This Mum Runs

by Jo Pavey

  Contents

  Cover

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1. Back on Track

  2. The Green Flash Years

  3. 1988 – Surprise Success

  4. Gavin

  5. The Lost Years

  6. Engaged and Married

  7. Round the World

  8. An Elite Athlete

  9. Defying the Doctor

  10. My First Olympics

  11. Controversy in Canada

  12. Always Fifth

  13. A Strange Sickness

  14. From South Africa to a Silver Medal

  15. I Wasn’t Doing It All Wrong After All

  16. Beijing – My Last Olympics?

  17. Thrilled to be Pregnant

  18. Jacob

  19. Motherhood and Marathons

  20. Foiled by Stress Fractures

  21. The Lure of London 2012

  22. A Home Olympics

  23. Emily

  24. Full Circle

  25. Gold

  26. At the Age of Forty

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Jo Pavey was forty years old when she won the 10,000m at the European Championships. It was the first gold medal of her career and, astonishingly, it came within months of having her second child.

  The media dubbed her ‘Supermum’, but Jo’s story is in many ways the same as every mother juggling the demands of working life with a family – the sleepless nights, the endless nappy changing, the fun, the laughter and the school-run chaos. The only difference is that Jo is a full-time athlete pushing a buggy on her training runs, clocking up miles on the treadmill in a cupboard while her daughter has her lunchtime nap, and hitting the track while her children picnic on the grass.

  Heartwarming and uplifting, This Mum Runs follows Jo’s roundabout journey to the top and all the lessons she’s learnt along the way. It is the inspiring yet everyday story of a mum that runs and a runner that mums.

  About the Author

  Jo Pavey has represented Britain at four Olympic Games since Sydney 2000. In 2014, at the age of forty and just months after having a baby, she won gold in the European Championships over 10,000m and bronze in the Commonwealth Games over 5,000m. Jo has won a host of other accolades, and came third in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2014. Jo lives in Devon with her husband and coach, Gavin, and children Jacob and Emily.

  List of Illustrations

  1. Jo and her mum, Linda (courtesy of the author)

  2. Jo and her dad, Bob (courtesy of the author)

  3. School portrait around 1978 (courtesy of the author)

  4. Jo and her brothers, Matt and Jon (courtesy of the author)

  5. Jo running for Devon in 1988 (author)

  6. Jo, Gav and Tony White (author)

  7. Travelling around France in 1993 (author)

  8. Jo and Gav’s wedding day in 1995 (Castle Photography, Tiverton)

  9. Friends from physio, l-r: Dana, Ross, Jo, Kol, Mel, Gav (author)

  10. Backpacking in Queenstown, New Zealand in 1997 (author)

  11. Fiji after Cyclone Gavin (author)

  12. Jo running in the 1,500m national trials in 1997 (author)

  13. Start line at Jo’s international debut in the World Championships in Athens in 1997 (author)

  14. With fellow athletes in Athens (author)

  15. Leaving for Jo’s first Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 (author)

  16. Women’s 5,000m heats at Sydney Olympics (Stu Forster, Allsport/Getty Images)

  17. Women’s 5,000m heats at Sydney Olympics (Mike Powell, Allsport/Getty Images)

  18. Women’s 5,000m heats, Athens 2004 Olympic Games (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

  19. Jo competes in the women’s 5000m final in the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games (Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

  20. Jo and Kenya’s Isabella Ochichi and Lucy Wangui Kabuu show their 5,000m medals at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games (Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images)

