Fionnuala Britton primed to medal at European Cross Country

On this date 20 years ago Sonia O’Sullivan felt rubbish and unmotivated. She started off with her usual warm-up around Richmond Park, close to her training base in London, before a hill session of 13 times 300 metres in an average of 51 seconds.

She did feel a little better by the end, and after a weights session in the gym that afternoon, she finished the day with another six-kilometre run.

O’Sullivan trained twice a day, every day, for the rest of that week, running a total of 132 kilometres. Then, the week before Christmas, she upped it up to 170kms, including another hill session, where for the first half of the set, she increased the distance to 400m.

On Christmas Day she only trained once: 27kms, in one hour and 50 minutes. After another hill session, two days later, she ended the week with a five-mile cross-country race in Durham, on New Year’s Eve, where she finished fourth. Her mileage total for that month, December 1994, came to 410.

It’s perfectly normal for athletes to feel rubbish and unmotivated when they’re averaging over 160kms a week of running in the depths of winter. O’Sullivan actually completed 53 training runs that month, including two races, without taking a single rest day.

Most of those runs were done alone, on cold frosty mornings or dark wet nights. Still, no matter how rubbish it got or how unmotivated she felt, O’Sullivan never once backed down – all of this carefully documented in her training diary from that month.

No recognition

Brendan Foster always said most distance runners feel tired all the time. They wake up tired, they go around all day tired, and they go to bed tired. It's all part of the hard and tiresome slog of the distance runner at this time of the year, when there is no recognition and reward for their efforts. But it's like putting money in the bank: it will always be there when the day comes to collect.

Indeed O'Sullivan spent most of the following summer collecting it. She was effectively unbeatable on the track in 1995, cleaning up on the old Grand Prix circuit, winning in Zurich, Oslo, Monaco and Berlin, running world-leading times in four separate distances, including a 3:58.85 for 1,500m – the only sub-four in the world that year – and not forgetting her World Championship gold medal over 5,000m in Gothenburg.

Of the 21 races she ran on the track that summer, O’Sullivan won 20 of them, and finished that 1995 season as the IAAF Athlete of the Year, the most consistent women’s distance runner in the world. Those December days of feeling rubbish and unmotivated had become magnificently worthwhile.

On this date 20 years ago Catherina McKiernan arrived in Alnwick in the north of England for the first edition of the European Cross Country championships. She’d backed off a little on the hard and tiresome slog of her winter training, although not that much: Alnwick was the chance for some recognition and reward, but it was still only a stepping stone to the World Cross Country, the following March.

By then, McKiernan had won three World Cross Country silver medals in succession, and finished each of those seasons as the outright winner of the IAAF Grand Challenge, the most consistent women’s cross-country runner in the world.

So McKiernan wasn’t entirely motivated by the prospect of a European Cross Country title in December 1994, beyond the fact she knew she could win it.

As it turned out McKiernan was given a hard run all the way to the line by Spain's Julia Vaquero: in the end it took a couple of elbows to remind Vaquero that McKiernan wouldn't be beaten.

Mental strength

McKiernan had to hold onto the ropes of the finishing shoot to stop herself from collapsing, and always said she won that race on her mental strength more than anything else.

These are just little teasing reminders of that time, 20 years ago, when Ireland boasted two of the best women athletes in the world, in any sport, and that perhaps we didn’t appreciate them at the time.

We may never see the likes of O’Sullivan and McKiernan again, and maybe distance running has moved on, in the global sense, although at least we still boast the most consistent women’s cross-country runner in Europe.

Because on Sunday in Borovets, a mountain resort in Bulgaria, Fionnuala Britton is looking to win a third European Cross Country title in four years. She finished a close fourth last year, in Belgrade, surrendering the back-to-back titles she won in Slovenia in 2011, and Hungary in 2012.

There were plenty of days in the aftermath of Belgrade when the Britton felt rubbish and unmotivated, but she never once backed down.

So, since the start of September, the 30-year-old has been training twice a day, almost every day, and every bit as hard and consistently as O’Sullivan and McKiernan were in their prime. Most of those runs are done alone, on cold frosty mornings or dark wet nights, around her home in Wicklow town. She’s now perfectly primed to win a medal in Borovets, quite possibly and ideally the gold medal, and with that at least gain some recognition and reward for her efforts, even if some people still don’t appreciate it at the time.