by Jo Pavey
I declined more surgery. It had already taken me a year to achieve this level of healing and I didn’t want to risk going back to square one. My thoughts were completely fixated on battling back with what I had. I had lost trust in the idea of surgery. I’m not suggesting it’s not sometimes helpful to sportspeople, as it clearly is, but on a personal level, I had experienced so many recommendations over the years which I had politely declined, not wanting to risk more invasive treatment to my body. The most laughable suggestion was from one surgeon who wanted to re-attach my toe bone in an upside-down position in order to get more mechanical range to help an Achilles injury.
The injury plus the surgery cost me another two and a half years, which is a long time to be unable to pursue the career you love – especially when you’re in your twenties and you’ve already missed six consecutive seasons and don’t imagine you’ll still be doing this when you turn forty. The constant cycle of optimism and setbacks, rehab, pain and swelling was frustrating, but I didn’t get depressed. I have always put life into perspective and have the attitude that I should consider myself fortunate, and I do. It sounds a bit of a cliché, I know, but I believe you should be thankful for your lot in life when you hear of people having terrible illnesses or see awful suffering around the world. I know worse things happen than an injury or a disappointing race.
In September 1999, I turned twenty-six, yet I had still only had one proper injury-free season as a senior athlete. I didn’t dwell on it. I did, however, sometimes have to deal with comments that I considered unsupportive from other runners. They were unrelenting in suggesting I should accept that I wouldn’t make it back, and that I should just get on with other things. I was hurt by that attitude. Who wants to give up on their dream when they feel like they’ve only just got started? I still enjoyed going up to Mike’s group. I had some good pals there, like Charlie and Lucy with whom I always had a bit of a gossip. I would tell myself I was a month away from full training. Just four more weeks and I’ll be back. But unfortunately time went on and on. Even though I was doing as much rehabilitation work and cross-training as I could, I was an athlete who had once again gone off the radar. I treasured my GB kit from Athens but I wasn’t a player in the ongoing world of competition. I was back on the outside, wishing I could step in.
I felt isolated at times. Perhaps if I’d been part of an athletics Centre of Excellence, somewhere like Loughborough University where many of Britain’s athletes train, it would have been different. I would have been going into the facility every day, and perhaps training alongside other injured athletes in the gym. It would have been favourable to feel part of the group and reap the benefits of a team atmosphere, a bit like the university and hospital camaraderie that I’d thrived on. Nevertheless, I remained focused on getting back to my dream. I couldn’t run but when walking became less painful, I took to walking for hours. Gav and I used to drive to beautiful locations at the weekends and walk and talk and the time would run away from us. In the week, rather than drive, I chose to walk an hour and ten minutes to the pool, do my aqua-jog session, and then walk the hour and ten minutes back. Mike, who always supported me, used to comment on how fit I looked with this regime that I’d made up for myself – even though I wasn’t running a step.
With the issues I had threatening to end my running career, it was necessary to have flexibility over my time. I needed to be able to cross-train, do rehab and receive the crucial physiotherapy treatment at a clinic which was a long distance away from home in Bristol. I was lucky to be treated by Neil Black, now performance director of British Athletics and a physiotherapist by training. He was based in Crawley, in West Sussex, and it could take me up to seven hours to make the round trip for treatment. That was potentially the whole day taken, so the only way to make that work was to try to miss both morning and evening rush hours. That meant leaving at 4.30 a.m. to get an early appointment with Neil and then driving back to Bristol in time to call in on the gym where I’d been given free off-peak membership, pour strong coffee down my throat, and do whatever training I could. I’d always ensure I got to Crawley early, leaving leeway for traffic hold-ups, as it would be daft to drive all that way and miss the appointment. I’d walk around a twenty-four-hour supermarket if I was stupidly early. It wasn’t a cheery experience. Then I’d have the treatment and leave buoyed up again by Neil. He was an excellent physio, and always had a laugh about the new words or phrases I invented to try to personalise the feedback about my injury. As a physio myself, I knew the lingo, but it’s different when you’re trying to be helpful in conveying exactly what you’re experiencing. ‘Isolationally dysfunctional’ was a phrase I coined for a small part that isn’t working. It was a fun relationship; his encouragement kept me going.
During that period I was leading a pretty lonely existence: driving up and down the motorway by myself, then going to the gym by myself, knowing the odd person to say hello to, but that was about it. And even that could be perilous. A guy who trained daily at the gym asked one day if I fancied a coffee. I assumed he meant a matey coffee comparing injury woes, because I was wearing a wedding ring and my status was perfectly obvious. He had other ideas. We were sitting there in the gym coffee bar in broad daylight when I realised what was on his mind and I had to make my excuses and leave sharpish. And then avoid him on future trips to the gym . . .
