by Jo Pavey
The prospect of walking into a club with such a professional-sounding name was daunting; even travelling into the city of Exeter itself was a fairly major deal. I had butterflies fluttering in my stomach, wondering what I’d be asked to do. Would we be made to run miles and miles? Would everyone be much faster than me? Would I feel out of place? I needn’t have worried. It was a lovely, gentle introduction. At first, I was in a group with Ruth Godbeer, and later with a coach called Paul Gregory. They looked after the youngest ones and made sure we had fun through playing lots of games. We’d run around cones and do little relay races; we tried everything – running, jumping, hurdling, throwing events, even piggy-back races. Paul gave us the opportunity to try all the events as well as introducing some longer running sessions. It was a well-balanced and healthy approach to developing young athletes. No one was pressurised to specialise in one discipline too young; it was all about having fun.
When I was about thirteen, Paul and another coach, Martine, took us all on a training camp to Swansea, which was great fun, and a real eye-opener for me. All the other kids said they couldn’t go training during a particular part of the day because they had to watch Neighbours. The Australian soap had just started being shown in the UK and was so popular. I’d never seen it before but came to love it too. Many years later I would win a road race in Melbourne, where the programme is filmed, and was awarded my trophy by the member of the cast who played Ruth. She told us that her character’s wedding to Phil was due to be filmed in a few days’ time so we could go along to meet the cast. We did – and I even took a novelty photo of me pretending to train on Ramsay Street.
I soon settled in at the Harriers and when it became clear that distance running was where my natural talent lay, I moved to the endurance running group coached by Tony White. He suggested initially I trained one night a week with Paul and another evening with him to make the transition easier. I was fourteen when I moved to Tony full time and was excited to be in the same group as Emma Sokell, Cathy Hulme and Liz Taylor – these girls were the stars of the club and I aspired to be like them.
Tony ran his squad on a handicap basis so the slowest set off first on a session and the quickest went last. Even so, I started leaving some of the boys behind. Tony likes to recall how he asked them if they were just being gallant in letting me always come in first, and one of boys replied in exasperation: ‘Far from it! I can’t go any bloody faster!’
Soon, I was running with the older boys, and eventually with the men in the group, getting faster and stronger by the week. It was a great time. When I first joined the club I used to get through huge numbers of Green Flash plimsolls, touched up regularly with loads of shoe whitener. I’d run until holes appeared. I was never happy unless I was out in front, even in a training session, and each time I moved up a group, I wanted to prove myself. I was challenging myself just as I had when I used to try to skip all the way home from school for dinner. Tony’s handicap system for a track session was a double challenge – not only to run an impressive time according to the target he set, but also to do the mental maths it required. He set us individual time slots. He would set the slowest at, say, 18.5 seconds per 100 metres, the middle range runners 17.25 – yes, he even did quarters of seconds – and the fastest at 16, and then he’d count down to the start and you had to work out when to go so that we all finished together on the line. The time set would vary according to the session. Then you had to take the average, adapt your time to real time, and tell him how well you’d done. I found this quite acceptable, but I now realise how unique it was. No wonder maths became my best subject at school.
Running gave me a sense of identity, of achievement and purpose. I loved the spirit at the Harriers, both the running and the social aspect, and I became determined to improve. Prior to joining Tony’s group, I used to go running every day at school at lunchtime, in the winter doing the road loop around Ottery St Mary (trying to do it in 13 minutes) and in the summer escaping down to the grass track to do an 800m. I had no concept of how you structure training, of breaking a certain distance down and doing repetitions instead of just running the whole length. I used to go for runs before school, too. That shocks me now: it shows my motivation because I’m not a morning person at all. On dark mornings or evenings, Mum would follow me in the car so that I could see courtesy of the headlights or Dad would accompany me on his bike. Another neighbour, John Kimbrey, a former Royal Marine who was the father of my brother’s best friend, also used to take me on long runs on the roads around home. These outings stretched me. John was a training instructor at the Royal Marine Commando training centre at Lympstone and we worked off each other. He gave me lots of encouragement and I think he liked to taunt his Marines that he went running with a young girl who could keep up with him!
As far as my parents were concerned, running at Exeter Harriers was my hobby, just as the boys had their skateboarding and surfing. I loved the Harriers. The club was full of characters and selfless volunteers. If it hadn’t been for the coaches, the people making tea, the supportive parents, no one would have had a chance to take running seriously. It was thanks to a community effort that I was able to consistently show up to the training sessions and stick to the schedule Tony set. I’ve always been grateful to Caroline and Jim and to the Gibbs family for the lifts. All three of us had our own interests and places we wanted to be. Dad did a hell of a lot of long-distance weekend driving, taking my brothers on day trips surfing in Cornwall or getting me to Solihull, Stoke or Crystal Palace for competitions. They cheered us on, but let us get on with our hobbies ourselves. We rarely had our picture taken on our own; my parents liked to take photos of all three of us together. They didn’t like to single one out. When we were together it was family time and we didn’t talk much about each other’s individual pursuits. They didn’t make a fuss about any of our personal successes because they were mindful of the other two and thought it’s not a mark of a person how well they pass an exam or do in a sports event.
