Watch: We trained with Ireland's Olympic legends ahead of Paris 2024, here's what happened
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It was quite possibly the longest 200 metres of my life. And then I had to do it again.
The people strolling the Cork City to Passage West Greenway might well have wondered who or what this jumble of bones was exactly — a fusion of splayed limbs, a pulled muscle waiting to happen, maybe a man trying to make his skeleton outrun the rest of his body, just like in a cartoon. Well, it was me.
At least my first, and likely last, attempt at race walking was in esteemed company. As I barrelled and pulled and stretched my way off the Skehard Rd, I was being urged on by Olympic medallist and acclaimed coach, Leeside’s Rob Heffernan, and accompanied — however briefly — by two of his charges: Three-time Olympian Brendan Boyce and Team GB’s Callum Wilkinson.
As I disappeared into their rear view mirror, I all but collapsed over the 200 metre line, shattered. Rob had said beforehand: “If you can race walk 100m I’ll be amazed.” So at least I managed to top that.
But suddenly everything ached.
In recent weeks, Suffolk-born Callum has finished ninth at the World Championships in the 20km race walk, which was won by another competitor trained by Rob, Sweden’s Perseus Karlstöm.
Callum is gearing up for the Games in Paris and Brendan, from Co Donegal, also hoped to be there. Me — well, no. I was quietly devastated when Rob, after expressing satisfaction with my first ever attempt, told me that “this is the slowest the lads would walk” — something like a 5.01minute/Km pace, when they can average 3.52minute per Km.
There was also a fresh appreciation for just how hard this endurance event is: The locking of the legs as you push from heel to toe, the driving of the hips as they threaten to pop a wheelie, the rod-straight back alignment, the pumping of the arms.
Hours and hours later my shins still hurt and the muscles from my backside down to my heel felt like frayed piano wire. All this, and I literally struggled to overtake Brendan and Callum for the second go at 200m as they breezed past me — and I was jogging.
As recently as May 25, Brendan was tweeting about how a hamstring tear in April at the World Championships had meant he’d run out of road to recover in time for the European Championships, with that absence also putting paid to any hopes of qualifying for the Olympics in the 20km race. That meant an anxious wait to discover whether he would be selected for the mixed race walk team relay — a new event in which one female and one male athlete alternate 10km distances over a marathon distance.
Brendan was one of a number in contention but had to see if he was selected. The Milford man was philosophical about it all.
“I guess the pageantry is kind of finished for me,” he said of the Olympics-as-event.
“I just want to be an athlete and perform. London was probably the biggest games and I was young and there for the experience. It was my first proper championships, I hadn’t been to a European or Worlds, and I said I would do all the Olympic stuff in London and then get serious. Even Rio [in 2016] was different. We didn’t fly out until after the opening ceremony. Tokyo was a disaster for all that stuff [due to the pandemic].”
He says Paris “would have been good”, so close to home that more people could travel to watch him as he edges closer to the end of his career: “It was definitely a big carrot to get to Paris, and end on a high note, but sport is sport.”
Callum is at an earlier stage of his career and can remember, aged seven in the playground, hearing that the Olympics was coming to London, and saying he would be there one day.
Clearly highly driven, he has come back from ankle surgery last August to put in a strong year, qualifying for the Olympics at La Coruna in Spain and living with the pressure of being in an expectant Team GB. He sent an Instagram DM to Rob, feeling he was missing something in his training and wanting to tap into the Corkman’s expertise.
“It’s been an education for me,” he said, prompting Rob to chime in: “The Cork humour is different.” On that front, Callum said he’s improving. According to Rob: “It has broken other Englishmen but Callum is getting there.”
The single-mindedness, the desire, seems in-built. Callum recently returned from altitude training in San Moritz. While there, he remembers ringing his mum and telling her “I need this”. Some of his friends were downing beers in the aftermath of Leeds United’s play-off defeat at Wembley. It got Callum thinking, but only for a second: “Sometimes you’re like, do I want a normal life? And you’re like ‘no’.”
Callum spoke of choices rather than sacrifices, building towards something bigger. Brendan knows the feeling. Both he and Rob recall his heroic efforts in 2019 when he not just survived but thrived in the unbearable heat of Doha to finish sixth in the World Championships. The heat was dragging to such an extent that Rob said it was the only time he couldn’t finish a run, and members of the Irish team were concerned about having a drip ready in case Brendan collapsed at the end — an outlook seen as unduly negative by the two lads.
