Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold Read Online Free

this if it’s going to be this serious. It’s not the same thing I signed up to a year ago.’
    It was scarcely the most glamorous of hobbies either. We went to Grimsby once for a race, sharing a car and braving monsoon-like conditions to compete in a decrepit stadium. The rain was relentless and I stood there in my oversized, bright yellow City of Sheffield T-shirt, the wind billowing against it and exaggerating its bagginess. It was grim, and Mum shivered in the shadows, no doubt shaking her head internally and wondering what on earth we were doing. But there was something inside me. I was fixated on the other girls, obsessing at how big and good they were, looking down at myself running, spidery limbs going everywhere, confidence low, but I emerged from it all wanting to do it again.
    I still had a social life at that time, but juggling the two would become increasingly hard as I got better and the demands grew tougher. At first I was just one of the girls, meeting up in Sheffield city centre outside HMV and going for a McDonald’s, but Saturdays slowly became dominated by athletics.
    In July 1999, when I was thirteen, I went to Bury St Edmunds for the English Schools Championships. That was a huge deal. For me, at that stage, it was like the Olympics. It entailed a six-hour coach ride with the whole South Yorkshire team and two days away from home. I was crippled with nerves on the way and then got heatstroke. I felt a bit like a fish out of water, frying in the sun and out of my comfort zone. I came tenth in the high jump with a mighty leap of 1.55 metres. Soon after, Toni, whom everyone called Chell, put me in for the English Schools pentathlon held at The Embankment athletics track in Peterborough. It was another unspectacular performance. I finished fifteenth and the record does not make pretty reading. My shot put was 6.75 metres, my long jump a mere 4.38 metres and I rounded things off with a pedestrian 800 metres completed in an agonizingly drawn-out 2 minutes 54 seconds. Part of you thinks that everything will always go right and that you will win everything. It is that resilient optimism that is more evident as a child. But you live in the moment too, and so when the moment is bad, your emotions are rawer.
    Things did improve at the English Schools competitions over the next few years. The following summer, in 2000, I won the junior girls’ high-jump title with 1.70 metres. The next year I was second in the intermediate girls to Emma Perkins with a jump of 1.71. Another year on, in 2002, and I was first and Emma Perkins was second and both of us jumped 1.80 metres. Chell usually entered me for the combined events too – first the pentathlon and then the heptathlon. In 2001, I had improved to second place, finishing behind Phyllis Agbo. My shot put was up to 8.59 metres and my 800 metres was down to 2 minutes 29 seconds. Phyllis was better than me, though, and the one most people would have tipped to go on. I was second to her again in 2002, this time in the heptathlon, and our roles seemed to have been set.
    When I was thirteen I suffered my first major injury, although it wasn’t on the track. A friend was hosting a fancy dress party and a group of us were getting ready at my house. My parents were out and there was plenty of banter and frivolity. I had decided to go dressed as Pippi Longstocking, the character from the children’s books who is renowned for superhuman strength and her appealing way of mocking condescending adults. I heard some boys coming past and so, as a prank, I decided to lock a couple of girls outside so that they would be embarrassed. The joke backfired when, after the routine screams, one of them, Rosie Manning, shoved the plate glass of the door. It shattered everywhere and the shards dug into me, slashing my arm. Rosie’s wrists were a mess and, amid the blood and tears and shrieks, I remember thinking with trepidation about how much trouble I was going to be in.
    A neighbour