Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (12 page)

If Chell would have cringed at that one, he would have had kittens when I was driven out into the Derbyshire countryside to do some pictures for
Vogue
. The idea for this one was for me to wear a lovely white dress and heels and stand on a rocky outcrop overlooking a valley. It sounded simple enough, but what the pictures did not show was that I was literally on the edge of a sheer drop and it was very windy.

‘I’m not really comfortable with this,’ I said, but I did it anyway, despite the wind that was whipping up and the crew of lighting men and assistants who were gathered around the edge to catch me if I fell. Nobody told Chell, of course, and the pictures were suitably dramatic.

I am like a lot of women in that I love fashion and being pampered, although glamour shoots can sometimes be a bit of a contradiction in terms. When I did a shoot for
Marie Claire
, the very vivacious and absolutely lovely American photographer spent his time saying, ‘Oh my God, darling’, before the shoot culminated in me leaning over a hurdle and a bunch of people chucking bottles of water at me. I loved the pictures but was soaking wet and had to get the train back north to Sheffield with my hair dripping. Another time I did a shoot for
Stylist
magazine. This one involved having red, white and blue powder paint blown in my face through straws. I ended up with powder in my ears and up my nose and got plenty of stares from people who thought my hair was caked in blood as I rushed for another train. The cover would be amazing, though, and so I felt it had been worth it.

I think it’s important to try new things and take advantage of opportunities, but I never took my eye off the prize. I also have limits. I did some sexier shots for
GQ
magazine, wearing some hot-pants and pouting. My mum rang me when she saw them. ‘Young lady, you didn’t tell me about that, did you?’ Andy gets the mickey taken out of him at work for it, but I would never do topless or nude pictures or even be body-painted. That is where I draw the line. I have really enjoyed this side of my life. Having make-up artists and stylists dress me and famed photographers shoot me for ad campaigns or magazines is the thing that many girls dream of, and is a far cry from traipsing around sweaty sports centres in a tracksuit.

Life was certainly changing and I was engaged by now. That happened on Christmas Eve. Normally we go to the local pub, the Robin Hood, on Christmas Eve, but this time we were off to an Italian restaurant. Andy and I had spoken about marriage but I had no inkling that anything was happening when he called me into our front room and asked me to sit down. I thought that was odd and then realized what was happening, but tempered the excitement by thinking he could not possibly have a ring. He spoke a bit about how we had been seeing each other for a long time now and I thought, ‘This is it.’ By the time he got down on one knee I could tell how nervous he was, but I was so happy. We called Mum and Carmel who both screamed their consent down the phone. Dad already knew because Andy had asked to see him the day before and asked his permission. I think Dad was relieved when that was all he wanted. It made for a great Christmas and made up for the time Andy had got a bit worse for wear, danced on the living-room table and fallen headfirst into the Christmas tree, putting a huge dent in the present I had bought for Grandad and lovingly wrapped.

There was never any question of getting married before the Olympics. I could not fully enjoy it beforehand because I had this big weight looming over everything. I thought the dream would be to win the Olympics and then have time to plan the wedding. Chell came around and I expected him to tell me straightaway that the wedding was off until after London, but he gave me a congratulations card and seemed very happy for us.

It was a good start to the year, but things rarely stayed smooth for long. I started the 2011 season at the Northern Athletics Indoor Championships at the EIS in Sheffield. A week later I clocked 8.03 seconds for the 60 metres hurdles and then dropped that time to 7.97 seconds at the Aviva International in Glasgow. It was a light start to the year, the phoney war if you like, as I targeted the European Indoor Championships in Paris in March.

The Olympic schedule was released that February. Chell had had some discussions about organizing the schedule so that I could do the hurdles as well as the heptathlon. I have always liked the hurdles more than any other single event, and sometimes watch the specialists turn up, run their race and go home with a degree of envy. It looks so simple and, when your body is crying out in pain the day after doing seven events, very tempting. However, the schedule only had one day between the end of the heptathlon and the hurdles heats and so I felt it was too little recovery time. It was never really on my radar from that moment.

