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G: If I said to her, "You did really well, you were great!" she would have thought, "that's not what you really think. Don't patronise me". If I had come out with all that bullshit, she would know I was telling her something I didn't believe. That would have made her feel a lot worse. I don't fill her head with crap and it is not what she expects from me.
My relationship with Gary has always been special, but not always what you would call straightforward: boy meets girl, brief courtship, fall in love, get married. We travelled a very different road. Others may look from the outside and think "weird".
I remember the night we met more clearly than Gary does. It was a Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1992 in a small pub in Loughborough, where I was in my first term at the university. I was with a group of friends after an evening run, but alongside me was this tall, good-looking 1500m runner from Northern Ireland, Gary Lough.
Whatever he said has long vanished but not the memory of his voice and the tingles as he spoke to me. The next day I rang my best friend Liz Talbot. "Have you met anyone?" she asked after we'd been talking for a bit.
"Well, not really . . ."
"What do you mean not really? You have?" "Well, there's one guy that I quite like. He was in the pub tonight. He is good-looking and he's got a really sexy accent."
Liz and I had been closer than sisters since I was 12. In my teens I lacked a lot of the self-confidence that would come with my success in running. I remember asking Liz when we were teenagers: What's wrong with me? Why don't I have a boyfriend. Liz said I intimidated them. "No," I said, "it's because I'm not pretty."
There are two sides to my personality. One is stubborn and intensely competitive; a few setbacks don't stop me doing what I enjoy and striving for what I want and believe I can achieve. If anything they make me even more determined. And I don't like to give up.
That competitive edge was always there. When Gary and I first trained together, one of us would be half a stride ahead of the other.
"Why are you pushing it?" "I'm not."
"Yes you are. Look, you're just ahead of me."
As both of us are stubborn, no one would give an inch and the pace would just get faster and faster. I would like to say we have both matured and are far more sensible now, but that wouldn’t be entirely true.
The other side of me is sensitive, self-conscious, a little vulnerable. Part of that is a yearning to be liked and accepted, which has always been there. The emotional woman is as much a part of me as the determined athlete.
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