Running for her fifth Olympics

There is almost nothing in Jo Pavey’s house that suggests she is a record-breaking athlete or four-time Olympian. Not one picture shows her winning bronze at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow two years ago or gold at the European Championships last month.

There are no framed medals, displayed tracksuits or mantlepiece trophies — her Sports Personality of the Year gong is filed away in a spare room. Almost nothing, that is, except for a tiny boot-room-cum-cupboard by the front door where a 600lb pro treadmill is wedged in between piles of trainers and coat hooks straining under waterproofs and children’s jackets.

It’s an unusual place for an elite long-distance runner to train. Even stranger
given she lives in bucolic Devon, surrounded by rolling fields and miles of forest tracks. “We bought the treadmill when I was pregnant the first time,” explains Jo, who has two children — Jacob and Emily — with her husband, manager, physio, coach and “best friend” Gavin. “We wanted to put it in an outdoor shed but you can hear the baby monitor from here. As a mother, you panic if you are not with them when you’re breastfeeding. Emily, in particular, wouldn’t take a bottle for five months. It gave me extra flexibility not to worry that she wasn’t having a feed. I was in the house so I could stop at any point.”

Juggling all the way

Forty-two-year-old Jo still pounds the treadmill regularly to cover the 100 miles a week and two runs a day necessary to keep her in peak competitive physical condition while juggling a chaotic family schedule of school runs, play dates and potty training. Most will remember her as the long-limbed, high-socked athlete who breezed through the Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London 2012 Games, skirting the podium, finishing fifth (repeatedly), seventh and 12th.

Then, in 2014, after a long career blighted by injury, she finally hit the big time, taking a Commonwealth bronze and European gold in the 5,000m and 10,000m respectively at the age of 40 — making her the oldest female European champion in history — and only 10 months after giving birth to Emily. Overnight, Jo was christened ‘Supermum’ by the media and became a poster girl for defying the ageing process (and doctors) and having it all. Jo credits her reversal of fortune, paradoxically, on becoming a mother and all the  hormonal upheaval that came with it.

Flexibility is her mantra. “Making decisions about juggling training around the needs of the kids and having fun with them has actually made me make better decisions regarding my running. When I was younger, I would get daunted by track sessions and spend the whole day thinking about hitting targets. Psychologically, it has been a massive boost that I have that balance and I don’t feel too tense or stressed,” she says. “As soon as I was pregnant I knew I wanted to stay at home and have that stability for the children. I thought, I’m a mum now and running will just be what it will be.”
It’s a tactic that is paying dividends. Recently, Jo received news that she will
enter the history books as the first British track athlete to compete in five Olympic Games, having been selected for Team GB in Rio. She will also become Britain’s oldest ever Olympic track athlete. Understandably, she is giddy at the prospect.

Jo is speaking from the sofa of her home near Exeter as Emily bowls in and out, grabbing her mother’s arms and crawling across her lap. We’ve met to discuss her new autobiography, This Mum Runs, which chronicles her career from enthusiastic junior to track-tested champion and all the pregnancies and hurdles thrown in along the way. Dressed in a patterned shirt, jeans and adidas tempo boost trainers, she is at times a nervous interviewee but is chatty, with strong blue eyes.

Scheduling hours of training alongside a young family has been no small task. In the early days, Jo would “get miles in her legs” on the boot-room treadmill while Emily was napping, or after 10 pm when the children were asleep and she’d finished discussing training strategy with Gavin over dinner.

Jo was raised in Feniton, East Devon, daughter to Bob, an environmental health officer, and Linda, a primary schoolteacher. Her childhood was a happy blur of roller-skating and skateboarding with her two younger brothers until she “fell in love” with running at school. She joined the local athletics club, and, with the help of her parents who would follow her in a car to illuminate dark morning and early evening road runs around school hours, soon began setting records over 1,500m and 800m. Years of injuries, including arthritis in her big toe, disastrous knee surgery and a hyperglycaemia problem, threw her into the competitive wilderness but she fought back, often ignoring doctor’s advice.

Her 20s and 30s saw her race in World and European Championships, four Olympic Games, pick up a Commonwealth silver, try marathons, tour the world, meet the Queen and spend winters in South African training camps. Since striking gold in 2014, her form is rarely discussed without mention of her age — understandable perhaps, given that she will turn 43 soon after returning from Rio. “I feel like I want to prove that I’m not too old. I don’t feel like I’m too old — although, I don’t want to use the word ‘prove’…If you are 25 and start running badly people think you’re having a bad year, but once you get into your mid-40s people presume you found it hard because of your age.”

Earlier this year, a chest infection thwarted her hopes of automatic qualification at the national 10,000m trials, although many assumed it was advancing age that was keeping her down. “I found that frustrating because I knew I just needed to get my body right. In theory, it should be harder to run in your 40s, when you look at all the scientific evidence, but I don’t get distracted by that. I still have more goals to achieve.”