Morgan Lake

Mind games

With the brutal impact of the pandemic, the cancellation of sporting events, a halt in training, and racism put in the spotlight, 2020 was a year that tested high-jump champion MORGAN LAKE in ways she couldn’t have imagined. But, by retraining her focus, the British athlete has emerged mentally and physically stronger than ever, ready for a summer of medal-winning glory

Words RACHAEL SIGEE Photography RICK GUEST

Power nap: Lake takes a moment to contemplate her dissertation about the sleeping habits of elite athletes

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few days before her interview with The Red Bulletin, Morgan Lake looked at her Instagram and saw a video she’d posted from her last training session at the track in March 2020. “I remember posting it and my friends on the Italian team messaging me to say they were literally just locked in their houses,” says the British high jumper. “At the time, I thought, ‘Oh my God, imagine if that happened to us.’ I was just training as normal and felt so thankful. But, the next day, the track closed and we had to train outside – everyone flocked to the Astroturf and it was packed. Then the whole country got shut down.”

It’s almost exactly a year since that bizarre first week of lockdown, and yet Lake is once again stuck inside, at her student house in Loughborough, Leicestershire. She’s folded up her 1.8m frame to crouch on the floor as she gamely tries to fix what has become a common issue for us all: a dodgy Wi-Fi connection that’s making the Zoom chat freeze.

At the start of March, Lake travelled to Torun, Poland, to compete for Great Britain in the European Indoor Championships, but, after a teammate tested positive for COVID-19 upon their return, she has been self-isolating. On top of the interruption to Lake’s training, the first draft of her university dissertation – about sleep and napping tendencies in elite athletes – is due next week: “It’s not been the greatest couple of weeks,” she concedes.

Luckily, after getting through 2020, the 23-yearold is more than equipped to handle setbacks – something she would have struggled to believe last March. Last year was supposed to be Lake’s year. The Milton Keynes-born athlete was heading to the Olympics in Tokyo four years after making the high- jump final in Rio. At that point, she’d won gold at the British Athletics Championships four years in a row, and taken silver at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Expectations were high as Lake was named one of the rising stars of the British team. She was laser-focused.

And then the pandemic hit. Suddenly, Lake’s daily routine was worryingly devoid of purpose. “It was really hard having to train in our back gardens – without any equipment or coaches or a track – for a competition that would have been the biggest thing in most people’s careers. Once things were postponed, there was relief initially. It was, ‘Thank God, we’ve still got that goal; it hasn’t been cancelled.’ But then it was like, ‘OK, well, what am I doing now?’”

Not only had Lake’s high-jump season vanished but, since she had chosen to split the final year of her psychology degree at Loughborough in order to concentrate on her sport, she didn’t even have university work to distract herself with. “Everything was geared towards that summer, and for that to be taken away... It was really hard to carry on training, not knowing if I was going to have a season.”

What should have been a year that tested Lake’s physical ability quickly became one that instead challenged her mental strength. She had been working with a mindset coach since just after the World Athletics Championships in Doha in 2019, and it was this resource that became crucial to Lake finding a way to navigate her drastically altered world. Her three conversations with the coach each week proved invaluable during lockdown. Under normal circumstances, these sessions would have covered preparation for the pressure of competition

Front runner: Lake began breaking athletics records way back in 2008, when she was aged just 12

“It’s dehumanising when people say sportspeople shouldn’t talk about things other than sport”

Finding a voice: prompted by Black Lives Matter, Lake has discussed her own experiences of racism

“Taking part in the 5K Challenge was fun. It was something I’d never normally get to do”

and dealing with nerves, but now they became about strategies for staying motivated without a competition on the immediate horizon. “Although it might have seemed pointless because I wasn’t competing, I was still training,” she says. “And that’s one of the reasons why I kept so focused.”

Instead of languishing, Lake seized on her coach’s mantra: “Control the controllables.” She brought forward one of her university modules to manage the pressure, and set about training as best she could with her housemate, a heptathlete. “We didn’t have a high-jump bed or a track to run on, but we do have a rugby field opposite our house, so we did a lot of work there, like runs and plyometrics [jump training]. My housemate was doing shot put, so I joined in with some of that, too. We marked out a little high-jump runway for taking off.”

Also, forced to relax her rigid mindset around training, Lake found herself doing things she usually wouldn’t. She was nominated over and over again for the 5K Challenge – run 5K, donate £5 to the NHS, nominate five people – and finally gave in, surprising herself with how much she enjoyed it: “That was fun, and it was something I’d never normally get to do.”

Taking advantage of the freedom from her usual strict training programme, Lake turned her attention to working on her weaknesses and learned to take more control of her progress, both physical and mental. With no access to physio, she was forced to address that she was “so bad at stretching and all the little bits around training”. She began doing more yoga and Pilates, enjoying the opportunity to take charge of her training time and embrace new challenges, and it’s paid off. “The biggest difference is that this winter I haven’t really been injured. I’ve had small niggles, but nothing where I’ve had to take weeks out of training. Before, if anything was hurting I’d just go straight to the physio, whereas now I’m like, ‘OK, maybe I’ll do a hip-opening yoga flow,’ and I’ll make sure I’m doing my best to keep my body in check. That was a big win from lockdown.”

If this is Lake at a low ebb, she must be bouncing off the walls come competition time. Although pragmatic when reflecting on having to isolate after the European Indoor Championships, she’s animated on the topic of actually jumping, clearly itching for the opportunity to prove herself again.

However, there are other challenges Lake has been forced to face over the past year, from beyond her world of training and competition. The Black Lives Matter movement prompted her to look more closely at her own experience as a young mixed-race Black woman and identify “so many things that I hadn’t thought of as a problem because it hadn’t been direct racism, a lot of little things I hadn’t really noticed. Hearing other people speak about it was really big. It was a tough time, but also enlightening”.

