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This Mum Runs
This Mum Runs
Oct 7, 2024 5:36 AM

Author:Jo Pavey

This Mum Runs

The inspirational story of athlete Jo Pavey, the runner and mum who ran at a record-breaking fifth Olympic Games at Rio 2016.

'Come-back races? I've had more than a few, the night of 10 May 2014 was the ultimate long shot. I was a forty-year-old mother of two who had given birth eight months before. I trained on a treadmill in a cupboard by the back door and I was wearing a running vest older than most of the girls I was competing against. Was I crazy?'

Jo Pavey was forty years old when she won the 10,000m at the European Championships. It was the first gold medal of her career and, astonishingly, it came within months of having her second child.

The media dubbed her ‘Supermum’, but Jo’s story is in many ways the same as every mother juggling the demands of working life with a family – the sleepless nights, the endless nappy changing, the fun, the laughter and the school-run chaos. The only difference is that Jo is a full-time athlete pushing a buggy on her training runs, clocking up miles on the treadmill in a cupboard while her daughter has her lunchtime nap, and hitting the track while her children picnic on the grass.

Heartwarming and uplifting, This Mum Runs follows Jo’s roundabout journey to the top and all the lessons she's learnt along the way. It is the inspiring yet everyday story of a mum that runs and a runner that mums.

Reviews

This is an inspirational book by an inspirational lady... Jo shows that age and being a mum is no barrier to achieve. This is a book for everyone, not just mums that run

—— Stride

Brilliant. Courageous. Moving

—— Washington Post

Nancy Friday - guru to a generation of feminists

—— Daily Mail

A clever, compassionate woman ... Women need people like Friday to write the script for them - Janet Street-Porter

—— Sunday Times

Nancy Friday has never shied away from hot-button topics

—— Salon.com

Nancy Friday must be the most understanding sexologist in the country

—— San Francisco Chronicle

One of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written

—— Guardian on Adults In The Room

Varoufakis has the greatest political virtues of all – courage and honesty

—— The Times

One of my few heroes. As long as people like Varoufakis are around, there still is hope

—— Slavoj Zizek

Superbly written ... he was – and is – right

—— Martin Wolf, Financial Times, on Adults in the Room

An outstanding economist and political analyst

—— Noam Chomsky

Astonishing … a reflection on the nature and meaning of power in our times

—— Open Democracy on Adults In The Room

The Thucydides of our time

—— Jeffrey Sachs

In these secular meditations, Knausgaard scratches away at the ordinary to reach the sublime – finding what’s in the picture, and what’s hidden

—— Rodney Welch , Washington Post

Knausgaard is an acute, sometimes squirmingly honest analyst of domesticity and his relationship to his family.

—— Lisa Schwarzbaum , Newsweek Europe

Very intimate and full of love

—— Belfast Telegraph

I am impressed by his responsiveness, the nuanced intelligence with which he speaks.

—— Kate Kellaway , Guardian

Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word

—— Kirkus

What he makes me see is how the personal is a possession and that this is especially true for everyone involved in the Bataclan tragedy because the personal was – and still is – in danger of being swamped by the public story of international terrorism.

—— Kate Kellaway , Observer

He had deliberately retreated from the world that was talking incessantly about the slaughter… If Antoine refused to give his hate to the men who killed his wife and so many others, he also refuses to give them space in his life and that of his now two-year-old son.

—— Joe O'Shea , Belfast Telegraph Morning

He looked at the words on the screen as the news networks competed to find words to describe the events: massacre, carnage, bloodbath. He wanted to scream, but couldn’t because of Melvil… Initially resistant to spending time with fellow mourners, Antoine discovered that there is a kind of brotherhood, a feeling of recognition, that can provide consolation.

—— Cathy Rentzenbrink , Pool

[A] beautifully written memoir… It’s the hardest book you can pick up this year, but also the most affecting.

—— GQ

It is a personal account of the aftershock following the atrocity. Yet there is no gore, no torture, no scene-setting, no facts putting the Isis-claimed retaliation in context, no second-hand reports of what happened inside the theatre… Instead, it is simple and immediate, and is all about love and loss… This book may also be Leiris’s way of just holding it together. One feels he is writing as the man he was before that November day that changed everything… It is the literary equivalent of smelling her clothes every night before attempting to sleep.

—— Helen Davies , Sunday Times

A book for our times.

—— Mark Lawson , Guardian, Book of the Year

This book is a love song to Hélène, a promise to Melvil and a resolution not to be defeated by chaos and barbarity. It is a stunning mission statement.

—— Claire Looby , Irish Times

This heartbreaking and beautifully written memoir lays bare the terrible chronology of grief, but it is also a testimony to the power of love and hope.

—— Jane Shilling , Daily Mail

It’s an agonising account of those first few days, in which the lives of father and son changed forever. Despite the haste with which it was written, every word is chosen with care and charged with meaning, a raw and honest memoir of grief which can’t fail to move all who read it.

—— Alastair Mabbott , Herald Scotland
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