Here’s Brendan on the athlete’s obsession — with performance, with schedule, with marginal gains, with the big picture.
“Like if I’m going to a wedding or something and I’m in a training block, I feel all wrong being at a wedding all day, it’s not the way I’m supposed to be doing things,” he said, half-smiling.
“Standing around, eating, having a glass of wine, relaxing, you’re like, none of these other people here understand the pressure I’m under. So sometimes you go to things you don’t even want to be at because every day is so important in training and you only have three or four days to recover properly before you’re going to hit another session and like, if that wedding falls on a bad day in your programme, you’re just like ‘oh no’. I remember I went to a wedding in Kerry and I went to the church and trained then between the church and the dinner because I had to do two sessions that day — trained in the morning, went to the church, left the wedding reception to train again and came back. It was in Killarney so I was off into the woods to train while everyone else is drinking Prosecco. It’s on your mind all the time, you can’t switch off.”
And so the numbers help you through. An easy session could be 15km this morning, 6km in the evening. I suggest this doesn’t really sound that easy.
“It is to them, like,” Rob chortles. He has a colour-coded chart which is essentially the roadmap. As he says, in November, you know what March looks like in terms of training regimen, how you build towards the second half of the year and the big prizes, how you take in altitude training, pushing your body further and further, and how you work your way through often gruelling training camps, the type of fora in which some athletes crack.
“It brings back memories of what camps are like because they’re very intensive and you get to the point where you’d want to come home and you’re nearly apologising to your wife,” Rob said.
Meeting your targets is fundamental. “It quietens the chimp”, according to Rob. But then again, you have to be careful not to overthink it.
As Brendan says, missing your splits, being out a second or two per kilometre, can “ruin your mindset”, and have you questioning whether it was a momentary loss of concentration in a technical event, or a mental issue, or a physical problem, or...
“Then you go into a mental spiral,” he laughed.
It’s all incredibly hard work, but with a goal in mind. For Callum, he ultimately wants a medal but he knows that, more prosaically, Team GB needs evidence of consistent progression, so he feels he needs to finish in the top eight. For Brendan, conversely, a late call-up to the relay event would mean he would be in the “give it a lash” mindset. No time to overthink anything, in at the deep end. Both can see the glory.
“Misery drives hunger,” Rob says at one point, though he clearly leavens his intensity with a healthy dollop of humour and pure life experience. As for the training regime, “there’s a reason for every single day,” he says. “I love when the boys nail the plan.”
And even amid the pressure of the Olympic Games, a one-in-four years crescendo of hopes and dreams, it’s important to not hang everything on one day in August.
He uses a recent example involving his own young fella, Newcastle United defender Cathal, who had been told the previous week that he would be on the plane to Melbourne for first team end-of-season friendlies, only to then tear the skin off his achilles when a door at the training ground closed on his foot.
“You’re kind of saying in the moment, it’s huge — first team, private jet to Melbourne — but you’re saying if you’re going to go where you want to go, it isn’t anything,” Rob says. Anyway, Newcastle lost one of the matches 8-0. “He was saying that’s because I was missing!”
The trio of Rob, Callum and Brendan disappear off down the greenway and I eventually right myself after an extended period of wheezing.
It’s done: I am announcing the end of my brief but glorious career as a top level race walker. I’ll always have that little stretch of the Cork to Passage Greenway, and no one can take that away from me.
We all fork out in different directions; a few weeks later it was confirmed that Brendan hadn’t got the call. But Callum and the lads? Hopefully they’ll always have Paris.
The best preparation for an Irish wedding weekend is to train with one of the greatest sprinting athletes of all time.
Or at least, that is what I must have thought when I signed up for a sprinting masterclass with Paralympian Jason Smyth, the day before a best friend’s wedding weekend.
Buoyed by Irish Athletics’ recent achievements, most notably in the mixed and female categories, I boarded a train to Belfast Lanyon Place to meet Smyth at Mary Peters Athletics Track on Upper Malone Rd.
I arrive to a smiling Smyth, whose eyes meet mine sympathetically. He knows I’m not supposed to be here. So do I.
“Was the journey alright?” he says, kindly.