People wondered why I was putting myself through all this. That question took on more resonance one rainy morning on the last stretch of the M25 before joining the M23 for Crawley. In my rear-view mirror I could see a white van speeding up to overtake me. Before I knew it, the van had clipped the corner of my car and sent me in a massive spin. It felt like a Waltzer ride at a funfair. I reacted in sheer panic, turning the wheel to try to regain control, but to no avail. I was convinced that another vehicle would smash into me as I was spinning. The fact that it didn’t was miraculous. My car slammed into the central crash barrier, ricocheted back across into the inside lane and ended up pointing towards the central reservation and totally obstructing the lane. A car was coming straight for me. It was only a matter of seconds before I was hit. The young woman at the wheel managed to slow down enough so that the impact didn’t do too much damage to either of our cars, but traffic kept pelting past us. We abandoned our vehicles, which were both now blocking the inside lane, and stood on the bank waiting for help, petrified that someone would smash into our wreckage. No one stopped for ages. It was terrifying. Eventually, to our utter relief, a guy in an old Sierra pulled up like a Samaritan. He said he’d turn my car around and leave it on the hard shoulder facing the right direction, and he moved the other girl’s car too – and then he drove off. We barely had time to thank him. We were both terribly shaken up. When the police arrived to assess the scene, they gave me the go-ahead to continue my journey. It seemed crazy to carry on to my physio appointment but I was almost there. The spinning across the lanes and the unfolding drama was mentally traumatic, but miraculously there hadn’t been much damage. On one level I felt incapable of driving and on another I felt bionic simply to be in one piece.
Gav and I decided that to assist in my return to running it would be helpful to get advice from someone who had been there and done it as an athlete at international level. Chris Boxer kindly agreed to be my mentor, and later became my coach. I knew her by repute as the 1982 1,500m Champion, and I’d met her at the 1997 World Championships in Athens when she was working as the trackside interviewer for the BBC. One day I sat down with Chris and Gav, and discussed starting to run again. I told them my knee felt like it was improving and I thought I could try again. I was playing down my pain, of course, but slowly, during the early spring of 2000, despite the grim prognosis from the specialist, I had sensed my knee was gradually starting to settle down. Slowly and tentatively, I started to get back to running again. At first I ran for just a few minutes around a cricket field, testing it out to see how it would react. For a long while it would always swell a bit after running, and inevi
tably there were flare-ups and setbacks along the way. I had to monitor it to ensure things were generally going in the right direction. With Chris’s help, I rebuilt my training very slowly. Her advice was: ‘Don’t do what you should do, do what you can do.’
Her sensible approach countered my tendency to be ‘over-enthusiastic’. She understood how to balance the need to return to fitness with the importance of not pushing too hard, and risking yet another injury. With Chris’s guidance, we broke my training down to basics and started working out what the priorities were. We knew I had to be extremely careful. In fact, throughout 2000 I never ran for more than thirty-five minutes at a time. I was still experiencing a lot of discomfort in my knee and also in my other hip beyond the thirty-to-thirty-five-minute mark. I also ran a very low weekly mileage, peaking at a maximum of 40 miles per week, which is nothing for a middle-distance athlete with ambitions to make the Olympics, but I couldn’t entertain what might be considered classic training. I had to train how I could, focusing on good interval sessions and tempo runs (or threshold runs, i.e. – running just under the pace at which your body produces more lactate than it can clear). Coming back from a serious injury, any gain you might get from extra miles is likely to be overturned by potential injury risk, so we concentrated on the crucial sessions – and it wasn’t long before we began to see the benefit.
However, it wasn’t until April 2000 that I was even ready to gently introduce interval sessions. I started with 2 x 2 minutes, then the following week 3 x 2 minutes and so on until I reached 6 x 2 minutes. Then I was ready to hit the track. We continued to add a rep a week until my sessions were 5 x 1,000m or 6 x 800m. My tempo runs were fifteen minutes long but fast, perhaps not always threshold in the strict scientific sense, more eyeballs out, doing them as hard as I could handle, often nearly being sick when I finished. I had a huge amount of fitness to regain, but this schedule started to move things in the right direction.
Nevertheless, the fact that it was April of an Olympic year, and I’d only just started introducing some specific training after being out for two and a half years, meant getting an Olympic place was a big ask. I’d always been a 1,500m runner, but to add into the mix, it was decided that I should target an event I’d never done before – the 5,000m. Olympic year may not be everyone’s ideal choice of timing to switch events, and I certainly felt I had unfinished business with the 1,500m, but there was good reason for this strategy. Going for a longer event could allow me to do more of the specific work for it away from the track, and do more of the sessions on grass to reduce the risk of injury. Given the amount of time I’d had out, this could help prevent further injuries. I also felt that, long term, the longer distances might suit me better. I embarked on putting in efforts around the softer surface of a cricket field, and went to the track relatively infrequently. The track sessions, though, were crucial as races approached to make sure I was hitting my target times, even if there were less of them than I’d ideally do. That important track work, minimal as it was, would make or break my Olympic chances.
Throughout my treatment in 1998 and 1999, another problem had emerged that I had to make sure I managed. As well as the hallux rigidus and the knee, I had unusually poor flexion, or forward bend, in my spine. In fact, I discovered I only had ‘normal flexion’ at L3 and L4, vertebrae in the lumbar or lower region of my back. The rest of my backbone was pretty knackered, which is not good news for a distance runner. Physio Neil Black and I used to laugh at how ridiculously far I was from being able to touch my toes. I’m like that to this day – it often makes me feel far from athletic! Sciatica has regularly flared up over the years but trying to get more range in my spine always exacerbated the symptoms. We worked out the best way forward was not to try to fix the problem, but to work on preventing it getting worse.
