‘I did a Parkrun in 16 minutes 8 seconds – and now I could be heading to the Olympics’

During the many, many coronavirus lockdowns in 2020, like many of us, Georgia Bell tried to make the most of her legally permitted hour of fresh air each day. ‘All you could do was exercise,’ she says. ‘I just needed to get out of the house, so I wanted to maximise that hour.’

Bell, who is now 30, has a full-time job in cybersecurity, specialising in artificial intelligence. When lockdown hit, she moved back into the family nest in north-west London, joining one of her two sisters and her parents.

The running went pretty well. She felt good, and was beginning to enjoy it. Bell had been a prodigious middle-distance athlete as a junior, but had long since given up the dream of medals and glory, instead assimilating into the working world, with all the time-forced inactivity that brings. ‘I hadn’t even laced up a pair of running shoes in over a year,’ she says. ‘And I gained a lot of weight.’

The lockdown runs got longer, and faster. Bell found more and more could be achieved in just one hour. She began to eat better, and added cycling to her routine. Eventually, feeling she might as well test herself against others, she signed up for a 5K Parkrun. So far, so typical. Only, if you’re beginning to quietly nod and identify with this story, I must spare you: this is where it stops being relatable.

A few Parkruns later, Bell crossed the line in Bushy Park, near Hampton Court, in 16 minutes and eight seconds. For the non-runners out there, as an amateur 5,000-metre time on uneven ground, achieved by somebody who’d only started running again months earlier, this is – to use a technical term – bloody quick.

‘I won for the girls,’ she says. ‘There was one guy, I think, who beat me. But after that I thought, “I’m in pretty good shape.” So I contacted my old coach to tell him.’ That was two years ago.

Fast forward to the present day, and Bell is now more than likely going to the Paris Olympics to compete for Team GB in the 1,500 metres. And people say lockdown achieved nothing…

Bell’s tale, in its crunched and simplified form, is the kind of thing sporting novices daydream about. On the face of it, running a super-fast Parkrun and expecting it to lead to a potential Olympic Games is like throwing a 180 on the darts down the Dog and Duck, then believing you might as well arrange a meeting with Luke Littler for two pints’ time, because you’re clearly ready, or googling the long jump world record after clearing a particularly big puddle. In short, to most people, just a flight of fancy.

But the slight, smiling blonde woman eating a vast bag of nuts and dried fruit opposite me in a meeting room at Belgrave Hall, the clubhouse of the historic Belgrave Harriers running club in Wimbledon, is not most people.

That auspicious Parkrun led to her old coach, Trevor Painter, working with her again, alongside his wife, former World Championships middle-distance medallist Jenny Meadows.

Bell is now improving her personal bests over just about any distance – including her favoured event, the 1,500 metres, plus the 3,000 metres, 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres – ‘pretty much every time’ she races. Today, she still has her job at a cybersecurity firm, but in the past six months she’s gone from working a nine-to-five to becoming a professional athlete, signing a sponsorship deal with Nike, winning 1,500-metres gold at the British Indoor Championships in February and a thrilling silver at the European Championships earlier this month, and regularly beating the world’s best.

Wisely, she’s now started a four-month sabbatical, allowing her to concentrate on running. ‘And that’s a wrap!’ she wrote last month on LinkedIn. She describes herself on the site as ‘an ambitious and hard-working cybersecurity enthusiast/running nerd’, along with two photographs, one showing her in smart clothes in her office lift, the other all muscle and grace on the track. ‘With Q1 closed out, it’s time for me to put all my focus on aiming for the Olympic Games in Paris.’

In the parlance of the internet, it was a serious flex. LinkedIn is, at its purest, the greatest stage for corporate sporting braggadocio, but few people get to say they’re ducking out of Q2 to try and win Olympic gold and really mean it.

‘Thankfully work has been very supportive,’ Bell says. ‘I think Steve Cram did me a favour at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow [in March], because they all tuned in and on the BBC commentary he said something like, “Ah, Georgia Bell, she’s working full-time but she must know that if she puts her focus on this she could make the Olympics…” So they thought, “Right, now we have to give her the shot then.” But asking your boss for time off in order to try and make the Olympics is a strange ask.’

Today’s photo shoot only involved a few strides of running – mercifully, given Bell is in self-preservation mode. ‘There was a bit where they had me going across some root-heavy ground and I was a bit worried, but I’ve given up cycling in London in case I’m knocked off in the next month.’

Photo shoots are a necessary part of the job now, especially since securing a sponsorship deal, as she has with Nike, is key to making athletics pay. But professional runners, both male and female, tend to be a glamorous bunch.

‘I know,’ Bell says. ‘I think when you line up on the start line you just want to feel a million dollars, so whatever it takes to get there. Look good, feel good, and you’ll race well.’

