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Yes, I had a disaster — a big one. Yes, I was devastated for a while and the scars will probably always remain there somewhere, but writing this book has made me think about what I have already achieved in my career, what I have to be grateful for in my life and what is still there for me to achieve.
I had intended Athens to be a happy place to end my story. Life may not always work out the way we’d like, but I did not need Athens to deliver that message. However, one deep disappointment is no reason to change long-term plans nor to give up on my dreams. What happened at the Olympics makes me all the more determined to keep working — it inspires me to try even harder. This doesn’t mean the time immediately after Athens wasn’t difficult. I didn’t fully understand the biggest failure of my career. There were plenty of reasons, but I still couldn’t identify what made me feel so bad and so weak.
However, it never once crossed my mind that my career might be over or even that I was no longer the athlete I once was. I didn’t believe the marathon had beaten and broken me. Yet I had to face all of this and more thanks to the media’s and public’s reaction. Facing up to what happened forced me to be hard on myself; to question myself without fear of the answers. The process has been good for me.
I know I’m not a quitter. In Athens I had to fight against very challenging circumstances; I made some mistakes, didn’t handle some things well and paid the price. I’ll learn from the experience and come back tougher. I still have so much to achieve and have not become a lesser athlete.
I’ve so much left to do. Next year’s World Championships are a definite goal and I still want that world track title. In the longer term, the Olympic gold remains a goal. Yet, as well as the medals and titles, I also simply want to compete in different races and different places. It is what I enjoy doing: getting out there and racing. Winning isn’t everything to me — but running and giving my all is.
Every time I visit the hot sulphur baths in Dorres, near Font-Romeu (where I train) in the Pyrenees, I see, engraved in the rocks, the words: Notre plus grand gloire n’est pas de ne jamais tomber mais de se relever à chaque fois que l’on tombe. ‘Our greatest honour is not that we never fall down but that we pick ourselves up again each time we fall.’
This is so important. We should never be afraid to go after something that we want for fear of failure. We all need the courage to try. We may not get there straight away, sometimes we may never get there, but we must never be afraid to give all that we can to go after our goals and dreams.
Unless you put yourself on the line and give it your best shot, you’ll never know what you could achieve.
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