This Mum Runs

by Jo Pavey

  If the 2006 track season had disorientated me a bit psychologically, that feeling took on a physical reality in the closing stages of the Great North Run. Running the last mile and a half, I felt really peculiar. I had to concentrate hard to keep running and stay upright. The road was swaying from side to side and I was almost delirious. Somehow I managed to get myself to the finish line. When I crossed the line Gav said I looked grey. I’ve seen photos of the volunteers holding me up just past the line and I do look ashen. Completely disorientated, I was immediately taken to the medical facilities. I kept wanting to leave but every time I got up off the bed, saying something like, ‘It’s okay, I feel much better now,’ my legs would buckle and I’d collapse to the floor. I literally couldn’t stand on my feet without wobbling and falling over. It might sound ridiculous but I felt as if I was drunk. I was very happy and merry thinking, ‘What’s all this fuss!’ Once I’d recovered my balance some two hours after the finish, I went to see the press in the media tent. I told one reporter that I felt like I’d downed a couple of bottles of wine. This made the papers, with the Guardian’s Duncan Mackay writing, ‘Mystery attack of “drunken delirium” robs Pavey of debut challenge’. I found this very funny to read. Even funnier was another reporter who got the wrong end of the stick. He wrote that I ran badly because I did drink a couple of bottles of wine before the race! But there was also a serious side to the incident. I went for several rounds of medical checks and my hyperglycaemia was confirmed.

  2007 was a big year – and we focused on the prospects of medalling in the World Championships in Osaka, Japan, at the end of August. I knew I wasn’t getting any younger, but after running that 14:39 in Brussels at the end of the 2006 season, I felt a global medal was a possibility. Gav, on top of his coaching role, also became my manager. After the galling disappointment of Gothenburg, I trained harder than ever before. We travelled out to South Africa to train during the winter months and my mileage peaked at 127 miles a week while we were in Dullstroom. During the winter of 2006/7 I would put in my heavy weeks of mileage at altitude then pop down to much lower Potchefstroom – a four-hour drive west of Dullstroom – to sharpen up with a couple of track sessions before heading home to a race.

  After a week in Potchefstroom, I hopped on a plane to Stuttgart to run a 3,000m at an IAAF Permit Indoor Meeting. Normally I take a race to get going at the start of the season, but I felt great and was over the moon with my time of 8:31.50, which broke my own indoor 3,000m British record from 2004. It would have been a European record, too, if two Russian athletes hadn’t run faster the year before in Moscow – one of them being Shobukhova and the other Olesya Syreva (who broke nine minutes for the first time with an 8:29, at that point her only sub 9:00).

  I treasured my 8:31 straight off the back of winter running as a great stepping stone for the track season ahead. Despite a setback with a flu bug that settled in my chest, I carried my high mileage deep into the summer months. Gav just said, ‘Swallow your pride. You might not do well in preparation races because we are not easing back for a summer campaign. It’s all about that one race.’ I had returned to the UK by May and in late June ran a 10,000m race at a British Milers Club meeting in Watford. I didn’t race it as such; I followed the 31:45 qualifying pace. With about three laps to go, I felt good so I just sped up a bit and finished with a 31:26 – not my quickest, but a time I was satisfied with. I would be going to the World Championships in a new event. With that event as my focus, I competed in a few other races to benefit from the massive boost in fitness that racing gives you. I was training through these races, concentrating purely on doing well in Japan.

