© Copyright – 2024 – Athletics Illustrated

Great Britain’s Rose Harvey raced the 2024 Paris Olympic Marathon with a stress fracture in her femure. She felt it early on, and kept racing to the end.

She owns a personal best over the distance of 2:23:21 from 2023 which put her on Team Great Britain. The 31-year-old has run sub-2:30 three times. Due to the pain in Paris, she rolled in at 2:51:03, not what she was hoping for.

Harvey found running during the COVID lockdown when her job as a lawyer was no longer relevant. She had run much more casually and finished the 2016 London Marathon in the time of 2:55:41. Her first serious go at the distance after the COVID training period saw a massive improvement to 2:30:51 at the Chesire Marathon in 2021.

She wrote on Instagram, “A couple of miles in, I quickly realised that wasn’t going to happen. The next 24 miles were a painful battle.”It turns out I had stress-fractured my femur.”In any other race, I would have stopped and there were so many moments when I thought I couldn’t take another step. The downhills were hell.

“But despite most of my race goals having slipped away, there was still a tiny part of my Olympic dream that I could hang onto – and that was finishing the Olympic marathon.