  21. Tower Bridge during the Virgin London Marathon 2011 (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)

  22. Winning the Women’s Bupa London 10,000m run in 2011 (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

  23. Jo running in Richmond Park (Mark Shearman)

  24. Jo in the women’s 5,000m at the London 2012 Olympic Games (Simon Stacpoole/Offside)

  25. The throwers and the distance runners at the London Olympics (author)

  26. Entertaining Jacob in the British Olympic Association family lodge at the London Olympics (author)

  27. Jo and Gav with Jacob when he was a few days old (author)

  28. Running in Bushy Park with Jacob (Anne Purkiss)

  29. Baby Emily (author)

  30. On the beach with Emily and Jacob in Ayr (author)

  31. Women’s 5,000m final at the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games (Ian Walton/Getty Images)

  32. Celebrating winning bronze in the women’s 5,000m (Ian Walton/Getty Images)

  33. Being met at the airport after the Commonwealth Games by brother Matt and family (author)

  34. The decorated house (author)

  35. Doing a BBC interview post Commonwealth Games (author)

  36. Leading the field in the women’s 10,000m final at the 2014 European Athletics Championships in Zurich (Michael Steele/Getty Images)

  37. Celebrating winning gold in the women’s 10,000m final (Ian Walton/Getty Images)

  38. The women’s 10,000m medal ceremony (Michael Steele/Getty Images)

  39. Training with Jacob and Emily in Devon (both author)

  40. Jacob running around a beach track in Devon (author)

  41. Jacob practising long jump during Jo’s training (author)

  42. Family time in Haldon Forest after training (author)

  43. Emily and Jo at the Yeovil track (author)

  44. Jo, Jacob and Emily on a Devon beach (author)

  For Gav, Jacob and Emily

  Jo Pavey

  THIS MUM RUNS

  With Sarah Edworthy

  CHAPTER 1

  Back on Track

  Come-back races? I’ve had more than a few, but the night of 10 May 2014 was the ultimate long shot. I was running in the 10,000m National Championships – the ‘Night of the 10,000m Personal Bests’ – a trial for the European Championships in Zurich that summer. I could look back to pleasing performances in the past and take confidence in being the 2012 European 10,000m silver medallist and a four-time Olympian, but I’ve always lived in the moment. And right then? I was a forty-year-old mother of two who had given birth eight months before. I trained on a treadmill in a cupboard by the back door and hadn’t raced on a track in spikes since London 2012. Was I crazy?

  The race was at 9 p.m., which meant it wasn’t practical to take the children. So I would have to be away from my baby, Emily, overnight for the first time. It felt like a big deal, an unsettling emotional wrench to leave her and Jacob, who was now a very active four-year-old. I travelled on the train to London the day before the trials so that I wouldn’t have to race with ‘travel’ in my legs, my mind churning through a checklist I’d left for my parents. Mum and Dad were arriving the next morning to look after the kids so that Gavin, my husband and coach, could follow me up to London. I’d be away for thirty-six hours and Gav for less than eighteen, but I wanted babysitting to be easy and fun for my parents and that required a lot of preparation. I stocked up on food, nappies and baby wipes. I rushed around and got the laundry washed and dried. I set out clothes for the kids on the bed in the spare room to save Mum searching through untidy cupboards. I laid out baby sleepi
ng bags and muslin cloths. I wrote a list of roughly when they’d need feeding and with what (fish fingers for Jacob – keep it simple! Formula milk and puréed baby food for Emily). I left notes on other useful information like special tricks we use to get Emily to sleep and made sure they knew how to work the essentials: baby monitor, TV and central heating. I bought nice snacks and real ale for my dad as a little thank-you gift, and made them promise to call me any time, and never worry that I could be preparing for the race. I couldn’t be more confident that the kids were in safe hands – just as when Gav’s parents help out – but my mind was more at ease knowing Mum and Dad would never hesitate to ring me if necessary. As the train neared London, I imagined what the kids would be doing. Had I remembered everything they might need? My hand reached for my phone. I couldn’t resist calling in to get the first update.