During 2000, as I was dedicating my time to attempting Olympic qualification, it became impossible to consider the regular long days of driving to Neil’s physiotherapy clinic. I started seeing Zara Ford in nearby Portishead. Neil discussed my problems with her and she took over my treatment. Zara was great and helped keep me going. She was an expert in osteopathy and physio techniques, and also had specialist knowledge in Pilates. She had a Pilates machine with the full trapeze set-up and we had fun with my complete inability to use it. I was useless! I had to face the fact that even though my bio-mechanical problems might affect the way I run, I had to go with what I’ve got. Runners of all levels have bio-mechanical issues of a sort – something they feel that if they could change, it would make them a better athlete – but I think it’s best to get on with making the best of what you are.
I was pleased with my rate of improvement. Firstly I ran a couple of decent 3,000m races. They did feel tough, though, a bit of a shock to the system, especially as Chris had told me to do them in racing flats rather than spikes to protect my legs. These early races served to boost my fitness, but to qualify for the Olympics I needed to run a decent 5,000m. I had to run the qualifying time and, on top of that, I had to finish in the top two in the British trials. I had never run a 5,000m race. The whole situation was rather daunting but I was also excited by the challenge.
My first target was to get the qualifying time. Leaving it to the trials themselves would have been a massive gamble, having never run the event before. I therefore entered the 5,000m at the Norwich Union meeting at Crystal Palace at the beginning of August, fully aware of what I had to do. All my family were aware of how significant a race this was for me.
As we drove to London I thought Gav seemed unusually quiet. I put it down to nerves, and everything we’d put into this day as a couple. We were at a garage en route to the hotel when Gav received a call from his dad. By the end of the conversation Gav had relief and emotion all over his face. It was only then that he told me that his mum Sheila – who’d had a heart attack in June and was due for a triple bypass operation later in the autumn – had that morning been rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. Unbeknownst to me, Gav had received that news early in the morning just as we were packing up to drive to London and he’d kept it to himself because he didn’t want to upset me before the race. I was confused at first about why Gav hadn’t told me – we’ve always shared everything – but he explained, and said she was out of theatre and the procedure had gone well. Sheila had specifically asked Gav’s dad Dave not to tell me until we knew she was going to be fine. She said she wanted me to go to the Olympics no matter what the outcome of her op might be. I burst into tears, not only shocked about what had been happening but also relieved that she was going to be all right, and emotional, too, because the family had secretly and thoughtfully agreed to keep it from me that morning. They thought if I had known of the emergency, I wouldn’t have been able to run with the stress and worry. We had a big hug. The day was always going to be tough mentally, and this added an enormous emotional impact.
I now had even more reason to ensure I ran well. The gun sounded. I settled into my rhythm, the lap times of the Olympic qualifying goal etched in my mind. I set about maintaining my focus, trying not to tense up as I methodically ticked off each lap time. Some of the world’s best athletes were in the race. It was such a high-class field, I had to suppress my schoolgirl instinct of just racing hard, going with that freedom of running whereby I simply ignored the clock. Trying to run with the front-runners at my level of fitness and with no previous experience of the event wouldn’t have been very sensible. I had a job to do: to get my time. Once that was done I would be ‘allowed’ to race. ‘Don’t take any chances,’ Chris had said. ‘Just do what you need to do.’ I finished well down the field, but it was the time that mattered: 15:18.51 – nearly 17 seconds inside the Olympic qualifying time! Chris, Gav and I were thrilled. I was pleased to be able to share the news with our families, particularly Gav’s mum.
I had one tentative foot in the Sydney Olympics. But the task was by no means complete. I now had to finish in the top two in the trial to achieve automatic selection for t
he Games. The AAA National Championships and Olympic trials were held in Birmingham. I was up against Paula Radcliffe, who had been a World Championships silver medallist over 10,000m the previous year, and she was in fantastic form. I knew all I needed to do was finish second. Again Chris said, ‘Don’t take any chances. Race, but race this only to make sure you get that automatic spot. You must not risk that second place.’ I was in ‘job to do’ mode, knowing what needed to be done.
Paula finished first, but when I crossed the line in second place in a time of 15 minutes 21.15 seconds I was overwhelmed. It was the happiest second place of my career. That was it. I’d made it! I was going to an Olympic Games! If I never did anything in running ever again, I’d made the GB Olympic team. My dream had come true. It was an unbelievable feeling. The level of competition in Sydney the following month would unquestionably be tough, but I knew that I would give it my all without compromise. It felt quite emotional to be able to say the words I’d thought might be a silly dream since I was a child: ‘I’m going to run in an Olympic Games!’
Gav and I were so thrilled. One of the first people we phoned was our old coach Tony. He had been there at the start of my career and helped show me that distance running was where my talent lay; now I was going to an Olympics! Tony was obviously delighted, and Gav and I headed to the pub to celebrate with Chris and my family, and later went out for a curry with my brother Matt and his wife Lorna to mark the moment.