  We flew to Macau for our final preparations before heading to Osaka. It was very hot and extremely humid and sometimes wet; in fact there was hardly ever a blue sky, but I loved that tropical feeling. Macau has a great trail along the side of a hill that was reasonably flat. Although it wasn’t very extensive, the surface was ideal and I was happy repeating loops. It seemed safe from the extraordinary number of stray dogs that ran along the roads in packs and, I feared, might attack me. My first run was with Helen Clitheroe and Gav. We aimed to do a twenty-minute jog to shake off the jet lag as we had just arrived, but we ended up getting lost. Our starting point was a wooden bench, the central point for four trails heading off in different directions, and marked by stones. We’d pick a trail, head off and then end up returning to the same bench! It was like a horror film. We were totally unacclimatised. We’d gone for a simple leg stretch, with no drinks. It seemed so unprofessional, but also funny, that we kept running around and around unable to escape the bench. The image of it as we approached each time became increasingly eerie. After about ninety minutes, we tried the first trail we’d chosen but then turned off onto another trail a few hundred metres later and finally – well over an hour later – we made it back to the start point, laughing in relief at the absurdity of it all. It was very funny despite the slight worry of disturbing our carefully planned preparations. We were soaked in sweat and gasping for a drink.

  The Asian heatwave of 2007 had blanketed Japan since May with temperatures ranging from 30 to 40°C. There was no let-up between day and night, and the combined temperature and humidity levels were particularly extreme on the night of the women’s 10,000m final. Sitting in the stadium, Gav and Alan Storey were dripping with sweat without moving a muscle. The thermometer on Gav’s GPS watch registered 36°C. With the humidity level at over 90 per cent, conditions were about as far as you can get from ideal for distance running. Just walking to the start line was reminiscent of walking into a sauna, the hot air like a physical barrier you have to push through. It was the same for everyone, so I just had to get on with it. Fortunately, I tend to naturally cope well in hot weather and, having acclimatised in the steamy hot climate of Macau, I felt well prepared.

  But the race was tough. From the off, it felt like a run to the death, which would be won by whoever could endure the most discomfort. I was close to being in the best shape of my life, but it was a slow race – partly down to tactics, but mostly owing to the conditions. I felt pretty good. On the penultimate lap, I just lost hold of the leading two – Tirunesh Dibaba and Elvan Abeylegesse – but was running a strong third. The home straight beckoned . . . a medal was in my grasp. Coming around the final bend, in those last desperate throes with the line in sight, I sensed the American Kara Goucher coming past me in a late burst of speed. I pushed as hard as I could. Inside my head I was yelling, ‘Come on, Jo, come ON!’ but I couldn’t hold on. There was nothing more to come. I gave everything. At the finish I was flat on my back, totally spent. The disappointment was huge. I felt I’d failed. Fourth was my best career placing in a World Championships, but to miss out on a medal, again, was gut-wrenching. I felt I’d let everyone down: Gav, who supported me emotionally as my husband and professionally as my coach; friends and family who boosted my spirits; supporters who had sent me messages of good luck.

  As Dibaba, Abeylegesse and Goucher gave jubilant trackside interviews and waved to the crowd, I couldn’t wait to get back to Gav at the warm-up track. It’s times like this when I know I have the right coach. Even when I have a bad run or a disastrous result, Gav is never angry. I see other athletes suffer when their coaches go off on one, but Gav knows that I’ve given my absolute all. He knows how much it means to me. He will be disappointed himself, of course, but he is always there for me and knows exactly what I need to move on.

  Like Gothenburg, it was another final in a major championships mentally filed in the ‘tough to revisit’ folder.

  Eight years later, another call from a journalist prompted me to revisit that painful image of my distraught fourth-placed self. In 2015, Martha Kelner at the Daily Mail informed me that Abeylegesse, who had claimed the silver medal in Osaka, had been suspended for doping. Her sample from that World Championships had been frozen and retested. It had been found to contain Stanozolol, the same synthetic anabolic steroid Ben Johnson had tested positive for in the 1988
Seoul Olympics. The appeals continue still but that news – which meant the medals could be readjusted and I could receive the bronze after all – sent my emotions spinning. I had finished fourth behind someone who was cheating, who shouldn’t even have been there, whose result should not and did not count. I had long had my suspicions about that race, and a few other races, because of whispers I heard on the athletics grapevine, and now I could be vindicated. On the one hand, I was thrilled to think I might get what was rightfully mine, but I was also angry. Athletes who cheat deprive clean runners of crossing the line knowing they’ve won a medal, of running a victory lap with a flag with the other medallists, and of standing on the podium instead of walking off the track, inwardly beating themselves up. Those are special moments, and you can never get them back.

