Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill

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Jessica Ennis-Hill (0:21)

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Hello, and welcome back to The MidPoint. Sports fan or not, if you've lived in Britain for some time, chances are you'll recognise today's guest. Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill is an athlete who's transcended her sport, not least because she played a pivotal role in one of Britain's biggest sporting moments, known simply as Super Saturday. It's certainly a night I will never forget. In fact, that whole Olympic Games is a career highlight of mine.

And Jess, that night, I think for me, personified everything that was brilliant about those games. In fact, somebody said to me recently, if you could live in the shoes of one person for one day, who would it be? And I said, Jess, in 2012, when she crossed the line in the 800 meters. I've never told her that.

That was, of course, the culmination of years of hard work for her. She walked away with the gold medal in the heptathlon, which of course means being world class in not one, but seven events many times, not just Olympic Games, but world champions.

And then perhaps more impressively still was her silver medal that she won in Rio in 2016, just 15 months after having her first child, Reggie. Now seven years into retirement, Jess and her childhood sweetheart, now husband, Andy, are raising two children, Reggie and his sister Liv. And as well as developing her own fitness app called Jenis, she regularly sits alongside me as we do the track and field together for the BBC. She is brilliant to work with, professional, funny and complete team player, as you probably imagine. Well, this week we're also joined by Dr. Louise Newson, who is a GP and menopause specialist. And she's so passionate about improving education around the menopause and perimenopause that she founded a clinic which ploughs some of its profits back into menopause research and free resources. There's so much to explore in this episode. I think you're going to like it. Let's get straight to it.

Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, it is so brilliant to have you on The MidPoint, and we are going to declare straight away, because you said, I will come on, but you have to make sure everybody knows I am not in The MidPoint. So just for absolute clarity and transparency, your age, Jess?

Jessica Ennis-Hill (2:41)

I am 37 years old. I am clinging on to those 30s.

Gabby Logan (2:46)

And I know a lot of people go, well, she's so young. Why have you got it? But the reason is, and it's the same reason we had James Haskell on a couple of weeks ago, I think sports people have a kind of midlife experience because it's almost when you change and you transition from sport into the real world, it's a little bit like what people sometimes go through in their late 40s when they're starting to kind of shift their family paradigm and all the stuff that goes on. So you are clearly somebody who's still very useful, incredibly fit and have small children, which actually some mid pointers do.

But let's go back to that time or when it kind of first dawned on you that being a super athlete in Olympic gold medalist wouldn't be forever.

Jessica Ennis-Hill (3:26)

Yeah, I suppose I never really allowed myself to think too much about what would come after athletics. So I think when you're very much in the middle of your career, you're so focused on the next goal and ticking off your list of achievements and focused on the moment. So I never really allowed myself to think, oh, actually what will happen when athletics stops and when I'm not training every day and my whole life doesn't evolve around this one thing, because I wanted to make the most of the time when I was in it and making sure that I was really, really focused.

So yeah, it's quite a strange feeling actually to firstly kind of announce that that was the end of what was a huge chapter of my life. You know, everything had evolved around training, eating, right, sleeping, right. It was all focused on these big championships. And then, you know, that moment when I said that was it, you know, I was going to retire, that all stopped. And it was, yeah, quite a strange feeling. It felt like the right feeling at the time. But then as the kind of days and weeks went by, it was just that realisation of, OK, this this chapter is definitely finished.