Mum thinks it’s comical, looking back on it now, how little they knew about running in those days. If people asked about my training regime, they hadn’t a clue. It wasn’t until another parent offered us her daughter’s old pair of spikes for £5 that I had my first pair. Up until then I ran on the track in my Green Flash plimsolls. ‘Poor child! We were terribly ignorant,’ Mum says, but it was such an innocent period. I ran with so much joy and enthusiasm and I consider myself very lucky with the support I had. My parents didn’t become overly involved or monitor my progress or discuss the ins and outs of my performances. As a result they never put pressure on me. I was quite good enough at doing that to myself. Their lack of knowledge about running meant they couldn’t be pushy parents if they tried. And we did see some! Mum and I once witnessed a father shouting angrily at his daughter, saying he wouldn’t give her a lift home – all because she hadn’t beaten me. That was how this particular parent often behaved. His face would turn bright red; he looked like he was about to explode. He was a good example of how not to parent a young athlete. Another time, I was stretchered off after collapsing on the track, and Mum ran down anxiously asking if I was all right. ‘Of course she’s not,’ growled another parent. ‘She should have won the race.’
It’s incredible how pushy some parents are. Mine appreciated seeing how running had quietly given me a passion, but it was my interest, not theirs. They didn’t interfere at all. Mum used to accompany the girls’ cross-country team on the coach. There weren’t shelters at these events so she was known as ‘the bag lady’: Tony asked her to look after all the girls’ bags while we raced to give her a role. Mum and Dad were proud of my progress but they weren’t living out their own fantasies through me; they never asked me to prioritise homework over running, or vice versa. They simply wanted me to do what I enjoyed and didn’t see how hard I was pushing myself. I enjoyed working towards goals. It was as simple as that. I’ve always taken life as it comes and got on with it. I knew I needed to do my ho
mework, so I did it. I knew I needed to run, and to get better at running, so I did the work Tony set for me. But I did feel extremely tired a lot of the time. I gave up piano lessons because it was too much on top of tennis and netball at school as well. Every day, going into training or weekend competitions, I put pressure on myself. But I hid it well.
CHAPTER 3
1988 – Surprise Success
By the age of fourteen I had moved full time to Tony White’s endurance running group. Tony has been an amazing supporter throughout my career – and he still is, even though he is long retired and lost his sight more than twenty years ago. He is an incredible person, a truly selfless man, as shown by all the hours he gave as a coach. When his wife sadly became ill, Tony was her devoted carer even though he himself was blind by then. He still walks several miles a day with his guide dog and he still goes up to the club twice a week with an assistant who is his ‘eyes’. Back in 1987, Tony saw something in me – ‘Little Jo’ as he called me, because there was a taller Jo in the club. He was a hard taskmaster – all coaches are – and what I always needed was someone to rein me in and hold me back, but he was also like a family member. Our bond was immediate even though he likes to tease me about the number of times he would affectionately call me a little madam for defying his race tactics in order to run at the front, or to run at all when he thought I was risking injury. I suppose I always enjoyed the thrill of trying to run fast.
In the winter of my first year under his guidance, we did a lot of cross-county and road races, a ‘means to an end’ to strengthen you up for the summer track season, Tony explained. On Tuesdays I would go out with the older boys on a road run. Tony gave us high-visibility bibs and he and his assistant Les followed, either in his three-wheeled Reliant Robin or in Les’s beige car. They’d suddenly appear at mile markers, jump out of the car and shout times at us. As one of the faster ones, I’d be held back before starting a road run because the idea was that we’d all finish together – which we never actually did – and so I missed Tony or Les calling out my times after the first few miles.
On Thursdays he set us a track session at Clifton Hill in Exeter. I have so many good memories of those evenings under floodlights. Way back then, before the wonderful Exeter Arena was built in 1992, we had no synthetic all-weather Tartan tracks in deepest darkest Devon. Unlike most of my rivals outside of Exeter, I trained on a cinder track, a concrete surface covered with a light dusting of cinders – not the best surface for young kids to be training on, really, as it’s so hard. Running on the tail of a pack of men meant I’d finish with grit and mud splashes on my face and down my front; but running for so long on a cinder track would prove an advantage, too. The first time I ran on a Tartan track it was so much easier, so much lighter, I felt like I was flying. The Clifton Hill sports centre was next to a dry ski slope, and we’d be slogging around the track only to look up and see people nonchalantly skiing down a gentle slope next door. The clubhouse was a jumble of chairs and tables, illuminated by flickering fluorescent strip lights. There were some weights in the corner and a kiosk in which two lovely ladies served crisps, chocolate and tea or coffee in white polystyrene cups. I never saw my pace in the context of other runners, or compared my times; I simply loved to run. At weekends Tony suggested I do a good thirty-minute evening run around my local playing fields on the grass to save my legs. The fields in Feniton were small so I had to keep going past the cricket clubhouse, which I found very embarrassing. The cricket team would be in the bar long after their match was over, and the groundsman would be on his tractor, and I’d feel self-conscious about running round and round by myself.