  It has a hidden impact on your career. To finish fourth or fifth, rather than on the podium, affects your confidence as an athlete. It makes you feel like everyone thinks you’re always getting it wrong when it matters. You’re continually having to say in interviews that, unfortunately, you weren’t quite able to do it on the day, when actually it’s not the way you feel inside as you don’t believe in the integrity of some of the performances that you’ve just witnessed. It can also affect the way that you train, making you take risks, trying to attain their superhuman levels and overdoing it. Athletes such as Goldie Sayers and the men’s 4 x 400m relay team from the Beijing Olympics, who it now appears look likely to have been cheated out of medals, have described how they believe that pushing themselves too far in training to try to beat the cheats resulted in them getting injured. Despite the introduction of the Athlete Biological Passport in 2009 and the re-testing of frozen samples, athletes are left feeling let down by the authorities. Stories of corruption and cover-ups leave clean athletes feeling despondent. Funding for anti-doping is pitiful. As an athlete I feel that not enough is being done to truly make an impact. Frozen samples have a ten-year limit, but you would like to think that a cheat could never think they have got away with it even when that timeframe has passed. Also, common sense would stipulate all anti-doping should be independent of sporting governance and that there should be a fully autonomous global body with far greater powers. Every athlete worldwide should be subjected to the same stringent anti-doping procedures. This is not yet the case. There have certainly been many dark days for athletics, but I am passionate about the sport, as are the majority of the people involved in it. I don’t like having to talk in a negative way about the sport I love. The positive side of all this is that perhaps now the huge problems have been exposed, the sport will sort itself out and present a brighter future for the youngsters coming through.

  One day I might have a World Championship bronze medal to add to my shoebox collection and muse on all the effort and planning and dreams that went into it, but it will remain a bitter-sweet moment. Did I ever question the point of pursuing glory knowing what I was up against? Did I ever wonder why I put myself through all this? No. I always believed that somehow I just had to find a way to beat the cheats. I had to train harder and harder. When the gun goes on the start line, I put all negative thoughts to the back of my mind and just go for it. You never know what might happen; you have to seize the opportunity. Despite the massive frustrations, I’m not one to mope around feeling sorry for myself. I know I’m lucky to be running. It’s my passion, and it’s given me wonderful experiences – the travel, the team camaraderie, the satisfaction of working towards improving my performances. There is so much more to running than the results. If I wasn’t trying to compete at an elite level, I’d still enjoy my runs in the forest and along the canal with my family.

  CHAPTER 16

  Beijing – My Last Olympics?

  During the winter of 2007/8 I trained hard again with a renewed focus – the Olympic Games in Beijing. I spent the autumn training at altitude in Flagstaff, Arizona, and then travelled back out to Dullstroom for the rest of the winter. It was our second trip to the American West, having previously spent time in Boulder, Colorado, and we drove miles to our run each day before realising there was a trail right around the corner from the hotel where we were staying. Unfortunately, early in the trip, I fell over on a rocky trail and smashed my knee, which was rather stupid. We had flown out to Arizona specifically to train so there was no way I was going to rest it. It was strange to be in a desert climate where the temperatures dropped to freezing at night but rose to 25°C during the day. The change of location felt like an adventure. We’ve never eaten so much in our lives. When in Rome, as the saying goes . . . One restaurant specialised in a ten-course menu. If you managed to finish a course, you got another plate free. Well, that was a challenge! I ate so much I was in excruciating pain. How could I have been so daft to inflict that on myself?!

  On rest days, we visited Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon and discovered the trails around Meteor Crater, a vast site formed 50,000 years ago as a result of a strike by an asteroid travelling at 26,000 miles per hour.

