A stubbed toe can force some people to ball up in pain. That isn’t the case for marathon runner Rose Harvey. The British athlete said Tuesday that she competed in Sunday’s Olympic race with a broken femur.
Not only did Harvey complete the race, she managed to beat out the two slowest finishers. Eleven other runners withdrew before the finish line.
The 32-year-old said she dealt with hip tightness leading up to the race, but it wasn’t debilitating enough for her to withdraw.
“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,” Harvey wrote on Instagram. “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.”
Despite the intense pain, Harvey kept putting one foot in front of the other. She crossed the finish line after 2 hours and 51 minutes — 28 minutes after gold medal winner Sifan Hassan.
“In any other race, I would have stopped and there were so many moments when I thought I couldn’t take another step,” Harvey wrote.”The downhills were hell. But despite that 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. I couldn’t give up.”
Harvey is now sporting crutches after her Olympic performance, focusing on her recovery and preparing for her wedding next month.
“My big challenge is to hopefully be off crutches for the wedding but we will see,” she told the BBC “It might be [my fiance] walking down the aisle at this rate.”
• Liam Griffin can be reached at lgriffin@washingtontimes.com.
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