This morning I spoke about how I wasn’t brilliant as a kid. I was one of those kids at school who loved sport and was on all of the teams going but I never really stood out as a star player. There were girls in my year and even the year below me who were much more talented than me and beat me regularly but they didn’t have the same passion for it as what I did.
After winning that first cross country race I went on to win the Durham County School 3,000m later that year but then I had to wait another 5 years before I won my next race – Heaton Harriers Memorial 5 mile. Throughout this time I had a lot of people telling me that if I applied myself and trained properly that I could become one of the best runners in the North East. I didn’t really believe them and was happy to just keep plodding along doing what I was doing. That was until the next year when I won the British Universities track 10,000m Championships.
After this I started to believe what people had been telling me all the years. This coincided with me finishing my undergrad degree so now was the perfect time for me to up my training and see how good I could be. Within a short space of time my times started to come down in big chunks. I received my first North East call up and started to win a few local races.
What made me change? I had plans of making my marathon debut in 2005 with the aim of having a crack at the Commonwealth Games time for the year after (2h40m). I felt I didn’t have enough knowledge to be able to guide myself to this so I asked Lindsay for his help.
I remember it clearly. We were at Sarah Wilkinson’s birthday party on the night of the Northern Cross Country where I had finished 11th. I chatted to Lindsay about my plans and asked him if he would be happy to guide me. He spent some time thinking about it and came back to me with an offer. He thought that I was best off to continue focussing on the shorter distances, 5k, 10k, half marathon, and get my times down in those before moving up to the marathon. After discussing this with him at length, (we really know how to enjoy a party!) I agreed and a lengthy and successful partnership began.
Under Lindsay’s guidance I achieved a lot, I got my 5K and 10k PBs down to 16.10 and 33.38 and won quite a few, local and national accolades before finally receiving my 1st England vest in 2008 and my first GB vest in 2009.
At this stage I realised that I wasn’t getting any younger and decided that it was now time to make the move to the marathon. I chatted this through with Lindsay and he agreed. However when it came to discussing the training for the marathon we came to quite a big stumbling block.
I am very grateful and will always credit Lindsay for the work he did with me, without his help I probably wouldn’t have got to that first GB vest and over those years of his guidance I learnt a lot and built a good firm base for my marathon pursuits.
Moving on from this point I started to plan my first attempt at the marathon. I spent many an hour trawling through the internet reading up on 12 week plans ‘V’ 14 week plans and ideal taper periods etc. Through all of this I was chatting a lot to Liz McColgan and passing my ideas through her for feedback. We were pretty much on the same wavelength when it came to training philosophies and after about 2 months of doing this I eventually asked her if she would consider coaching me.
Anyway the rest as they say is history. It hasn’t been all plain sailing and pretty, we’ve had our ups and downs both as a coach athlete relationship and in terms of performance, but in large it has been a successful partnership. Reaching the World Championships last year is something which I never thought I’d actually ever do, but I did. Unfortunately this year hasn’t been brilliant but I have learnt a lot about myself through my failings and I will use these lessons to hopefully make me a stronger and faster athlete.