1988 was a crucial year for me. In the space of a few years I had gone from someone who didn’t know I had a talent for running to being a fully committed member of an athletics club with a race schedule. In those early races, I clearly remember the exhilaration of getting to the front, trying to go faster and faster, carefully gauging my pace according to Tony’s advice. Within weeks I had developed an absolute love of track racing. I adored that feeling of running at the front, being chased down. It was such a thrill, almost animal-like, running scared, excited, trying to keep ahead of the chasing pack, hoping no one would catch me before the line. One day Tony asked me to get my mum or dad to come and see him after training the following Thursday.
‘Why? What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said, without further explanation.
It turned out he had decided to put me in for the Southern Counties Championship at the New River Stadium in Haringey. He told Dad he thought I might ‘cause a bit of a surprise’. So Dad drove me to north London for my first championship Junior Girls 1,500m race. I was pretty silent on the journey, terrified. Tony said there were four very strong girls in the field and he thought I’d get extended. ‘This is not going to be easy, okay?’ he said. I was daunted by the prospect of racing at all. In fact, I was so nervous I vomited before the start.
The gun went. Ignoring Tony’s tactics, I ran to the front and carried on pushing to the finish line. I won with a time that was only half a second outside a record that had been held for twenty years.
To my continuing surprise, I won all my races in the lead-up to the big ones that year: the English Schools Championship and the AAA (Amateur Athletic Association) National Championships. I was nervous for the English Schools, but equally I couldn’t wait. My simple approach of running to the front, enjoying the thrill of the chase, trying to get faster, was all I knew. Although I cared about the end result, it was the excitement of the race itself I was becoming hooked on. The English Schools was staged that year at Yeovil, on the very same track I ended up training on in 2014 when my home track at Exeter was closed for resurfacing. The tradition was for each school athlete to stay with a host family. Though they were lovely, welcoming families, it ramped up the level of nervous discomfort. You’d be a shy teenager doing the championship of your life and staying with people you’d never met before, sitting at dinner making small talk, staying in someone’s spare bedroom. Today the English Schools competitors stay in youth hostels because of child protection laws.
On the day, I was consumed by nerves, but not sick as I’d been before the Southern Counties. I just went to the loo about forty times. It felt like I imagined an Olympics would, but I was probably more nervous than I would be later on for the Olympic Games. This meeting felt so massively important. When I see youngsters competing now, I know what great experiences and memories they are gaining, though I also feel empathy with them because I know all too well the pressure you put on yourself at that age. The pressure can be worse because you haven’t learnt how to cope with it or understand that nerves manifest themselves in different ways. At fourteen or fifteen you feel so grown up, but you have no idea how narrow your perspective is. At a championship I felt very heavily the pressure of performance, of expectation, of not wanting to let down my club, my teammates or Tony. My dad says now that he could tell, driving me to races, how nervous I was and how I tried hard to hide it. In my earliest races I remember the nerves, but also the thrill of trying to be competitive and working to put in the best performance I could. That’s a sense that’s stayed with me through my career.
These memories are balanced with the great times I had as a member of the Exeter Harriers team: travelling on the coach with my friends, cheering each other on in our events, bellowing at the side of the track, stopping at the motorway services to buy sweets on the way home. We were all competing to get valuable points for the team. We often had to do a random event for points – you’d get one point even if you came last. These points would be crucial to boost our club’s position in the league. I’d often find myself doing hurdles or long jump. We’d have a laugh as there was no pressure. The fun camaraderie of being part of a team was definitely a factor that kept me interested in athletics for so long.
Before the English Schools 1,500m final, we had to sit in the ‘call room’ before our race, following the ro
utine of a senior meeting, with the atmosphere growing increasingly tense. The call room is where the stewards check your bib numbers and make sure everyone is dressed according to the regulations. It’s a strange atmosphere because you sit surrounded by all your track rivals. Some people sit quietly while others move around and stretch nervously. I remember the relief of finally lining up to start. It was a damp and windy day, but that hadn’t deterred all my family from coming to support me or the crowd from cheering every race vociferously. I still have a video of the race and those few minutes of film capture my entire 1988 season: me in my Devon Schools vest and distinctly 1980s running knickers, Tony with his stopwatch positioned at the 200m point – his preferred perch – so he could see directly across the field to time me by the lap as well. The gun went off and I moved to the front, and enjoyed the buzz of trying to run faster and faster with each lap. I could hear my club mates urging me on. Tony had warned me that Heidi Hosking from Cornwall was my biggest threat and she hung on my coat-tails. We left the rest of the field behind over three laps. From his trackside position, I heard Tony call, ‘Jo, you’ve got to go . . .’ and I duly sprinted down the back straight – ‘like a scalded cat’, as he describes it – with Heidi now 10 metres behind. I crossed the line; I’d done it. The official result read: Joanne Davis, 4:27.9. Not only had I won, I’d set a new British Under-15 record.
