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

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

Book: Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold Read Online Free PDF
Author: Jessica Ennis
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Sports
that people could be coerced into acting in appalling ways due to an unwavering belief in obedience. I found this fascinating, the idea that people could act against their natures due to external pressures, and I became interested in people’s perceptions of psychological disorders. It is so easy to say to people ‘snap out of it’, without paying attention to the hardwiring of the brain and the biological side of things.
    I did my dissertation on self-regulation. Broadly speaking, it is the idea that there is an area of the brain that self-regulates, but if, for example, you were on a diet, you would only have a certain amount of strength and willpower. The area becomes fatigued but you can train it. My tutor specialized in self-regulation in cricketers and it is an important area in sport, where repetition and visualization play important roles in success.
    The psychology of sports is interesting and there are lots of issues that affect people. It is an elitist, cut-throat world and it is, inevitably, results-driven. That can lead to lots of pressure and even desperate measures. In athletics, eating disorders are not uncommon. I occasionally see people who I can tell are suffering, and I have heard lots of stories about long-distance runners suffering from bulimia and anorexia.
    It is hard because in athletics there is a lot of pressure to look a certain way. That is why people need to be careful about the language they use. I was lucky in the sense that I have never had problems with my weight. I have always had a sweet tooth and big appetite, but my mum was skinny and so it is more down to genetics with me. However, the flip side of that is that you need to be quite muscly to be a heptathlete. When I started doing sessions in the gym I just did not want to be good at it. I would not push myself because I felt big muscles were unattractive and none of my friends at school had them. Many girls just do not want to stand out in their teenage years and, apart from when it came to athletics, I was the same.
    Chell grew frustrated with this attitude, because he could see that I was not pushing myself.
    ‘I don’t want to lift this,’ I would tell him.
    ‘You’ve got to if you want to get better.’
    ‘I don’t know if I do then.’
    As time wore on I realized Chell was right and that, if I wanted to be a successful, then I needed to do the gym sessions properly. My perspective changed. If I could be guaranteed to win an Olympic gold medal and had to have big muscles to do it, then of course I would, but as a teenage girl I was more self-conscious. I would not wear certain things and, to some extent, I am the same now and will usually cover my arms. I look at myself in the mirror and think I am a bit butch, but you get to a point where you finally understand that looks do not matter so much.
    I was not a normal student and did not lead a normal student life. In my second year I competed in Cudworth and Turkey, Grimsby and Lithuania. The hurdles and the high jump were my best events, but I liked the variety of the heptathlon with its seven disciplines and numerous ways to foul up. In 2004 the press had damned us as the worst ever British team to go to the World Junior Championships. The medal count was terrible and we were really slated. That was my first taste of a negative media and it was quite hard, but in July 2005, aged nineteen, I went to Kaunas, the second biggest city in Lithuania, for the European Juniors.
    Finally, it all came together. Everything went well for once and the work we had done on the second day paid off. I scored 5891 points to take the gold medal. The rain was cold and hard, but as I got the medal and heard the National Anthem piped through the stadium, flecked by a few hardy fans, I felt close to complete. I remembered the times I had told my dad that all I ever wanted to do was stand on the top of the podium. It was an intensely emotional experience, because it felt like it had taken so long to
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