It’s 2005. For the last three years, I’ve been coaching sports in a Primary School in Elephant and Castle, London. Last year, we had discovered SportsHall Athletics. We got our application in late for Area Championships; a competition between 16 Primary Schools in Elephant & Castle, where the winning team progressed onto the Borough Championship, against the best teams in Southwark. I picked eleven of the fastest children from Year 6, (the top year in Primary) and one kid from Year 5; a small boy named Michael who was showing promise…

We have done badly in the field events (10th by my secret calculations) and there is no hiding it. The kids know what is going on. We had practised really hard, we had all improved, but this competition is on a different level, the other teams out-stripped us. I was trying to gee everyone up, keep them positive, but the atmosphere is gloomy, heads are dropping…

Michael and Robbie

They were in Year 3 when I joined, and now they were Year 6. They had grown into the fastest two kids in the school. And they couldn’t have been more different…

I can’t say the new school year started magnificently. It wasn’t like some Hollywood montage, but things did start to turn around. The nightmare Year 6 class had gone, and the staff room was moved, so the teachers no longer had to hear me scream. I learnt things the hard way, and figured out, slowly, how to control the class and give them a fun time. And that those two things were inextricably linked…

2002; I left University after one year, I wasn’t happy with my course, or the running group at Loughborough. I went home to London and got a job as a Teaching Assistant in a Primary School. A perfect job for me, at 21 years old. Short hours and long holidays, so I had plenty of time to focus on training.

Invicta School was small, only 300 kids, in inner-city London. A lovely Victorian building, hemmed in by menacing social housing estates, towering up on all sides. The area was under-privileged, with many poor families, not enough space, no green areas, and certainly no gardens. Drugs and crime were rife in the estates, with concrete mazes straight out of Blade Runner. I would walk around discarded needles on the way to school…