A game of tig that led to a silver lining

SCHOOL DAYS:Catherina McKiernan recalls her innocent school days in Cavan and her love for everything sporting.

SHE WAS never one to sit still for long. Catherina McKiernan's formative years in rural Cavan were a hyperactive blur of sport. Cornafean is a small place, lost in the sweep of all but the most detailed maps. What it had in abundance was open space, field after field of it, a natural playground for an active child.

"I was always outside. I can't remember when I wasn't. When the World Cup was on we'd go mad. We'd set up posts in one of the fields in front of the house and we'd have a soccer game among ourselves."

She attended primary school in Coronea, a mile and a half from home. It was a long walk for a five-year-old. Funny, the little fragments of memory that bob up in her mind. She recalls her elder sister Rose holding her hand on those walks to school, sometimes pulling her along as she lagged behind - she who was to leave so many in her dust in years to come.

At break times, the children would play the chasing game, tig. Little Catherina McKiernan danced and wove her way around every grasping hand that tried to catch her. She cannot remember ever being caught. It all seemed natural. "They could never catch me but there was never anything thought of it. I never thought anything of it."

Camogie drew most of her sporting energy as a girl, preceding her involvement in competitive running by several years. She played throughout secondary school in Loreto Cavan, also representing the county at underage level.

"It was a big thing in the school. I remember we got to an Ulster final one year. The head nun was there; that was a big thing. She was along the sideline, shouting, 'Come on, come on!'"

At Loreto, lunch breaks were a blessed release into sport. She sat in class braced as the clock hands clicked out the inches to a half-hour's freedom. With the bell's first trilling, she dove headlong for the doors. "I used to wear my shorts and T-shirt under my school uniform so that I wouldn't waste time changing."

She laughs at this. Devising stratagems to maximise the time she could spend on outdoor activity was a feature of her schooldays.

Despite her evident natural athleticism, she was 15 before running started to draw her in.

"It didn't start to nurture till my fourth or fifth year there. There were a few girls interested in running. It would have been a select few. Most people went for the team sports."

Once she had started running she could not stop. The perpetual-motion machine that was Catherina McKiernan was smitten. "It was just the feeling of well-being it gave me. When you can get out there and float, just that floating feeling.

"No money would buy it. And it gave me great confidence, just literally the feeling it gave me, the endorphins."

Training after school, she first ran the back fields of her father's farm, hemmed in by her shyness. She later took to the hilly country round Cornafean, dipping and rising with the landscape. The hard, recurring contours of the land helped make her the world-class athlete she became.

"I knew no better. If I wanted to run, I had to run up and down hills. It was the same with cycling. But it would have helped to build the aerobic capacity and make you stronger."

In 1987, when she was in fifth year in Loreto, she raced in the All-Ireland Schools Cross Country at Mallusk, near Belfast. She finished second, behind one S O'Sullivan of Cobh. Notice was being served.

The following year, her last in school, was to prove defining.

February 1988: Catherina McKiernan, camogie captain, awaits Loreto Cavan's Ulster semi-final. It is set for the second-last Friday of the month. Meanwhile, Catherina McKiernan, runner, awaits the Ulster Schools cross-country event.

Here fate, wearing its most mischievous smirk, enters her young sporting life. The race is scheduled for the day after the camogie match. Participating in both is not practicable.

Circumstance had her at gunpoint. Neither choice was without attendant pain. Her decision to run stirred a mood of rancour in the school.

"It was a hard decision but my heart was set on the running. I loved the running. I think it was a good decision in the end, because I was successful. There was a bit of hard feeling, needless to say. I was upset at the time. As a young girl when everyone stops talking to you it's not very nice."

She won the Ulster race through teeth gritted even harder than usual. Her next stop was the All-Ireland Schools event. Piqued, Loreto threatened to ban her from competing. She was stripped of her captaincy and prohibited from running around the school grounds. Sense eventually prevailed after the story became a cause célèbre in the national press.

For one accustomed to slogging up the hills of Cornafean, the flat All-Ireland course in Dungarvan was rolled out before her like an invitation to gold.

"That was the turning point, when I won the All-Ireland Schools race. I ran in my bare feet that day. Where I was training, there were cow marks and muck. In Dungarvan it was like a carpet, so I thought, 'You don't need shoes for this sort of thing'. So I just took them off."

That All-Ireland success was the culmination of her school sporting career, a step on the road to her major international successes. She travelled the long miles home to Cavan that day in a heady glow of satisfaction. She exulted in the run itself, setting out no markers for the future then, but something big was gaining form and momentum.

Sometimes, later in her career, matters extraneous to the pure act of running, the tangle of sponsorship and press commitments, began to impinge. They leached away just a little of the joy of it.

She runs now, though, just as she did as a schoolgirl, for the sheer, unadorned pleasure of it.

"I run every day in the Phoenix Park. It's like where I started; I've come full circle. I run now because I love to run, love the feeling it gives me. And that's why I started to run initially."