As a result, Lake felt confident enough to speak out on social media and in interviews about racism and injustice. She’s unimpressed by the argument that athletes should stay out of politics: “It’s really dehumanising when people say that sportspeople shouldn’t talk about things other than sport. It’s like, ‘Right, you’re not a person, you’re just entertainment. We only want to watch you for entertainment purposes and that’s it.’ But you’re a human first, then an athlete. Obviously we have other interests – we’re not just thinking about track and field all day and then we sleep. It’s such a weird and outdated opinion that athletes can’t also have opinions outside sport. This past year has shown we can, and we’ll carry on talking if we have the platform.”

With this newfound focus, Lake has also used her platform to promote a healthier body image for women, appearing on the cover of Cosmopolitan’s February 2021 issue celebrating different body types. “That was really cool,” she says. “For me growing up, it was like, ‘Be as skinny as you can,’ and that was what I saw as the best body type. So being an athlete was quite hard, because I have muscles and I need them to compete and train well. It’s nice that there’s been some change so you don’t have to look just like one person.” Lake cites her own role models as tennis superstar Serena Williams and gold-medal-winning heptathlete Denise Lewis, and she breaks into a broad grin when she recalls how last year her friend, the record-breaking sprinter Dina Asher-Smith, was made into a Barbie doll: “It was so cool, because it showed you can be a strong athlete and still be a Barbie. I know little things like that will mean so much to younger athletes now – it would have meant so much to me growing up.”

Lake and Asher-Smith became close, along with British long jumper Jazmin Sawyers, during the 2016 athletics season, when all three had their first experiences competing on the world’s biggest stages. It’s a connection that’s incredibly important to Lake: “It’s so nice to have such huge life-changing events with your friends; having friends to push you so you can all achieve together.” This has been Lake’s support system, alongside her family – most notably her dad Eldon, a former triple jumper who was her coach until she went to university. “We’re still so close now and always talk about athletics,” she says. “It’s really nice to have someone who I’m so close to, so that we can share my journey in the sport.”

Where that journey is heading has been the subject of some contention. Although Lake has soared (literally) in the high jump, there has long been the suggestion she might return to heptathlon, in which she was the 2014 World Junior Champion. However, it seems that lockdown may have given her a new

Leap year: Lake jumped the Olympic qualifying height of 1.96m unexpectedly at the Serbian Open this February

“This year, I just wanted to train really hard and give myself the best opportunity to jump high”

High bar: Lake has been British high- jump champion five years running; (opposite) a gauge showing her PB from January 2019

“Having the time to step away from competition and re-evaluate my goals has been a huge thing for me”

perspective on that, too – at least for now. “In the past, I’ve always just thought about what I’ll be doing next – going to heptathlon and going to this or that,” says Lake. “I’ve not really been in the moment, in the now. This year, I just wanted to train really hard and give myself the best opportunity to jump high. So I’m going to take away the distractions of what I’ll be doing in the future and think about what I’m going to do to make this year the best it can be.”

This has meant making peace with 2020 for the havoc wreaked on her normally fastidious elite- training programme; with no clear roadmap of competition, it was near impossible to plan when her form should peak. “Usually you have everything so planned out. It’s almost easy in a sense, because everything is so meticulous: your coach gives you a programme, you know what you’re doing, and you do the work. Obviously the work is hard, but the motivation and the stuff around it is the easy part.” Instead, with that framework removed, it was her pure love of the sport that kept her going. “It was like, ‘This thing can either make or break me.’ I just love athletics, and for me it was like, ‘Right, let’s make the most of it. We’re stuck in this situation. We can either sit there and be sad, or just do what we love.’ That was the main thing for me: regaining the love of the sport.”

Lake’s passion for high jump being brought into such sharp focus has proven more than beneficial to her jumping. Last September, she took gold at the British Athletics Championships for a fifth consecutive year. Then she had to tackle Olympic qualification. Lake had last jumped the qualifying height of 1.96m in January 2019 – setting a personal best of 1.97m in Hustopeče, Czech Republic – and with the Games postponed she needed to requalify. A further blow came when the winter season she had been gearing up for began to falter, with various competitions cancelled at the last minute. This was exactly what her mindset coach had specifically prepared her for: processing a change in plans without falling apart, and being able to find a positive way to move obstacles.

“I needed to think, ‘Don’t just get angry and sad about it, because you’ve done all this work and there will be an opportunity to showcase it,’” she says. In the end, she nailed the height in unexpected circumstances. “I jumped it at some random competition – the Serbian Open [this February]. It was the first competition I’d ever done without my coach being there. I just wanted to try to win the competition, enjoy it and have fun. There was no way I thought it would be the competition where I jumped the qualifying height.”

Perhaps even more important than the jump itself was the revelation that accompanied it; that trying to force matters just doesn’t work for Lake. “I think last year it was such an aim to jump 1.96m indoors that I wasn’t enjoying competitions; it was so stressful. Whereas this season it was in the back of my mind but never a target. It was an amazing moment and it showed me that when I relax and enjoy myself, my best performances come.”

The unpredictable nature of 2020 could have been devastating for Morgan Lake. Looking ahead to a seemingly infinite, empty stretch of time is a daunting prospect for an elite athlete used to painstaking planning, and initially it did stump her. But it was learning to cope in this new world that turned out to be the key to Lake’s most significant steps forward, both inside and outside sport. “Having the time to step away and re-evaluate my goals and my thoughts on the sport has been a huge thing for me,” she says with a characteristic smile.

These experiences could not have happened in the 2020 that Lake had originally anticipated. But, based on her start to 2021, and with Tokyo once again on the horizon, she might now be better prepared than ever for success. morgan-lake.com