  Emily was born by Caesarean section in September 2013. Having another little one filled us with so much joy and I didn’t want to spoil that very special time with our newborn by worrying about regaining my fitness. I was also determined to breastfeed for as long as possible. I returned to running before Christmas, doing whatever seemed achievable on a day-to-day basis. On my first few runs I had a weird sensation that my legs were not attached to my body; my core muscles would take much longer to recover from abdominal surgery than from a natural birth. I kept breastfeeding right up until April, giving me just a month before the trial to get back to a pre-pregnancy state. Up to that point I was feeding on demand, and Emily resolutely refused to take a bottle of expressed milk, so I couldn’t ever be physically far from her. As a result, from the beginning of my journey back to race fitness, all my runs became family runs. Every single one. Sometimes we’d head into the forest – with me or Gav pushing Emily in a running buggy, and Jacob whizzing along gamely on his little bike; sometimes we’d venture into a local park or down the canal path. At track sessions – which involved an hour-long drive to Yeovil because our home track in Exeter was being resurfaced – Gav would coach me, stopwatch in hand, with Emily strapped to his front in a baby carrier, snoozing away, and Jacob sprinting up and down the long jump runway. While breastfeeding, my track sessions were laughable. I ran wearing two or three crop tops to support my lopsided boobs – one emptied from the last feed, the other full in readiness for the next. I had to hope that even though the times I was recording were rubbish, I was still gaining the training benefits. Gav kept reassuring me this was the case: ‘Don’t worry about the times,’ he’d say again and again. In order to boost my mileage and be on hand at home for the kids, I’d pound away on the treadmill we have stashed in a space other people might use as a cloakroom. My children were now my priority, but I couldn’t yet contemplate a life without running.

  My preparations to ‘come back’ as an athlete were rushed, guided by every parent’s mantra: ‘Do the best you can with what you have.’ What did I have to lose? I was spurred on by the outside chance that I might represent my country for one more athletics season.

  I travelled up from Devon for the ‘Night of the 10,000m Personal Bests’, hosted by the Highgate Harriers, determined simply to give it a go. I’d normally have entered three or four races as preparation leading up to a National Championships and qualifying trials, but here I was on the night before this very significant 10,000m race, sitting in an anonymous room at the Teddington Travelodge, 150 miles away from my family, contemplating my first race back, a race that was my only chance of qualifying for the 10,000m at the European Championships. I sat there feeling strangely cut off and alone, asking myself all the questions that I have repeatedly been asked ever since I became a mother in 2009: why was I still trying to run at an elite level? Why was I putting myself through this? To be isolated from our happy-go-lucky domestic chaos felt all wrong, like something was missing in the room. It wasn’t until I was chatting to Gav on the phone at about 9.30 p.m., once the kids had gone to bed, that I realised with horror that something much more mundane was missing: my Exeter Harriers vest.

  I’d forgotten you need to wear your club vest for national trials. I’d spent hours preparing all the stuff for the kids, and then just chucked my sponsors’ kit into my bag on autopilot. It was the sort of thing that would have thrown me into a panic before I had children. Now I was used to taking things as they come with the kids, I just thought how lucky it was that we’d discovered the problem in advance of the event. I told Gav where the Harriers vest was – at the bottom of the laundry basket. (I’m afraid to say it had lingered there because I knew it had to be hand-washed, not just bundled in the machine with everything else.) I said it would need a quick wash and Gav said no problem, he’d bring it up, clean, the following day.

  An hour or so later he called again. I could hear in his voice that something was wrong. In the division of domestic chores in our house, there’s only one machine Gav’s ordinarily allowed near – the coffee maker. And for good reason. He’d only gone and put the vest into the washing machine on a hot wash and it had come out a beautiful Peppa Pig pink. The dye in the burgundy strip across the white had run. It was a complete mess, ‘totally unwearable’, Gav said – and it was the only one I had.

  It was late at night and I started to panic. The rules clearly state you have to wear registered club vests. Racking my brain, I remembered I did have one other – the vest I wore as a junior in the late 1980s, now stashed away as a keepsake in a box of mementos. But where was the box? In the garage? The loft? A cupboard upstairs? Gav was going to have to turn the house upside down to find it and, if he did, I was going to have to run in a vest that was older than most of the girls I was running against.

  Quite a while later he rang, triumphantly declaring he’d found the box, eventually, at the back of a wardrobe in a spare room. The vest was inside, he said, but it would need a wash.

  ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘Just bring it as it is.’