I went back to the EIS for the European trials. I had planned to do a few events, but only got through the shot put, my worst of the year, and the high jump before I knew something was wrong. UK Athletics issued a press release saying it was just precautionary and we thought it was, but the pain in the Achilles would fester on and refuse to go away. Before long I accepted I would have to pull out of Paris. The UKA doctor thought I had torn my calf and that the blood was dripping down and pooling near the Achilles. The pain was not too bad and I felt I could have gone to France if my life depended on it, but I was looking at the bigger picture.

I could not run or jump. Hurdling was out. I was stressing now because it kept nagging away. I did my rehab, as I’d grown used to under Ali, but there was confusion about what was wrong. I went to London to see an Achilles specialist and he did an ultrasound. He told me that the problem was the plantaris tendon that runs alongside the Achilles. He said that not everyone had it and, basically, we had evolved and it was now redundant. It was like the appendix. He suggested he went in and snipped it.

The talk of operations scared me because I’d never had one. How will I heal? What if it gets infected? What if the doctor’s wrong? I was against it and, luckily, Chell, Derry and Ali felt the same way. It’s easy to accept what doctors say unquestioningly, but we decided to do it our way.

Ali did lots of work on the calf and I did all I was told, but the weeks continued to tick by with little progress. For someone who hates missing even a single session that was hard. Desperate times called for desperate measures and so I tried cryotherapy. That meant I had to go to Champneys Tring health resort and enter an ice chamber where temperatures are kept at minus 135°C to aid blood circulation. After a minute in there I went into a second chamber, which was a steady minus 90°C, for a couple more.

It felt like the indoor season was causing me problems and I always seemed to come away with something. I heard a story about another girl who had the same issue. She had the operation and got back to the top of her game very quickly. I wondered if I should have done the same. In all I had seven weeks out, during which time I flew to Orlando for an Adidas shoot and was so frustrated to watch the likes of Tyson Gay, the top American sprinter, doing his track sessions, while I had a bunch of boring rehab exercises to do in the gym. I was cranky and impatient at not being able to run and, for me, seven weeks seemed a lifetime. Later Chell told me that the girl who’d had the operation had broken down with a ruptured Achilles. I felt very relieved that I had not chosen the same route.

I made my comeback in May 2011, three months after I had last performed. I went to the Great City Games in Manchester, an outdoors event where they erect a track down Deansgate, the main thoroughfare in the city centre, and let you run by the shops and punters. It is novel but a good way of trying to get more people into the sport, although I had no such worthy aims when I turned up. I just wanted to prove to myself that I was going to be able to make it to Götzis in a fortnight, because I desperately needed to do a heptathlon before the World Championships, which were being held in Daegu in South Korea and beginning in August.

It was grey and miserable in Manchester, but I got through. I was happy with my 100 metres hurdles time of 12.88 seconds, my fourth fastest, and less so with my 150 metres, but I was in one piece. ‘She should have got well and truly spanked given the lack of training,’ Chell said to the media.

It was a gamble going to Götzis with barely six weeks’ training done. Because I’d been planning an indoor season, where there is no javelin, and then got injured, I’d had little time to work on that event. I had also become something of a dream freak in the meantime. I had one and looked up the meaning in my book and it seemed really significant. It said if you dream this, then you will never achieve your goal. There was a caveat, though, and it said if it also involved something specific, like a flower with a petal missing, which it did, then you’d work hard and get everything you want. Sometimes I felt as if I was grasping at straws.

Everybody was in Götzis in May. It was the dry-run before Daegu where I would put my world title on the line. I was worried and anxious, but I actually felt in brilliant running shape. Maybe sometimes you need a break and, when you are an athlete, you don’t allow yourself that. I sat in my small hotel room, with a box of Jaffa cakes, box set of
Grey’s Anatomy
and the tube holding my javelins, and counted down.

