Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold by Jessica Ennis Page B

felt the lactic build up gradually during the session until the one rep where I crossed that line and it flooded through me. In those circumstances there is nothing you can do. You can’t feel your legs or your arms. A few of the girls in the group threw up. That happened every session. Their bodies had conditioned them to be sick when they felt the lactic. I hate being sick and never got to that point, so I held it in and came apart instead.
    ‘It’s meant to be hard,’ Chell would say to us. ‘This is the worst it can ever get.’
    He reminded me of that in Götzis. ‘You’ve done the work,’ he told me. ‘It will be painful but not as bad as that.’ As it turned out, he was wrong.
    That night we went to the athletes’ parade in the town. Derry Suter, my soft tissue therapist, came with me. There was a barbecue and the heptathletes all had to run down a path between the crowds, hi-fiving all the kids as we went. The next step of the time-honoured programme that never changes took place in the town hall. Each athlete was called up onto the stage. This was my first time in Götzis but I would come to find that the presenter would say the same thing to me year after year.
    ‘I’m small, too,’ she would begin, ‘but
I’ve
got my heels on.’
    I smiled and accepted the rose that they gave to each athlete. It was the ancient side of old-fashioned, but not as bad as the time they used to hold a Miss Heptathlete type of beauty pageant before the competition in Desenzano del Garda in Italy. Quite how they got us all to do that I don’t know, but we would parade around the stage there before the judges voted on who was worthiest of this high honour. I won it once but I do not count it among my greatest achievements.
    The trappings of Götzis disguised how important it was, and on Saturday 31 May we all turned up for the start of competition. There was little chat among the competitors. I am quite friendly with Jessica Zelinka, from Canada, and would talk to Hyleas Fountain, the best American, but there is nobody I would call a close friend. I compartmentalize my life and have friends and rivals, business colleagues and family.
    The competition began, as ever, with the 100 metres hurdles, my favourite event, and I did not feel right from the start. For me it was a rubbish time and the vague niggle I had had beforehand was still there. It is easy to panic as an athlete, viewing every little ache or pain into impending doom, but I said to myself, ‘What’s going on?’ Then it got really bad in the high jump.
    The sense of panic was rising now. At first my fear was that I would not be able to get another jump in and I needed the points. Then it grew into a fear of having to pull out of the event and I did not want to do that because I had finished every heptathlon that I had started. It would be some time before these doubts and fears would merge into the deep, dark realization that the entire Olympic dream was in the balance.
    Neil Black, the UK Athletics physio and future performance director, gave me some treatment at the side of the track.
    ‘It feels like the ankle’s blocked,’ I said. ‘Like it needs cracking or pulling or something.’
    Neil manipulated it and it felt looser. I tried a run and stopped quickly.
    ‘I can’t,’ I said. The panic was now all-engulfing.
    Still, I went to the shot put and set a personal best. That event allows you to get onto your toes and so it was a different part of the foot I was using. But a PB? Clearly, it did not seem to be anything too serious. And then came the final event of that first day, the 200 metres. I clocked 23.59 seconds. That was a poor time, and in the home straight I felt as though I was going backwards. I struggled to push off my right foot at all, and by the end I was second overall, behind Anna Bogdanova, and I could hardly walk.
    I struggled across the infield with Neil to get my stuff.
    ‘Walk as naturally as you can,’ he said.
    ‘Okay,’ I