S11, Ep2 How to Fail: Jessica Ennis-Hill

Elizabeth Day (0:00)

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Hello, and welcome to How to Fail With Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right.

This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger, because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week, I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Jessica Ennis-Hill is one of the most respected British track and field athletes of all time. She is an Olympic heptathlon gold medalist and a three-time world champion. The image of her winning gold during London's so-called Super Saturday in 2012 will stay seared in the minds of anyone who was there or who watched it on TV. It certainly does mind. Her achievements are extraordinary. Just 15 months after giving birth to her first child, Reggie, she won the 2015 Heptathlon World Championship in Beijing. Shortly after her 2016 retirement, she was given a damehood. And shortly after that, she had her second child, a daughter, Olivia. Ennis Hill grew up in Sheffield, the daughter of Vinnie, a painter decorator, and Alison, a social worker. She found sport young when her parents took her to a summer holiday athletics camp at the age of 10 Here she won her first prize, a pair of trainers. As well as pursuing athletics, Ennis Hill also gained a psychology degree from the University of Sheffield and found the time to marry her teenage sweetheart, Andy Hill.

After retiring from athletics, Ennis Hill was surprised by the lack of relatable advice on training and health for women, particularly those embarking on motherhood or wanting to get back into fitness after giving birth.

So she launched the Jennis fitness app to pull together all her experience, including cycle mapping, which offers users the right fitness sessions for the four phases of their menstrual cycle. It's a brilliant idea that shouldn't be revolutionary, but is. As for what athletics might have taught her about success and failure, she says, you have those moments when you feel totally broken because of disappointments and setbacks. You just have to refocus yourself, put things into perspective and keep going.

Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, welcome to How To Fail.

Jessica Ennis-Hill (3:58)

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Elizabeth Day (4:00)

It is an absolute delight.

I wonder, have you always had that ability, that sense of discipline? Do you think you're born with it or do you think that you learned it?

Jessica Ennis-Hill (4:12)

It's something that I think about quite often and I do get asked quite a lot.

I think it's a combination of both. I think that from a very young age, my parents say that I was very, very driven and very focused from the age of nine or 10 You know, I knew what I wanted to do and I just went at it 100%. But I do think that you need to have that environment. You need to have the right people around you and to be stimulated in the right way to bring out that side of you, that drive and that focus. And I definitely found that as soon as I stepped into the world of sports.

Elizabeth Day (4:45)

Is it true that you wrote your university dissertation on self-regulation?

Jessica Ennis-Hill (4:49)

I did, yeah. Gosh, it seems such a long time ago. But yes, I did. I loved psychology at school and it was the subject that I really found great interest in and was really fascinated by. And I was going down this sports route from a young age and I didn't want to then go into the physical education side too much within my academic world. I wanted to have something that was quite separate but would also help me in the longterm.