“This is mortifying,” I think to myself as I lace up my runners over an ailing spray tan. We begin with stretches and graduate into circuits. Smyth moves with ease. “We’ll do a few little jogs now,” he says, breaking my heart.
The way his feet spring on and off the track will never leave me, especially when compared with my ill-timed thunder-stomps. “Are you gonna go home now and tell everyone I’m a slavedriver?” he smiles.
“Nah, just that you’re actually a prick,” I smile.
“So the truth then?” he says, stone-faced. “Now, back to the starting line.”
Smyth, hailed by the International Paralympic Committee and BBC as “the fastest para-athlete of all time,” and by his peers as “one of the most technically gifted sprinters alive,” is gracious and self-deprecating to my obvious flaws. His soft Derry accent descending into gentle laughter every time I ask the question: Are we nearly done? He, of course, has spent a lifetime avoiding being done, having the distinction of never testing defeat in a major Para-Athletics event since his debut at the 2005 European Championships in Espoo, Finland.
Smyth, you’ll remember, has represented Ireland at three Paralympic Games — Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016 — winning gold medals at all three (including double gold in both Beijing and London).
He has held the title of the most consistent Paralympic performer in the world — at least in the T13 category, created for athletes with a visual impairment — for the past 15 years, and remains, in the category, the current World Record holder on both the 100m and 200m events with the time of 10.22s and 21.43s respectively.
“Did I set out to break records?” he muses, repeating my question back to me. A pause. “I think I just always wanted to be my best. And that dictated every decision I made. What I ate, how I recovered, how I slept. It’s a very selfish life, and I’m now enjoying being able to do the normal, silly things that everybody does — birthday parties, trips to the zoo with the kids. Now my wife would still say I am selfish, but that’s another thing.”
Smyth grew up in the village of Eglinton, north-east Derry, the eldest of five. At eight years old, he was diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease, a disorder that causes the central part of the eye’s vision to be affected. Both his mother and father are carriers of the gene. His grandfather had it, too.
“You don’t fully understand it at that age,” he says. “And to be honest, with the technology and accessibility and opportunities we have now, it’s hard to put into context what that felt like. I remember my mother crying after seeing the specialist. And honestly the hardest thing with these things would be acceptance, and to be completely honest, that took me years. But sport really was that vehicle for me, it really helped me make that shift from why me to why not?”
As a child Smyth was fast. Really fast. A strong footballer, and regular school sports day winner (“except when a guy who was 6’3” joined the school”) he joined an athletics club at 16 on the recommendation of a teacher.
“She said she would make some calls at her club, and I kind of hoped nothing would come of it,” he smiles. “Then I went and met Stephen Maguire, who ended up being my coach for most of my career.”
He trained for the first year without telling Maguire about his Stargardts. “The last thing you wanted to do at that age is stand out, so I kept it completely under wraps anywhere I could.”
The pivot from mainstream athletics to Paralympics training meant that information was public.
“The Paralympics in 2005 was in a very different place than it is now,” he says. “I wasn’t comfortable enough in myself yet, I was nearly embarrassed to be competing.
For someone whose professional posture demands that he push every muscle in his body forward, at top speed, over and over again until he hits a wall, Smyth is remarkably laid back.
That calm, of course, might be related to the fact that Smyth retired just over a year ago.
“It’s one of those things people talk about, going from a somebody to a nobody overnight,” he laughs. “It has been a huge shift, with a lot of stuff to get used to, but I think the main thing is that I chose retirement, I didn’t have to leave because of injury or anything. I also achieved all I wanted to achieve in the sport, so it’s not like I left a big part of me out on the track.”
The Smyth we’ve seen running — or indeed dancing; he took home the Dancing With The Stars Glitterball with Karen Byrne earlier this year — is less than a percentage of his actual reality.
“Competing is the sexy part,” he says. “People look at that and think: I want to do that. Very few actually want to do what it takes to get there.”
His relationship with his disability remains complex: “If you said tomorrow that you could give me my full sight, I’d take it. But I wouldn’t take it over what not having it has given me.”
But, he’s hopeful for the future: “All I’ve always wanted to do was change people’s perceptions. That’s what I tried to do with my career, and that’s what I did with Dancing With The Stars.”
His wife and two young daughters have just arrived to collect him from the track. They brought the Glitterball trophy into school today to show their friends.
