Jeremy Roff
I ran 3:34 and I imagined by now I’d probably be
running even quicker than that. But things don’t
always work out the way you want them to.
JEREMY
ROFF
Older, Wiser…Better?
One of our brightest middle-distance talents of the past decade, Jeremy Roff has travelled
a tough road in recent years in his quest to stay at the forefront of Australian athletics.
MITCHEL BROWN chats with the World Championships and two-time Commonwealth
Games representative ahead of his return to the domestic racing circuit.
IMAGES COURTESY OF GETTY IMAGES
36 RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
Jeremy Roff
Roff leads the field during
the heats of the 2009 World
Championships in Berlin.
I
f you’d asked Jeremy Roff five years ago
where he thought he’d be in five years’
time, chances are he wouldn’t have said
here.
Actually, if you’d phrased the question
literally, he may very well have told you he’d
be in the exact position he is. In fact, it’s
probably the same position he would have
been in at the time of asking – sitting on the
balcony of Woodsmoke Apartments and
looking out over the surrounding mountains
and valleys of Falls Creek. He has, after all,
been a regular fixture at the annual New
Year’s runners’ pilgrimage to the famous
Victorian ski resort since his days as a young
up-and-coming star of the Australian 1500m
circuit.
As far as his career is concerned, though,
he’d have been hoping for a little more by the
time he hit 31.
“It’s funny because I wrote a blog today
about that kind of thing – when you run a
certain time, how you see the next year and
the year after,” he muses. “I ran 3:34 and I
imagined by now I’d probably be running
even quicker than that. But things don’t
always work out the way you want them to,
and you’ve got to learn from that.”
It’s not hard to imagine how Roff could
have gotten swept up in a wave of ambition.
Success breeds confidence, and Roff ’s
performance at the 2009 Internationales
Stadionfest in Berlin, where he recorded a
time of 3min 34.39sec, was about as big as
successes come. A three-second personal
best, it was a mark that signified his
graduation from the ranks of the very good
1500m runner to those of the genuinely
world-class, one that moved him to number
six on the Australian all-time rankings and
saw him become the number-one ranked
1500m runner in the country.
Granted, it was a very brief time at the
top. Less than four weeks later, long-time
nemesis Jeff Riseley reclaimed the mantle
with a scintillating 3:32.93 in Rome – a result
Roff wryly suggests was “on the cards” given
Riseley’s impressive season and frustrating
tendency to wrest back the upper hand
whenever Roff threatened to snatch the
ascendency in their long-standing rivalry.
Nonetheless, Roff was now a big-time
contender who had every right to see himself
being at the forefront of Australian distance
running for the next half a decade.
But it wasn’t to be. At last year’s
Commonwealth Games is Glasgow, as
Riseley finally produced the championships
performance his precocious talent had always
suggested him capable of in claiming two
fifth-place finishes, Roff was forced to watch
on from home. With his raw talent yet to be
refined during his 2006 Games debut and
his 2010 campaign in Delhi hampered by
an injury-riddled preparation, 2014 should
have been Roff ’s chance to prove his own
championship credentials. Instead, his
2013 and 2014 campaigns proved to be the
most miserable of his career, culminating
in surgery to his plantar fascia followed by
successive stress fractures and an extended
stint on the sidelines.
Having finally freed himself of the chronic
osteitis pubis that had previously prevented
him returning to the lofty heights of 2009,
Roff admits his new injury setback was a
hard one to take. But he was determined not
to distance himself from the sport during
his absence, instead using the success of his
FAST FACTS
NAME: Jeremy Roff
DATE OF BIRTH: November 22, 1983
PLACE OF BIRTH: Sydney, Australia
CLUB: Randwick Botany Harriers
COACH: Ken Green
SPONSORS: ASICS, ENDURA
CURRENTLY LIVING: Sydney, NSW
MARITAL STATUS: In a relationship with Lora Storey
OCCUPATION: Personal trainer
HEIGHT: 183cm
WEIGHT: 74kg
SHOE SIZE: US 11
HAIR COLOUR: Brown
FAVOURITE SHOE COLOUR: Black
MOST LOVED PAIR OF RUNNERS: ASICS Nimbus 16
FAVOURITE RACE: Sydney Track Classic
TOP THREE RUNNING EXPERIENCES/PERFORMANCES:
· 2009 Berlin Golden League (International
Stadionfest)
· 2006 Commonwealth Games, Melbourne
· 2009 World Championships, Berlin
PERSONAL BESTS:
800m: 1:48.79
1500m: 3:34.39
Mile: 3:55.05
3000m: 7:57.06
5000m: 13:37.48
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37
Jeremy Roff
Jeremy Roff
Roff celebrates after taking out
the 2011 Sydney Track Classic.
An exhausted Roff after
the 1500m final at the 2010
Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
38 RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
compatriots to remind himself of where he
wanted to be.
“You can either completely segregate
yourself from the sport or you can just
embrace it and watch the races and allow
it to give you a bit more motivation to get
back to that level,” Roff says of his time on
the sidelines. “It’s too hard to completely
segregate, so I just used it as motivation and
watched all the races. I think Jeff ran very
well. It was good to see him perform in a
championship.”
