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

there’s my dad, who just watches me for fun and has no idea of any personal bests. He just wants me to do well.
    After getting the bronze medal in the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in March 2006, I rang my mum straightaway. Then I rang Chell. I could tell that he was excited, but I would come to find that there are different ways of dealing with success. I fly on a massive high, but Chell takes the opposite route. When things go well he actually suffers a bit of a downer. There is also an embarrassed half-hug and handshake afterwards. We are very different people. I will be basking in the moment but he is already looking to the next thing. That is good in some ways, but it’s also sad and you can’t move too quickly.
    I had gone to the European Championships in Gothenburg in early August 2006 and put in another good performance. More personal bests in the shot put and 200 metres put me in a great position, but the competition was fierce and even an improved score of 6287 points was good enough for only eighth. Carolina Klüft won again, maintaining a winning streak that would last for twenty-two competitions and stem back four years to 2002. She was peerless, an incredible champion who looked impossible to beat.
    Being up against Klüft and co meant that Gothenburg felt surreal for me, and the following year the World Championships in Osaka, in August 2007, were even more so. In athletics the whole year is based around one major championship – the Europeans, Worlds and, ultimately, the Olympic Games. You might warm up with the indoor season and, while that is serious stuff, it is very much the appetizer for the summer.
    Things were changing for me both professionally and personally. Hannah, my friend who also trained with Chell, had stopped doing athletics and was focused on becoming a dentist. She had decided that was a more viable career path for her. I ended up being the only constant, everybody else dropping out, one by one, as time passed, although new people would join to bolster the numbers. We started training next door at the new English Institute of Sport, EIS for short, and in 2006 I also moved with Andy to a little rented terrace house. He was working as a construction site manager and I liked the fact we had something else to talk about at night. I got my degree, a 2:2, which I was happy enough with given that I had missed so much term time.
    Any thoughts of an alternative career were on hold for me. I was now immersed in the senior British team and eagerly anticipating the World Championships in Osaka, a sprawling industrial city in Japan. Before that, in early March 2007, I went to the European Indoor Championships in Birmingham. Inevitably, Klüft won, with Kelly second in a new British pentathlon record, just 17 points adrift. I was sixth and frustrated. I watched Nicola Sanders, who would become a friend and room-mate on trips, win the 400 metres, and I looked around the National Indoor Arena. ‘Why can’t it be me?’ I said to myself. ‘It’s not fair.’
    My great-grandad was ninety-four and was really ill at the time, too. I left early because I needed to get home to say goodbye to him, but sadly he died before I made it. He was surrounded by family at home and had lived a full and happy life, but it was terribly sad and made worse by the fact I hadn’t been there. Mum was really close to him and was badly affected by his death, but we had lots of good memories. He had a warm, dry sense of humour, as shown by the first time Andy met him. ‘Hi, I’m the Godfather,’ he said.
    It was a difficult time for us all, and Mum in particular, but I was soon back training. I wanted to make up for Birmingham in Osaka in August, but I knew how hard it was going to be. I started brightly and clocked a personal best in the hurdles. The high jump was a solid 1.89 metres. The conditions were stifling, an intimidating heat that meant you were dripping with sweat just walking to the track, but there was no