At a recent Nike-sponsored race in Oregon, ‘There was a whole “glam squad” floor.’ She shows her immaculate red nails, which each bear tiny Nike ticks or the letters ‘Just Do It’ on them. ‘It was insane…’

Today she’s here with her mum, Angela, a primary school teacher enjoying half-term. Her dad, Andy, is Channel 5’s political editor, so has quite a summer ahead, but still makes most of his daughter’s races. ‘Even Rishi Sunak’s allowed the odd day off, you know…’ Angela says.

Looking back on the last six months, and ahead to the next few, Bell offers a likeable and understandable blend of confidence and disbelief; of vivacious amateur and hard-drilled professional. In a way, she’s closer to the true spirit of the Olympics than most who’ll be competing in Paris. ‘I’m just enjoying it, it’s been such good fun. And when it’s a high-pressure environment before a race, I just remember that I could be in the office, doing back-to-back Zoom calls, but I’m here.’

There are two standards British track athletes must meet to qualify for the Olympic Games: first, they must hit the Olympic qualifying time for their event (in Bell’s case in the 1,500 metres, that’s four minutes 2.5 seconds, which she is comfortably quicker than); and second, they must prove they’re among the top three Brits over their distance. The latter is determined at the UK Athletics Championships in Manchester on the final weekend in June.

‘Everything this summer is gearing up to that race [on June 30], the Olympic trials, then if I get through that it’ll be on to Paris, but there’ve been improvements pretty much every time I race, so I’m just trying to ride that trajectory.’

The favourite to cross the line first in Manchester, she concedes, is her friend Laura Muir, a silver medallist at the last Olympics. ‘The bookies would say she should win, but she was beaten last year at the British Champs, so anything can happen on the day, which is probably what makes it scary but also what makes it interesting. Nothing is a sure thing.’

Bell is arguably in the most enviable position, given she isn’t timing her peak for the trials or the Games themselves, isn’t defending her reputation or living up to personal expectations – she’s just seeing how fast she can go.

‘I don’t know where my ceiling is, but I trust in my coaching plan, and know that almost every race I do is the biggest race I’ve done. I keep getting PBs, but I think that’s because I’ve finally got consistency without time off injured,’ she says. ‘I know this is a second shot, so I’m just racing well and seizing every opportunity.’

Bell grew up in London, one of three sisters. ‘I was always the sporty one,’ she says. ‘That’s how I remember being identified.’

While academically bright, she was also preternaturally gifted at almost all sports, but especially running, so joined a local club, Ealing Southall & Middlesex, when she was 11. ‘I did cross-country but always found it a bit of a slog in the rain and the mud, but loved the track. I just loved the competitive side of it, being able to race and see your improvements. Otherwise it was just very sociable in training, and mixed gender.’

As a junior she was exceptional. ‘As a junior, yeah, the glory days…’ She won the English Schools under-15s 800 metres title, and remained top-ranked through to the end of secondary education. Yet after studying geography at the University of Birmingham, and despite continuing to deliver strong performances and personal bests, her progress appeared to stall. ‘Either other people caught up or I plateaued,’ she says, with a shrug. It’s the story of 99 per cent of talented teenage sportspeople.

Unwilling to give up athletics or enter the working world just yet, she took an athletics scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, training and competing while studying for a Master’s degree in political science.

‘It was awesome as an experience, you feel like a professional athlete out there, you’re kitted out, you’re flown around to track meets, it’s packed-out stadiums rather than just Mum and Dad and a dog in the UK…

‘The problem was that it was a very one-size-fits-all method, and if you can’t fit in with that you’ll fall off and get injured, which is what happened to me. I had a couple of stress fractures, and by the end I was lining up for races feeling unfit and like I wasn’t ready, but I had a scholarship so it was always expected that I do well.’

Not that she regrets going, she’s eager to emphasise. ‘People might think I’d have negative things to say about it, but if you want to live abroad and see the world, and live in that team environment, then it’s a great option. But if you’re of Olympic potential, you’re maybe better off staying at home with a personalised programme for you. If I have kids one day I’d definitely recommend [going], though. It’s an amazing experience.’

In the end, with persistent injuries hampering her progress, she finished her two years at Berkeley in 2017 and gave it all up, taking a tech job in San Francisco. ‘It was sad, I thought I’d quit for ever and I was never going to go on a track again; I was very mentally and physically burnt out. But I was relieved, in a way, not having that expectation on me.’

When she says she didn’t run in that first year after ‘retiring’, she really means it. After sacrificing so much of her youth to training and racing, she barely even thought about it. ‘I just enjoyed living a normal life as a 23-year-old, going out for dinners, making plans at the weekend, all the stuff I couldn’t do as an athlete,’ she says.

