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Jessica Ennis-Hill: 'I just want to give it my best shot'

The heptathlete has gone from the toast of the nation to being a sleep-deprived mum - but she’s ready to compete again. She just doesn't know how well she'll do...

Matt Majendie
Friday 17 April 2015 10:11 BST
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Ennis-Hill says the Olympics are a ‘distant memory’
Ennis-Hill says the Olympics are a ‘distant memory’

It is the same Jessica Ennis-Hill, but different.

Inside the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield, where she partly shaped her Olympic triumph, there is the same smile and bubbly personality, the same svelte athlete. The big difference lies at home.

Today marks nine months to the day since her son Reggie was born. Motherhood has understandably changed her, physically as she has endured the inevitable sleepless nights and mentally with regards to a complete overhaul in terms of her priorities.

“Before I had Reggie it was all about me, me, me, competing and making sure I am training and everything is going right for me,” she says. “Now it is not me, Reggie comes before everything else but I am still really competitive, taking a back seat watching everyone else compete. I want be there and be at my best again.”

Ennis-Hill winning gold in London

Where once she would train twice a day most days, a session in the morning and another in the afternoon, now there is a solitary morning session while her parents, Vinnie and Alison, take Reggie, or her son comes to the track.

Then after Reggie is put to bed around 7pm each night, session two begins in a makeshift gym in her garage, Ennis-Hill taking to a new lifting platform enabling her to juggle the parent-athlete double act.

The 29-year-old has been training full-time since November and there are just 22 days until her return to competition over the 100 metres hurdles in Manchester, a first outing since limping her way to fourth inside the Olympic Stadium at the same event at the Anniversary Games in 2013, when she was hampered by an Achilles injury.

Both Achilles have flared up again and pegged her back on her return to training but slowly she is coming through the other side: “It has been frustrating because I’m giving it everything, I’m sorting out Reggie, making sure that there are people around to look after him and I’m down for training. I’m putting a lot of time and energy into this so when you pick up these little niggles that mean you can’t train it is so frustrating.”

It begs the question what sort of athlete can be expected when she does finally return to action after two years out? She says she has no idea. It is the great unknown for the Olympic heptathlon champion and her coach Toni Minichiello.

But she is well aware the expectation will be huge from a wider public accustomed to seeing her excel when the reality is likely to be infinitely different. That’s not to say she will not get back to her best, it’s just she genuinely does not know what to expect.

In some ways, Ennis-Hill says, “I feel like I am at the beginning of my career again, I’m back down here. It’s nice – and it’s not. In London I was there at the top. I have to work back up.

“This year is just about coming back – I want to get back into the swing of competing. It’s quite hard to know because I have never come from this situation before. I don’t feel like I’m a million miles away. I’m just not 100 per cent sure what it’s going to look like when it all comes together.”

The competitor in her knows it will be difficult to not be knocking out personal bests or standing on the top step of the podium. Instead she is on what she likes to call “a different journey”.

Ultimately, she would like that journey to end at the Rio Olympics next year. Her goal at this stage is simply a medal and she has no idea if the defence of her title might be too much to ask with her compatriot Katarina Johnson-Thompson having taken over the multi-eventing mantle with such effect.

It has not been a journey without pitfalls: “I’d be lying if I said there hadn’t been days when I thought: ‘I’m not sure I want to do this because this is really, really hard.’ I did feel like that. I thought: ‘I’ve already become Olympic champion, do I want all the stress and hard work again?’

“I know it’s going to be hard but I have to give it a go. I don’t want to look back and think: ‘Oh, maybe I could have done it.’ At least if I do it and I’m successful, fantastic. If I’m not quite where I want to be then I will still know that I have given it my best shot.”

Regardless of the end result, Ennis-Hill will forever be defined by London 2012, the events of Super Saturday when she won one of Britain’s three Olympic gold medals on the same night along with Mo Farah and Greg Rutherford.

She was a household name before the Games with her picture plastered on billboards nationwide, even more so in the aftermath. People across the country would stop her in the street to wax lyrical about the achievement, a sentiment that has changed.

“People are like ‘congratulations’ and I’m like ‘London, that was ages ago’,” she says, cradling her arms as if holding her son, “and then I’m like ‘oh, Reggie’. Everyone’s interested in him and they want to meet him, see him and find out how he’s doing.”

As for London 2012, it is a “distant memory”, in part because three years, her wedding and a son have followed and also because she feels the need to look to the future and forge new goals.

One wonders if the fire in her belly to compete will be quite the same – she is adamant it will be – having undergone something so life-changing. But there are other athletes who have returned to the top following motherhood, Jo Pavey a case in point last summer with her European title. And Ennis-Hill has sought counsel from skeleton racer Shelley Rudman, who spent much of her career with daughter Ella in tow.

Ennis-Hill’s cause has been helped by Reggie finally beginning to sleep through the night but she says the challenge she faces is nothing to what has happened in the past nine months: “This is the hardest challenge ever. It was really tough in the lead-up to London but this is a whole different ball game and it throws so many different things at you. Just the sleep deprivation and all those things.

“I can’t remember life before kids,” she adds. “You have so much time. I was so busy before the Olympics but I did have loads of time and now I have no time. But I love being a mum, it is amazing, and now he has a real personality and he is doing lots of different things. He is giggling, it is just brilliant.”

Ennis-Hill makes no bones about the fact that this is the happiest she has ever felt, happier even than when she was the toast of the nation at the London Games.

On her return, she is hardly easing herself back into competition with Gotzis, the de facto world championships of multi-eventing. But her theory is she has to face the best in the world at some point.

It will mark the beginning of a rivalry with Johnson-Thompson, one she admits is “added motivation”.

But it is not a rivalry that is about to spill out into animosity like Seb Coe and Steve Ovett three decades previously: “There isn’t that hate at all. She’s a nice girl and I hope she says the same about me. She’s getting the reward she deserves.”

Whether it becomes a rivalry to match that of Coe and Ovett is another matter. The message from Ennis-Hill, for now, is don’t expect fireworks in 2015. That’s not to say they won’t follow.

Jessica Ennis-Hill trains in the adidas Climachill apparel range designed with advanced fabric for maximum cooling, and the adidas Ultra Boost trainers. Both available at adidas.co.uk

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