Rose Harvey “Couldn’t Give Up” Paris Olympic Marathon Despite Injury

Rose Harvey knew it was going to be a harder-than-usual marathon after just two miles. 

Despite a great training block, the Team GB runner started feeling some tightness in her hip in the weeks leading into the Paris Olympic Marathon.

But this was the Olympics. She’d worked hard to get to the start line, and she’d work hard to get to the finish line, because that’s what marathoners do. But “the next 24 miles were a painful battle.”

She only realised afterwards that the intensifying pain was caused by a stress fracture of her femur.

Rose explained on Instagram how ahead of the race her “incredible team and I put in so much work to make the start line fit and healthy and we were all optimistic that with a bit of race day adrenaline, I would be able to run the race I knew I had in me.”

From early on, the hip pain was still there. “The downhills were just agony, and it just got worse and worse,” she said in an interview with the BBC. “I kept telling myself to smile, soak up the energy of the incredible crowds and just put one foot in front of the other.”

She used the mindset of a marathoner. “During all that [marathon] training you’re training your mind, you’re training all that grit and resilience, and I just had to fall back on that,” she explained. Having friends and family on the course kept her going, breaking the gruelling marathon down into moments of relief brought on by familiar faces.

From passing 5km in 17:31, Rose went through halfway in 1:20:07, well off her best pace and suffering throughout. “It was heartbreaking,” she said, and she struggled through to finish in 2:51:03, hobbling in pain as she crossed the line in 78th place. 

“There were so many moments when I thought I couldn’t take another step,” she said. And even though her race goals slipped away one by one as the pain increased, “there was still a tiny part of my Olympic dream that I could hang onto – and that was finishing the Olympic marathon,” she said. “I couldn’t give up.”

It was only after the race that she discovered the true extent of the injury, and that she’d suffered a stress fracture in her femur. While marathons may lead us to a metaphorical breaking point, that’s quite different to reaching a literal one, and none of her team would’ve let her run on a broken bone. But in the moment, at the Olympic Games, it was pain she felt she could run through in order to finish her Olympic Marathon.

It’s been a remarkable shift in careers for Rose who until 2020 was working as a lawyer in the music industry and running for fun in her spare time. When she was made redundant during the pandemic, she started to train harder, and ran 2:30:58 at the Cheshire Marathon in 2021, which got her into the elite women’s field at the London Marathon later that year, where she ran 2:29:45. She was signed as a PUMA athlete in 2022, ran in the world championship marathon in Eugene, then set her personal best of 2:23:21 at the 2023 Chicago Marathon, becoming the fifth-fastest British woman over 26.2 miles (now the sixth), a time which qualified her for the Paris Olympic Games. 

“This was far from the Olympics I dreamed of, but still an experience of a lifetime,” Rose said. “Any other race I would have stopped, because I wasn’t able to run like I normally can,” she said, “but I just had to get to that finish line, I had to do the Olympic marathon.”

“I knew deep down if I stopped, I would always wonder what if I just could’ve run an extra mile. And I wouldn’t be able to live with that.” 

We hope to see Rose fit and healthy and back on the start line soon. 

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If you want to hear more from Rose, then she met with Sarah to share her top 10 tips for how to get good at running. 

Lead Image © Bank of America Chicago Marathon/Kevin Morris