This Mum Runs

by Jo Pavey

  CHAPTER 11

  Controversy in Canada

  Up to 2000, I had a reputation for being one of the most injury-prone athletes you could ever meet, but the Sydney Games proved a watershed. Over the next eight years, I would be considered one of the most consistent. From 2000 to 2008 I attended all of the major outdoor championships – the Commonwealth Games, European Championships, World Championships and Olympic Games – and reached the final at each.

  Before Sydney I had only been running about 35 to 40 miles a week but over the winter of 2000 and spring of 2001 I was slowly and steadily able to build up my mileage and the intensity of my training sessions. Of course, there were setbacks. The truth was, I had spent the whole of 2000 injured or in pain to some degree. First my knee, and then a hip issue. But I had never seen injury as a reason to stop. Every time I did a run at the camp on the Gold Coast, I was in pain and felt my progress was being limited. After the Olympics, the pain in my hip hadn’t eased so I went to see Gerard Hartmann, who ran a sports injury clinic in Limerick and treated athletes like Kelly, Paula Radcliffe, the Kenyans, Marian Sutton, Elaine Fitzgerald and many others who had all sought his help. It was quite an experience; Gerard believes in getting really deep into the tissue to sort out the problem. I’d hear squeals from his treatment room above the soothing background music of ‘Morning Has Broken’. But it was a very good programme. He set me specific exercises to do twice a day, for between 60 and 90 minutes, as well as treatment to correct and strengthen my body mechanics, and I was able to resume training.

  In January 2001, we flew out to Johannesburg to reap the benefit of training in a warm climate. Stepping off the plane, I recall feeling pleasantly shocked by the South African heat. I love running in the heat and I feel like it really boosts my fitness. Many runners woke up early to avoid the hottest part of the day. When I stayed in accommodation with other athletes they often though it was funny that I was heading out so late in the morning. This was my first experience on the continent, but the university city of Potchefstroom was where a lot of my teammates based themselves in the winter, such as Kelly Holmes, Helen Clitheroe, Mo Farah, Anthony Whiteman, Andy Graffin, Chris Thompson and Sam Haughian. Situated on the banks of a river about 75 miles south-west of Johannesburg, Potchefstroom offered a great environment conducive for warm-weather training and an immaculate grass athletics track, as well as the opportunity to run from your front door and enjoy the camaraderie of a dedicated athletics community. We often met up for coffee at the Die Akker café, which served great cream teas – complete with freshly baked scones, clotted cream, jam and a pile of biltong. The dried, cured meat is a national tradition, but I never warmed to it as an appropriate accompaniment to a cream tea. Gav used to scoff mine.

  I was there to focus on my running, although I also wanted to learn more about the country. We made a point of visiting Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, which I found humbling, as well as visiting game parks and Simon’s Town where we swam with penguins. South Africa is a land of paradoxes, which are difficult to reconcile, but the beauty of the landscape gets under your skin. At just over 4,000 feet above sea level, the city of Potchefstroom and its surroundings didn’t have particularly high altitude, but it was great for building up my mileage. With potentially loads of different places to run with ideal surfaces underfoot, it made a perfect training base, especially as I was in year one of our five-year plan to build up my weekly total to 100 miles by 2005. I did most of my miles along the railway trail, a dirt road that went along the side of the track all the way to Johannesburg. It was roasting hot with no shade but the surface was perfect for running and I liked it as an ‘out and back’ route. Sunburn was a hazard; it was easy to get burnt as I ran facing the sun all the way out then had the sun on my back all the way home. I have many memories of sun cream stinging my eyes. Very, very long and slow trains would often pass with the drivers waving at me and tooting their horns. On one occasion a man heard me approaching from behind and pulled a knife. He immediately apologised and explained he thought I was going to attack him.