“At the end of the day, I’ve done far more in life because of the fact that I can’t see very well, compared with what I might have achieved with full vision. Because of sport, I’ve been able to overcome challenges and build a resilience that has created important building blocks for the future. And I know for sure that if I didn’t have limited vision, I wouldn’t have had the success I’ve had, and I wouldn’t be the man I am today. That is 100% certain.”
ON a blustery Cork morning, I set off to meet former sprint hurdles athlete Derval O’Rourke in Munster Technology University (MTU) for a light hurdles training session.
My husband was still laughing as I went out the door, and my sister said she could collect my daughter from summer camp “if you injure yourself and can’t drive”.
The athletics track at MTU had been re-laid recently and looks magnificent (they must have known we were coming). I look around for Derval.
“Over here! I have the hurdles!” I rush over to help her get the hurdles onto the track.
“I spent half my life carrying hurdles around. If I was training I’d have to bring 10 of them out and lay them on the track,” she says, as she effortlessly lifted them over a railings.
I take one from her and nearly collapse to the ground. “Oh yeah, they’re heavy,” she warns. “No shit,” I think.
For women, the hurdles stand at 2 foot 9 inches, and for men it’s 3 foot 6 inches — so like jumping over a young child.
“You have to be tall for hurdles,” says Derval. I gulped as I looked at them; I’m 5ft 4 inches, not a natural hurdler height.
Despite having retired 10 years ago, Derval still looks in peak physical shape. She is, of course, an Olympian, having competed in three Olympic Games — 2004, 2008 and 2012.
She also competed in several European and World Athletics Championships, and took home the gold medal at the 2006 World Indoor Championships for the 60m hurdles.
She still holds the national record for the 60m hurdles, and held the national record in the 100m hurdles for 13 years, until Sarah Lavin broke it in 2023 with a time of 12.62 seconds.
Put simply, she’s an elite athlete. I, on the other hand, am a 48-year-old, mainly sedentary woman, who’s main source of activity is a hit around on the badminton court once a week.
Derval eyed up the hurdles and set off at a fast pace towards them. I watched as she glided over them and landed easily on the other side.
Derval talks me through the technique. “You’ll need momentum, so take off fast. Then get your lead leg over and follow with your trailing leg.”
I look at my legs. “Which one is my lead leg?” We agree it’s probably my right leg. So I need to get to the hurdle with my right leg ready to go up and over.
There’s no doubt that hurdling is a highly technical event. “It’s an interrupted sprint really,” says Derval. “You’re trying to get to the finish line as fast as possible, and the hurdles are a little bit of an inconvenience.”
Inconvenience? Let’s break it down. You’re sprinting 100 meters, and there are 10 hurdles. You’re looking at a time of around 12.5 seconds to be competitive. So that’s around one tenth of a second each hurdle.
“And what about making sure you get to the hurdle on the right, er, lead leg?” I ask. Derval explains that you take eight steps to the first hurdle, then three between each subsequent hurdle.
“You’ll know within one or two steps if you’re right, and if you’re not, you need to correct yourself straightaway.” That’s because, the last thing you want to do, particularly in a big race, is hit a hurdle.
“Does it hurt if you hit one?”
“It absolutely does,” says Derval. And if you hit one with your lead leg, it’s race over, as the world-famous American hurdler Gail Devers, who famously fell at the final hurdle at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, will tell you.
Apart from the technical and physical side of the hurdles, the psychology of the event is brutal.
“You have your lane and there are just inches between you and your competitors. And the athletes on either side want what you want.” Derval explains how it’s all about how you manage yourself. “I always loved the stress, the bright lights, and I wanted to put on a show.”
“What are you thinking when you’re on the blocks?” I ask.
“I have one thought at that moment. Get out hard and keep going. With the hurdles, it’s all about controlled aggression, you’re teetering on the edge of catastrophe, and that’s where you need to be to win.” she says.
Speaking of catastrophe, I make my move towards the hurdle. As I get to it, I lift my lead leg and close my eyes… and thump to the ground on the other side.
“Wow, well done,” says Derval. “I’m genuinely impressed you got over the hurdle. You have fierce good body awareness. A very neat trailing leg.”
Honestly, I feel like I’m in a dream sequence.
We say goodbye a few minutes later, me still basking in the praise from one of Ireland’s best-known athletes. I hop into my car, bringing my trailing leg in neatly behind me... or was that my lead leg?