  Gav drove up from Devon the following day and met me as I checked out of the Travelodge. He handed over the mothballed vest and we had to giggle.

  From 2003 to 2010, Gav and I had lived in Teddington, in south-west London, as so many distance runners do because of the proximity to the running trails in Bushy and Richmond Parks and to Heathrow for travel, so we were back on our old stomping ground. We had lunch in Café Mimmo, a favourite coffee shop, and looked with dismay at the weather outside. It was horrendous, pouring with rain and high winds. As the race was not until 9 p.m., we hoped the wind would die down a bit during the day. But the weather did not abate and we sat in the car for ages, then sheltered in another coffee shop in the park until they turfed us out at closing time. When we arrived at Parliament Hill Athletics Track, we said hello to everyone, then jumped back in the car again to keep dry. Squirming in the passenger seat, I changed into my running kit. I pinned on my number – 41 – and thought they should have given me the number 40.

  What were my chances of achieving a qualifying time here? I honestly didn’t know. It seemed such a long shot. Having recently stopped breastfeeding Emily, my body was still undergoing physiological and hormonal changes. As an athlete, I understand my body well. I take good care of it; I can read its signals, but I was now primarily a mum who runs and, as any mother who’s breastfed knows, your body doesn’t quite feel your own immediately post-feeding. How would I perform? It truly was a step – or several thousand strides – into the unknown. I knew that when I put myself on the line, a forty-year-old up against much younger girls, ready to fight it out for medals, I would not modify my approach because of my age. I was aware some of the other athletes had been overseas on winter training camps in preparation; some had run good times in the United States. I’d just been clocking up my miles in lovely Devon with Gav and the kids. I would do what I had always done and simply run as hard as I could. There can be a surprising difference between how I feel when training and how that translates into race form. Sometimes I surprise myself with how much faster I go, other times it can go the other way
. The only thing to do was to go into my default mode, give it my absolute all, and see where that would get me.

  Despite the dramatically stormy weather, the meeting had a great uplifting party atmosphere. The organiser had been granted permission from England Athletics to allow spectators onto the track to cheer on the runners from lane three. There was live music, real ale and the smell of burgers wafting across the track. Fuller’s London Pride sponsored the event, producing commemorative bottles of beer labelled ‘Night of the 10,000m PBs’ – a nice inspiring touch. The organisers had taken the trouble to ask all athletes for a song in advance to create a playlist for the night; I had chosen U2’s ‘Vertigo’ because I wanted something upbeat with a strong tempo. The rain lashed down; banners and tents strained in the wind. There were some good girls in the field and I had been nervous anticipating the race, but the atrocious weather made us giggle each time we were literally blown off the track while attempting our final warm-up strides – so much so that my nerves evaporated. No one could expect to run well in the blustering gale and that took some of the pressure off. During my warm-up, I had to bow into the wind and throw myself forward to counter the resistance. The wind would let up for a second and I’d have to re-balance or fall over. It was another ridiculous variable which made my mission seem even more unlikely. The comedy of the situation helped me relax.

  As I stood on the start line, I pushed all the factors against me doing well out of mind. I thought, ‘Let’s go for it and see what it brings.’ When the starting pistol went, I was taken over by the awesome thrill of being back in a competitive race. Tasha Vernon was the pacemaker for the first few laps, then I decided to go to the front. About midway through, Sophie Duarte of France took the lead for a lap, but I overtook her and pushed on. I was feeling surprisingly okay. It was tough in the gusting wind but everyone was in the same boat and I just felt like cracking on with it. I had to finish in the top two and run under 33 minutes to automatically qualify for the European Championships. Gav had been chatting to fellow coach Alan Storey, the former head of British Athletics Endurance, who thought it would be pretty tough to go under 33 minutes in these conditions, but it was one of those races with no messy moments or sharp elbows or the risk of having your legs cut by another athlete’s spikes. After three of the twenty-five laps the race strung out, so I just focused on my rhythm and the track ahead, trying to keep under the qualifying pace as the laps ticked by, my energy boosted by encouraging shouts from the crowd.