  With diligent care of my knee and hip, I had started to get a decent block of training in, but just before returning to the UK, I was gutted to sustain a shin injury. I returned to Gerard Hartmann’s clinic to get it sorted. I missed the start of the 2001 season, but had to start racing in July if I had any chance of making the championships. I raced a 3,000m in Lausanne in July. I finished seventh in 8:58.20 – a disappointing result. Eleven days later, I ran in the AAA British Championships in Birmingham and won the 5,000m, which meant I had earnt selection for the World Championships in Edmonton, Canada, the following month.

  Gav was now acting as my coach. Chris Boxer had moved to Scotland so throughout 2001 we were trying to decide the best way forward. Gav wasn’t too sure whether to take over the coaching role at first. We had been pleased with the way things had worked out while we were backpacking in the winter of 1996/7. Then, it was just us on our own, setting the training together. Continuity in approach was our priority. We were concerned that someone else may not understand how extremely prone to injury I was and allow the flexibility I needed with my training. We decided to go ahead with Gav becoming my coach. Former athlete and commentator Tim Hutchings kindly gave us some initial advice and Gav knew he could also get on the blower to Alan Storey, Head of Endurance for UK Athletics, and use him as a sounding board. ‘That’s bollocks, Gavin!’ Alan would say, or ‘That’s great, I love that!’

  The World Championships in Edmonton was a difficult experience for many reasons. I had worked hard to get over my injury problems, and trained as hard as I could around them, but my fitness wasn’t at the level it should have been. We arrived in Canada quite a few days before the competition to prepare a plan, which proved just as well because as soon as we landed I developed a strange kidney infection. My legs swelled up, my quads felt like they were splitting; I felt dizzy and I couldn’t see clearly. However much fluid I drank, my urine remained dark. It was very mysterious. On the recommendation of Gerard Hartmann, I went to the supermarket and bought litres of pure, unsweetened cranberry juice. Luckily Canada is the second largest cranberry producer in the world and I drank as much as I could get down me. Eventually my body started functioning properly again. I was rooming with Kelly Holmes again, and when I arrived early and discovered our room faced a busy railway line, I messaged Kelly and warned her it was impossible to sleep with the noise. Being an important member of the GB team, she managed to get us moved before she’d even seen the room. There were two days of torrential rain preceding the championships and on one occasion Kelly persuaded the bus driver to detour right up to the gym door so she could dash in without ruining her hair!

  Beyond my little bubble of trying to get myself fit to race, a media storm was brewing. Sadly, doping in athletics became a prime topic of conversation in 2015 but, back in 2001, the championships in Edmonton opened my eyes to this awful side to the sport. Obviously I’d heard of scandals like East Germany’s athletics programme and Ben Johnson, but now the focus of world attention at this championship involved an athlete in my race: Olga Yegorova of Russia who had tested positive for the blood booster erythropoietin (EPO) at the Paris Golden League earlier that summer. EPO – a hormone that is produced naturally by the kidneys, but can be produced synthetically – prompts the production of red blood cells. When a cheat injects EPO, more red blood cells are produced and the result is that they can run faster and will tire at a later point than they would naturally because they have more oxygen being delivered to their muscles.

  The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) reinstated Yegorova and allowed her to run in Edmonton because of a technicality. The French laboratory tested her urine, but there was no accompanying blood test. This did not mean that EPO was not detected in the urine sample but only that proper testing protocol had not been followed by the authorities. I felt extremely angry about the situation and let down by the inadequacies of d
rug testing in my sport.

  In 2001 I wasn’t in prime shape or at the stage in my career to challenge for the medals, but I still found it upsetting. In later years I felt the impact of the inadequacies in drug testing even more personally – because I was getting close to the medals and I was kept off the podium as a result of cheats.