  By the time we’d settled back in Dullstroom in December, I was running heavy mileages. When we left in the middle of May, I was clocking up around 115 to 125 miles per week and I was running most of this at over 8,000 feet, only dropping to about 7,000 feet for my intervals, either on a grass track in Belfast or a synthetic track in Ermelo. Training was going well and I carried this right through to the summer.

  We loved our training camps in South Africa, the variety of runs in beautiful landscape, the familiarity of our routine; but the violence started to feel too close to home. I used to buy honey at a little shop called Milly’s, which mostly sold trout as Dullstroom is a hub for fly fishers. The house we were renting was on the other side of a courtyard to the shop. We never heard the shots, but we were told the lovely lady who I’d often chat to during my regular honey purchases had been shot dead in the shop by her husband – while we were at home. That was a jolt. In 2007, we were back in the old rundown house with the veranda that we loved. Adjoining the house was a double garage with an annexe above. The owner let this accommodation separately, and a security guard called Wiseman lived there with two women and a gorgeous little five-year-old boy called Justice. They were refugees from Zimbabwe, very friendly, and they’d often pop in to use our microwave. We left for a quick trip to do an indoor race in Europe and on our return found they’d gone. It turned out Wiseman had shot both the women and then turned the gun on himself. Thankfully he had taken Justice to a friend’s house beforehand, so the little boy was safe, but it was so devastating and shocking to realise that someone we trusted was capable of murder. The heart-breaking tragedy really got to Gav and me.

  The plan for the year, as in 2007, was to focus on one main goal: the 10,000m at the Beijing Olympics. Back in Macau for the holding camp, it was nice to again be part of the team environment, going on training runs with Paula Radcliffe and Liz Yelling, and enjoying the camaraderie. Training went well for me again. The sessions were bang on, better even than before Osaka; I was ready to go. Despite the pain of those World Championships, I drew encouragement from the fact that I had finished fourth at world level. Nonetheless, I was experienced enough to know that things have to be right on the day. It’s not about your last result or how training is going – even if that gives you confidence; it’s all about race day. In the back of my mind, there’s always a niggling worry that things could go wrong at the last minute. I would turn thirty-five the month after the Games. Would this be the end of my international career? I was pretty sure it would be my last Olympics.

  In Macau, we had been as meticulously careful as ever with what we ate and obsessively used antibacterial gel to wash our hands. The nightmare would be to fall ill. Athletes, pushing ourselves hard physically and thus putting our immune systems under stress, tend to be prone to bugs, especially as we have to travel close to when we aim to peak. Gav and I arrived in Beijing three days before my race and, to my horror, I felt those undeniable stirrings in my abdomen that indicated I wasn’t well. There was
nothing I could do but admit to myself that I must have food poisoning or a stomach bug, and with those symptoms came weakness and lethargy. I willed myself better, but on the morning of the race I still wasn’t right, better enough to think maybe I’d be okay, but aware deep down that for a professional athlete any marginal decrease in health translates into a big dip on the track. That tiny tick of the clock that seems so minuscule could be the difference between a medal and finishing down the field.

  Gav advised me not to run, but, as usual, he let me make my own decision and then supported me 100 per cent. I wasn’t okay at all. When the gun went, there was simply nothing there. I had no strength to muster. I got round the laps by telling myself this was an Olympic Games and I just needed to get to the finish line. I trailed in in twelfth. I felt horrendous, but thought, with a bit of time to recover, I could put it right for the 5,000m.

  Part of me wanted to run out of sheer frustration, but on the day I still felt nauseous and dizzy. I tried to warm up, but was so wobbly that even in my determination to go out with a point to prove, I realised it would be insane. Gav had warned the BBC commentary team that I was going to attempt to race and explained the situation so he would know the reason if I had to make a last-minute withdrawal. When you’re so far away from home, family and friends might have wondered what had gone wrong when I didn’t show up at the start line. I was so disappointed. I take my team place seriously and my one consolation was that I hadn’t taken someone else’s place in the 5k only to pull out. There wasn’t another athlete sitting at home, watching on TV, thinking they could have run the race as I had been the only athlete entered for the 5,000m for Team GB.