For once the fears were unfounded and Götzis was brilliant for me. ‘She’ll have a face like a slapped backside,’ Chell said cheerily to the media guys as he came down to greet me after the javelin on day two. I knew I could have thrown better, but 43.83 metres was okay and I was happy. I was not worried about Denise’s British record today. The other girls were struggling and, by the time I edged out Jessica Zelinka in the 800 metres, clocking a personal best of 2 minutes 8.46 seconds, I was struggling to contain my emotions. I had scored 6790 points, my second-best tally, and had beaten the rest by 251 points. I knew that Daegu was likely to be different, but knowing that Dobrynska had only been 45 points behind me the last time we met, I had every reason to be cheerful.

It had been a huge weekend. I knew that, even with minimal training, I could get myself into peak running shape and that might be good enough to carry me through. Suddenly, everything felt like it was back on track.

My journey into the surreal reached a new peak with the news that I had got an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday honours. Deep down I thought things like that did not happen to people like me. I was just Jessica Ennis, the same woman from Yorkshire I had always been, with the same friends, same motivations and same beliefs. But I also know that there was now another Jessica Ennis, the one on the billboards, the TV and, soon, at Buckingham Palace.

There was also a Jessica Ennis in Madame Tussauds. I had been shocked when Suzi told me they wanted to do a waxwork of me. I’d never been, but had obviously heard of the place, so I went down and did a sitting. It was a fascinating if painstaking process. I had to sit for ages while they took photographs of me from every angle, slowly turning me round on a spinning board, and taking hundreds of measurements. I was surprised as I had expected them to take a cast of my face, but they did everything from their own calculations and expert eye. They then cut a lock of hair to get a sample, gauged my teeth colour on a white board and matched my eyes to a chart.

Some time later, when I was down in London doing a photo-shoot at a studio, they said they would bring my head along. It was an unnerving experience, like the film
Seven
with Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head turning up in a box. I felt uneasy when someone at the shoot said: ‘Your head is here.’ Then they came in and lifted the clay face from the cardboard container. I thought this is brilliantly freaky. The next time I saw it was the night before the unveiling. Andy and I arrived late and there were just a couple of people from Madame Tussauds there. They touched up the colouring and added a few freckles. It was dark and quiet and I could feel hundreds of glass eyes on me. We got taken on a personal tour after that, although I gave the Chambers of Horrors a miss and remember Bruce Willis’s eyes seemed to follow me everywhere. I told them to stick me next to David Beckham and was happy to get out.

A
ndy would leave early for work leaving me to wake up slowly. I would take Myla for a walk and then stumble out of the house at about 9 a.m., fuelled by toast or cereal. Chell had not wanted us to get Myla because he thought she would be a distraction. She was, but in a nice way. Yes, I had to take a lot of phone calls from people saying, ‘Your dog is in our garden’, and, yes, I was mortally embarrassed by her behaviour at the obedience classes, a contradiction in terms as it turned out, but she was therapy when I was getting back on my feet. Even if it meant pursuing her down the street in my PJs, or crying as she gnawed her way through the radiator pipes, she was the nicest sort of distraction.

According to Chell’s colour chart, I was green and need a plan. That was why I worked six days a week at seven events for one big championship a year. It’s risky when your season comes down to two days, but I don’t know how footballers can be competitive every week. My week was designed to get me ready for those two days, this time at the World Championships. I left Götzis and carried on working away, building up the unseen gains that I hoped would see me through. They were hellish weeks that went like this.

Another week would start for me with an 800 metres running session in the morning and my hurdles drills. Then I did some circuits and throwing. We looked at videos to analyse what I was doing wrong. There was always something. The shot was something we had studied in detail, going over videos of my action, and seeing how I glide across the circle. Chell would demonstrate, I would laugh and somehow it would come together. Then I’d finish the day with more violent treatment from Derry.

Javelin day. I drove up to Leeds to do my weekly session with Mick. My javelin had come on leaps and bounds. In heptathlon you will always have favourite events, but I knew I could not afford any bad ones. The bad ones had to be average, the standards shifted.