Even after moving back to London to live and work, just prior to lockdown, she considered herself done, especially as she was enjoying her nascent cybersecurity career. ‘There was definitely a period of time where I thought, “Running is just something I used to do. A nice memory, but we’re not going to go back to that.”’

And then good old lockdown arrived. Painter, her old coach, had been hoping for the call.

‘He didn’t really want me to go to the US, he got me to the fastest I’d ever run before [in her final year at Birmingham] and said he’s always called me “the one who got away…” The idea at the start wasn’t to go for the Olympics at all, but just to see how fast I could go.’

Very fast, it turned out. Bell’s speed and fitness took everybody by surprise, including her mother. ‘If you’d asked me four years ago whether Georgia was going to get back to track, I’d have thought, absolutely not, no way,’ Angela admits. ‘But then, when you added cycling and started doing duathlons…’

She gives a heavy, maternal nod at her daughter. The prompt is a deliberate one. As if she could have forgotten, Bell suddenly appears to recall that she’s also a phenomenally good cyclist – or at least discovered she was after complementing her running with hours spent on the indoor, static-bike app Zwift in those long lockdown days.

‘Yeah I did a little bit of that…’

Putting the two sports together (‘and cutting out swimming, because it’s the worst’), last year she won the Duathlon World Championships in the female 30-34 age group, before focusing almost solely on running in the last nine months.

Following Painter and Meadows’ plans – which over the last six months have resulted in frighteningly quick improvements – her preparation has included extended warm-weather training stints with a group of other British athletes in South Africa. There, among Painter’s other protégés, she was the only athlete also holding down a full-time job, ‘getting up at 6am to do some work, and fitting in calls between training’.

Now on sabbatical, ‘with the laptop slammed shut’, at the age of 30, Bell can finally live the life of a professional athlete aiming for her first Olympics. A dream once thought dashed was, it turns out, just deferred.

She lives in south London with her fiancé, ‘a very good amateur’ cyclist and often her training partner, and for the moment lives according to a routine she admits is ‘very monotonous’: after 10 hours of sleep, she’s up at around 9am, has a black coffee and scrambled eggs with peppers and tomatoes, goes to training, then has a lunch of chicken, rice and vegetables, has a mid-afternoon snack of some peanut butter on toast with a banana, trains again, then eats ‘something like salmon and vegetables’ for dinner.

Currently she’s doing 30 miles of running, 100 miles of indoor cycling, and two hours of gym per week. ‘If you’re preparing for a race, you just want to keep to things that you know work,’ she says. During downtime, she’ll stretch, or have an ice bath, or sleep. ‘It’s a boring lifestyle,’ she says, with a laugh. ‘One thing I’ve noticed is that professional athletes are so active but, when they’re not competing, they’re just… slothlike. And I get why.’

I think I know the answer to this but… any booze? ‘No, no. Nothing until after the Olympic trials. But I’ll have a glass of Champagne if I make the Olympics, obviously.’

There is currently a frustrating gap between grassroots participation and professional support in athletics. Thanks in part to Instagram, which is full to the brim with preposterously good-looking fitness influencers capturing their marathon plans and hawking high-end kit, running has become cool of late. For Generation Z in major cities, ‘Friday night runclub’, complete with coaches leading the charge with boomboxes strapped to their backs, is the new actual clubbing.

The phenomenon of Parkrun has helped too, of course. ‘Which is great, but everyone is interested in my 5K time [the length of a Parkrun] and so impressed, when my time for the 1,500 metres is way more impressive…’

The whole Bell family does Parkruns together sometimes, including on Christmas Day. Occasionally they’ll be racing some big names.

‘Yes,’ Angela chips in, ‘your dad beat Seb Coe once, I think.’

Bell’s face screws up. ‘Um, I don’t think he was trying his hardest…’

She just wishes that public enthusiasm carried on to the top level. ‘A lot of my friends don’t even know who’s favourite to win Olympic gold this summer. They know the football stars, the tennis players, the Lionesses… but not track. So people can appreciate running but not the top level, there’s a disconnect… It’d be cool if everybody followed our stories.’

That, she hopes, will change this summer. And with likeable personalities with inspirational stories like hers in the running, it may well do. First, she’s got to get there, and make the most of that sabbatical. If she keeps on at this rate, though, she may well need to extend it.

‘I’m just going to race and have fun, and we’ll see,’ she says. One good thing, she adds, is that her initials are GB. ‘So at any international event it always feels like absolutely everybody is cheering me on.’

This summer, whatever happens, we’re all Team GB. And even on the greatest stage, she can give herself that most contemporary of pep talks: remember, you could be doing back-to-back Zoom calls.