I took up running after being made redundant as a lawyer during Covid and now I’m running Olympic marathon for Team GB
ROSE HARVEY lost her job during lockdown – now she is going to the Paris Olympics.
During the 2020 Covid pandemic, Harvey, 31, found herself with a lot of spare time when she was made redundant from her role as a finance lawyer in the music industry.
The London-based athlete took up running full-time and she is now part of the six-strong Team GB marathon squad heading to this summer’s Games.
She joins Emile Cairess and Mahamed Mahamed, who were selected on Friday following their third and fourth-place finishes at the London Marathon.
The Clapham Chasers runner, whose PB is 2:23:21, said: “Losing my job was difficult but it gave me the most incredible opportunity.
“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.”
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Coming from no sporting background whatsoever, Harvey joined Clapham Chasers Running Club to meet people when she moved to London after years of partying hard at university.
And after being laid off her corporate job, she laced up her trainers and began to take training seriously.
She joins already selected Phil Sesemann, Charlotte Purdue and Calli Hauger-Thackery in Team GB for the Olympic events taking place on the 10th and 11th August.
Competitors will run from central Paris to Versailles and back.
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.