  But back to Edmonton . . . It was a disheartening experience. I was appalled to be on the start line of the final with an athlete who’d had EPO detected in her system. I felt she had no right to be there. My heart went out to my good friend Kathy Butler who just missed the cut for the final. The fastest of the non-qualifiers, she’d been deprived of a place in a World Championships final. It wasn’t just fellow athletes in Edmonton who were horrified, sports fans following athletics were dismayed too. The atmosphere in the stadium reflected our feelings and frustrations as the crowd booed Yegorova. It was weird to be led out onto the track for a huge event to such a negative reception, and yet the boos were directed at one athlete only. As we raced the crowds continued to boo her and they were still booing long after the race too. It was a media circus with an intense spotlight on us for all the wrong reasons. In 2008, the cheating finally caught up with Yegorova and she was banned, along with six other female Russian athletes. This was after shockingly tampering with the samples, as discovered when the DNA didn’t match. We now know that the incident in 2001 was an early sign and the tip of a very big iceberg, beneath which lay a huge problem in Russia that would go unexposed until 2015. This is also indicative of the failings of anti-doping authorities to detect doping in athletics over a lengthy period of time.

  The Edmonton final was a tough race on so many levels. I was in Canada knowing my preparation for the event was far from ideal. I finished very disappointingly down in eleventh place. Considering my injury and illness problems, it was to be expected realistically. I often hope I can still pull something out of the bag on the day, but you do need both fitness and determination. I had given it my all in the race. I came away with that in mind, but with some dismay that all was not rosy in my sport. But I would just have to crack on with my training and racing. I would focus on what I could control, and train as hard as I could to try to improve my own performances.

  CHAPTER 12

  Always Fifth

  Another thing that came to light in 2001 for me was a medical condition related to an endocrinology problem. Most runners slow down at the end of races due to muscle fatigue and an accumulation of lactate, but I had to contend with another – very different – issue that caused me to slow down. Over the latter stages of a race I often experienced dizziness: the track would start to sway from side to side and I would feel myself begin to weaken. During the many years of my career where dipsticks were still used for urine testing, I was often told that the sugar level in my urine was at the highest reading and it was suggested that I could be diabetic. I went to the doctor to get this checked out. I also got a kit normally used for diabetics to monitor blood sugar and began to note down the value whenever I could after races and hard sessions. It quickly became apparent that the rise in my blood sugar level wasn’t due to the duration of an effort but rather to the intensity, as it would happen in a 1,500m or 5,000m race and later in half marathons. No matter what distance I was racing, my blood sugar level rose suddenly in the closing stages when I was putting in the final kick. The medical team also did some testing on me whilst I was on a GB training camp in South Africa and were surprised at the high levels of sugar in my blood following training sessions. Annoyingly, the sugar stays in my bloodstream rather than being delivered effectively to my muscles. This contributes to the heaviness in my legs and leaves me feeling quite spaced out, dizzy and lacking in energy. After seeing an endocrinologist, it was confirmed that I wasn’t diabetic but that I had something like a diabetic response to exercise. He said it was extremely unusual and it would be difficult to do anything about it. I was told to keep an eye on it and report it to the team doctors.

  Fortunately, it was not considered a significant long-term health issue but it was deemed to be a potential serious problem during intense exercise. It was also frustrating because it made it much more of a challenge to put in a strong push to finish races. I experimented with my diet, trying to have more pre-race protein and that helped a bit. However, in theory, the main thing I could do would be to get my fitness to a level whereby my body would feel under less stress during the closing stages of a race. Easier said than done! So here I was: a runner with a back that only flexes properly at L3/L4, the toe condition hallux rigidus, a leg that locks when straightened, and now a hyperglycaemia problem too. And that’s just for starters – I was crocked, and I was only in my early thirties.

  The next few years were enormously exasperating for me. I’d had some good performances, lowered some personal bests, but things seemed to go wrong just at the worst time, and I kept missing out. In 2002 I finished fifth in the European Championships, and fifth in the Commonwealth Games. It felt bitterly disappointing – I was always reaching the finals of the major events, but never realising what I felt was my potential. I seemed to be beached in fifth position on the results table.

