Rose Harvey believes her dizzying rise from lockdown redundancy to the Olympic Games proves that anything is possible.
The 31-year-old marathon runner has been added to Team GB’s ranks for Paris 2024 and boasts one of the best backstories of any competing British athlete.
Hailing from no sporting background whatsoever and struggling to make the netball B team, Harvey joined Clapham Chasers Running Club to meet people when she moved to London after years of partying hard at university.
Other than the occasional jog into the office, running plummeted down her list of priorities as she poured time and energy into a demanding job as a finance lawyer in the music industry - until she was made redundant in 2020.
“It was difficult but it gave me the most incredible opportunity,” says Harvey. “The job was insane hours, I’d regularly be working until 2am and working weekends.
“I actually loved it at the time but it took that period of stopping to realise I was getting pretty burned out by it. In a way, being made redundant was the best thing that could have happened.
“It was a major shift for me. I’d gone from working all hours to literally having nothing to do, all this time at home, and I realised that work had become my entire life.It pushed me to do something quite radical, I had this awesome opportunity and wanted to do something cool with it.”
Harvey reinforces the fact that she was a good club runner before lockdown, running her first marathon in 2:55 in 2017.
But, with nothing else to do, she threw herself into full-time training for a Half Ironman and was taken on by coach Phil Kissi, who spotted her running in Battersea Park. She then sliced an incredible 30 minutes off her personal best at the Cheshire Marathon in 2021.
“It became a challenge to see how far I could push it,” said Harvey. “I saw progress very quickly and I was totally hooked. I loved seeing what more I could do and built on it week-by-week, month-by-month. That’s still a big part of it for me - I just want to see how fast I can run.”
The answer is very fast. Harvey clocked 2:23.21 at last year’s Chicago Marathon to land the Olympic qualifying standard and go fifth on the British all-time list.
She has now punched a ticket for Paris and is a professional athlete, sponsored by PUMA, although her success is yet to truly dawn on her career-orientated family.
“I have no sporting genes and none of my family are particularly interested in sport, either,” said Harvey. “I was a corporate lawyer and it’s a bit of a generational thing, that’s seen as a very good career.
“I’d worked hard to get there and ended up in a big city job that was very stable and very predictable. Making the switch to being a pro runner has required a lot of explanation, let’s put it that way!
“They still ask me, ‘when are you going back to being a lawyer?’ My parents’ generation, you stay in one, sensible job and I was channelled into having a good career at a young age and not going rogue. They know what the Olympics are, though!"
Harvey will take to the Olympic stage on August 11, with the women’s marathon taking place on the final day of the Games. The hilly course is a tribute to women as it is a reference to a key episode of the French Revolution: the women’s march on Versailles.
The ‘Marathon Pour Tous’ will bring the public closer to the Olympics than ever before with a mass participation night marathon set to take place on the same course.
Harvey hopes her own remarkable story can inspire recreational runners to chase their own dreams.
“I find it weird to think of myself as inspiring people,” said Harvey. “I was running three-hour marathons and I hope that they can look at me and think that they can also run a lot quicker and break through some time barriers. That would be awesome.
“A lot of top athletes have been in the system from such a young age and that in itself is very inspirational for different reasons. But other people might see that and think they can’t do it unless they’ve been in the system since they were 10. It’s good to show both sides of it.”
Sportsbeat 2024