we had water. Eventually we found a way to descend to the treeline, picking our way through the deep forest in pitch dark to find our hired jeep.

  One of the things that made the trip so special was the feeling of being cut off from our conventional everyday lives and learning to become more self-reliant – though sometimes that was a bit hairy. North of Cairns, for example, we had an incident that still makes me shiver to recall. Strolling from our campsite we happened upon a beautiful deserted beach. Fringed by palm trees straight out of an exotic holiday brochure, it was idyllic. We set up camp for the day, laying down towels and sarongs to read and relax and doze in the sun. It was a wonderful lazy day, lying there half asleep. When the campsite owner asked us where we’d been that day, and we told him, he went crazy: ‘You bloody idiots! The beach is off-limits. Didn’t you see my signs? A f***ing saltie has been prowling up and down it all week.’