  I was happy, though, to be working steadily within our long-term plan and with Gav as my full-time official coach. Being my husband, he could hardly be part time! In 2003 we moved from Bristol to Teddington. When my commercial agent Geoff Wightman retired after the Sydney Games, Gav and I had gone to a meeting with Kim McDonald in Teddington prior to joining his agency in late 2000. A former long-distance track athlete himself, he had gone on to manage athletes such as Steve Ovett, Sonia O’Sullivan and Peter Elliott, and was well known for developing the Kenyan runners. Sadly Kim died a year later – I remember getting the call in Bristol and it was a devastating shock. It was so hard to believe. He was only forty-five. When we first met him at his office, we didn’t know that part of London at all. As the meeting came to an end, we asked Kim if there was anywhere we could go for a run. Any bit of grass? Very straightforwardly, he gave us directions to walk back up the high street, turn left and go through a gate. We followed his advice, expecting maybe a couple of football pitches, but found ourselves at the entrance of the vast, 1,110-acre Bushy Park, the second largest of London’s Royal Parks. We could certainly see why the area attracted so many runners. By early 2003, we had moved to Teddington like so many distance athletes – training in Bushy and Richmond Parks, discovering the Thames towpath, going out for coffee in the nice cafés, popping into Tesco on the way home with groceries for supper before the evening session. We also enjoyed going for a curry in the evening at Bilas Tandoori, a favourite amongst athletes. For track sessions, we were close to Tartan tracks in Kingston and in Walton-on-Thames. Later, a Tartan track was laid down at St Mary’s College near Teddington, which made the location even more ideal. St Mary’s was also home to the UK Athletics Endurance Centre, where we had access to physios and physiologists like Andy Jones and Charlie Pedlar. It was a great routine and we were close to Heathrow, which made travel to and from races and South African winter camps so much easier. The management agency provided transport so we never even had to worry about organising that. We focused on training and enjoyed a social life with fellow runners Kathy Butler and her husband Andrew, and Benita Willis. Running in Bushy Park, Gav and I would often come across another athlete and we’d join up for a run if we weren’t doing a specific session, and routinely meet for coffee.

  In 2003, with an eye on running the 5,000m in Athens at the Olympics in the following year, Gav introduced a different approach. I would train for 5,000m – i.e. do high-volume sessions and speed endurance work with lots of 800m and 1,000m reps – but race over 1,500m. Gav felt the races over three and three-quarter laps would allow me to work on my speed whilst gaining valuable tactical experience. It was an interesting approach, and it led to a very pleasing 4:01.79 time in the 1,500m and an 8:37.89 in the 3,000m on the same weekend in early September. This was at the World Athletic Final in Mo
naco, which meant a proper race with no pacemakers. (A pacemaker is given specific instructions for lap times by the race organisers to ensure a fast race.) I much prefer free races to paced races.

  The 1,500m time did make me half wish that I could have a proper go at the 1,500m one year and go sub 4 minutes. After some discussion, however, we felt that the 5,000m was the best option going forward because I didn’t have the pure top-end finishing speed of a top 1,500m runner. It was all about championship running and to this day 14:39 at 5,000m is my best PB when compared to 4:01 at 1,500m and so this was the right decision for me.

  In early summer 2004 I was in good shape. I’d had a great winter’s training in Portugal – three short trips to prepare for the indoor racing season, focusing on the different style of racing and surface – and they’d gone well. I felt the rewards of that hard work when it all came together in a 3,000m race in February in Birmingham in which I broke the British record. In the later laps I had gone to the front and tried to run away from the Ethiopians, Meseret Defar and Tirunesh Dibaba. They tucked in behind and went past me on the final lap. I think they both ran about 8:33 and I was right behind in 8:34. I loved this race. The atmosphere was awesome. Each race that season whetted my appetite for the Olympics in Athens. Having focused on the 1,500m in 2003, I needed a 5,000m qualifying time for the Games.