Jess Learmonth: From supermarket worker to Olympic medal hopeful

Learmonth won silver for England at the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast in 2018

When Jess Learmonth and her boyfriend Jon flew home to Yorkshire from Australia in 2010, they thought they might never go back.

They had spent six months travelling around the country's east coast as part of a year's break from work.

"That was it. We had saved up and we thought that would be us done with travelling for 30, 40 years," she tells BBC Sport.

"I think I have been back to Australia another three times since."

If her destinations would have surprised Learmonth, so would the career that has carried her to them.

Now 31, she is back on Australia's Gold Coast, a world silver medallist about to begin a triathlon season she hopes will culminate with a place on the Olympic podium.

"I wouldn't have classed myself as a sporty person," she says of her gap-year self.

"We got back from travelling and I realised I was getting a bit fat. I realised I needed to do some exercise."

At the time, she was working in a supermarket in Tadcaster, moving money around the back office and price-checking products. A serious sporting life was something she actively wanted to avoid.

A high-level swimmer in her youth, Learmonth stepped away from the sport at 17.

"I had been training nine or 10 times a week, before and after school. I didn't have a social life and I didn't enjoy it. It was so hard and boring," she says.

"I got fed up with being so tired. I hated it really, so I quit. I went from being extremely fit to doing nothing - never exercising - but I loved it. I had time to do things. I had time to go out with my friends. I never regretted it."

But, through chance and circumstance, sport crept back in.

After injuring knee ligaments while on a fitness boot camp, she was advised that cycling could help her rehabilitation. Coincidentally, Jon was training for a sportive between Wetherby and Filey.

Then Learmonth and three of her colleagues organised a low-key fund-raising triathlon challenge.

"I took it deadly serious because I am that competitive," she remembers.

"I don't think anyone else was bothered, but I just got into it that way. It was really random and then I just got a bit too keen."

By the time London 2012 came around, Learmonth had switched careers to become a personal trainer. She travelled to watch the Olympic track cycling one Saturday and nipped across town to catch some of the women's triathlon in central London.

"It was absolutely ridiculously busy - we could hardly see. I never would have thought stood there that a few years later I would be racing the people in the race," she says.

In Tokyo, she could complete the surprisingly short route from spectator to central player.

After competing at European level, she joined British Triathlon's world-class programme in 2015.

She beefed up a run leg that failed to match her strength in the water and on the bike, and was rewarded with World Series bronze in Rotterdam in 2017, Commonwealth silver in 2018 and World Series silver in Lausanne in August 2019.

A couple of weeks before that latest medal, Learmonth and British team-mate Georgia Taylor-Brown were disqualified from an event testing the Tokyo Olympic course because they crossed the line hand in hand to take 'victory' together.

The result may have been scratched off, but the message remained: Britain and Learmonth are coming for Olympic medals.

"The women are so strong in Britain - there are too many of us, we can only get five in each World Series race. We are all competing with each other and if you start to underperform, you don't get the chance to prove yourself in the race," Learmonth says.

"Other nations don't have that problem. It makes it harder, so it does help raise the bar."

For now, though, she and Jon - who is taking another year off work to join her as a occasional training partner and bike mechanic - are not looking too far beyond Saturday's race in Mooloolaba, an event that serves as a season opener after the World Series event in Abu Dhabi was postponed because of coronavirus.

Learmonth says: "Five years ago we were both working full-time and didn't really have any sport in any lives - we did a bit, but not much - but to be back here in Australia and travelling the world, doing this, is kind of mad.

"It is so amazing to be here. We really try and appreciate it and take it all in because time flies. Before you know it, a year has gone and soon I will be back out of triathlon and back in full-time work, so you have to enjoy it."

Doing what you love - be it backpacking, fundraising or swapping swimming for a social life - has served Learmonth well so far.