Six months on and the outlook is looking
substantially brighter for Roff. With the
early stages of his return to training having
already begun before Glasgow, he has now
been running injury free for 10 months and
is eyeing a return to track racing across the
Australian summer. In many respects, he is in
the best place he has been since his breakout
2009 season.
But things have changed. As a member
of the Sydney Running Academy, Roff is
still training under under the tutelage of
long-time coach Ken Green – a man whose
influence throughout his career he describes
as “amazing” – but the group now includes
the likes of rising stars Josh Wright, Jack
Stapleton and Adrian Plummer, meaning
Roff is no longer the undisputed top dog. He is, though, more than
willing to take a hit to the ego for the sake of working with training
partners of that quality.
“The boys all give me shit,” he says with a laugh. “They call me old
and call me the king and all this, but I love it. And to have guys like
that, four guys who I think this year potentially can break 3:40 in one
group – how can you say no to that? We work well together, we all
have fun and share reps around, and it’s just good to have those young
guys in the group because I guess they look up to me a little bit. And
they probably don’t know this, but I’ve got a lot of respect for them and
I see a bright future for those guys.”
Perhaps the more important change can be seen in Roff ’s newfound
wisdom and more considered approach. In a training sense he is far
more cautious, appreciating the value of rest days and being more
proactive in his application of injury prevention treatments thanks to a
more heightened awareness of the fragility of his body.
“I think a lot of the time, if you really want to get the best out of
your running, you’ve got to treat it like a job,” he says. “If you went
to work and you had to do a set amount of tasks, just going for a run
isn’t enough sometimes. I think you have to think, okay, I’ve got to run,
I’ve got to stretch, I’ve got to do my recovery and do all of that before I
do anything else, whether that’s watching TV or going out with your
mates.”
But Roff ’s philosophical disposition extends beyond the training
environment. His rigorous approach to the one-percenters of training
is countered with a better ability to compartmentalise. He has learned
to let go when necessary, embracing his part-time roles as a junior
coach and personal trainer in preparation for life after running and the
corresponding shift in career focus.
“My mum always said I’m like an ostrich,” he says with a laugh,
reflecting on his mother’s earlier attempts to force him to map out a
future career path. “I’d just bury my head in the sand, focus on the
running and that’s it. But when I got injured I just realised that when
you’re injured and you have nothing but running, it just drives you
crazy. So you’ve got to find another outlet.”
None of which is to say Roff is any less ambitious when it comes to
his running. If anything, his new respect for the fleeting nature of an
athlete’s time at the top has made him more determined than ever to
A lot of people see
it as a fluke, but it’s no
fluke. You spend all
that time getting into
the best shape you
can and you take your
opportunities.
Roff sits behind Ryan Gregson
during the 2013 Australian
Championships 1500m.
take advantage of his window of opportunity
before it closes for good. At 31, he is a veteran
without being a relic, but with his previous
injury history he admits he is running out
of opportunities to claim the one major
representative honour yet to be bestowed
upon him – an Olympic Games berth.
“I’d be foolish to think I have a lot of time
left,” he says bluntly. “The past five years
have gone by quite quickly. I’ve had some
okay years in between, but the last couple
have been a real struggle for me. This year is
just about rebuilding, and if I can find some
form come Nationals then maybe I’ll go away
overseas. But the real goal is 2016 because
that’s probably my last chance to be an Olympian.”
Also in Roff ’s sights at some point down the comeback trail is the
Australian 1500m crown, a title he has remarkably never held. It
might seem comparatively minor alongside the honour of an Olympic
debut, but the fact winning it involves overcoming the likes of Riseley
and Australian record holder Ryan Gregson makes it one of the more
difficult national titles to capture and all the more appealing a prospect
for Roff.
“I’d rather win [a national title] the hard way than get an easy one,”
he says. “I’d rather come second or third in the hardest event in the
country than go and do a different event just to say I won a national
title. It just gives you that motivation to be better and try to be the best
in the country and on the world stage as well.”
Ultimately, though, neither a spot on the Olympic team nor a
national title depend solely on Roff ’s performances. The one thing
he can control, assuming his body holds up, is returning to or even
improving on the sort of form that saw him capture the attention of the
Australian athletics community five years ago. And while he concedes
there is an element of luck in those seemingly magic races such as the
one he produced in Berlin, he insists the chief determining factor is
plain old-fashioned hard work.
“A lot of people just think you go in and it’s just this magic tow, that
you get towed along and you run five seconds faster than you ever
have,” he explains. “A lot of people see it as a fluke, but it’s no fluke. You
spend all that time getting into the best shape you can and you take
your opportunities.”
Fortunately for Roff, hard work has never been an issue. If his
assertion he has never been the most talented runner is to be believed,
he is perhaps one of the hardest working among the hard workers.
Of course, things have changed; when you’re on the wrong side of
30 and your next injury may be just around the corner, there are no
guarantees, even for the hard workers. For now, though, Roff can
at least take comfort in the world-class performances of his fellow
thirtysomethings and hope that, like them, his best may still be yet to
come.
“I see someone like Nick Willis at 31 running 3:29, so why can’t I run
something like that? You’ve just got to be positive, hope for the best
and train hard, and hopefully everything comes together.”
Roff at his debut Commonwealth
Games in Melbourne in 2006,
complete with “Dorothy the
Dinosaur” colour scheme.
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