Olympian grit

CNN reports:

Team GB runner Rose Harvey completed the women’s marathon at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games despite having a broken leg, she said on social media.

In an Instagram post, which shows Harvey on crutches in St. Pancras International train station in London, the 31-year-old explained that a few weeks before the August 11 race, she had felt some “tightness in her hip.”

“My incredible team and I put in so much work to make the start line fit and healthy and we were all optimistic that with a bit of race day adrenaline, I would be able to run the race I knew I had in me,” Harvey wrote.

However, after a couple of miles, Harvey “quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen.” She describes the next 24 miles as a “painful battle.”

The British runner eventually finished the race 78th overall with a time of 2:51:03, just over 28 minutes behind gold medalist Sifan Hassan.

She had a broken leg, and she still ran a marathon more than an hour faster than I could manage!

Harvey only seriously took up running during the Covid-19 lockdown after being made redundant from her job as a corporate lawyer in the music industry. She was spotted running in Battersea Park in London in 2020 by coach Phil Kissi and quickly saw rapid improvements.

She had been selected to run for Team GB at the Paris Games after completing the 2023 Chicago Marathon in a time of 2:23:21, just 26 seconds off Hassan’s Olympic record time in Paris.

She only took it up four years ago, and she got to within 26 seconds of the Olympic record. Amazing.