Olympian Linda Byrne has won her biggest battle yet

You know what every athlete says about running in the Olympics. The lifelong ambition. The dreamy sense of achievement. That feeling nothing will ever quite top. For Linda Byrne that last part was the problem. Nearly everything about her life up to the point of London 2012 had to do with running. Once the Olympics were over, the comedown hit her in a way neither she nor anyone close to her could have imagined.

Gradual at first, then completely crippling, that it soon destroyed her running career comes with the deep consolation it could have been far more tragic.

That she’s now back running, for purely pleasurable purposes, is in itself an achievement beyond anything the Olympics had to offer.

“I see running now as a gift,” she says. “And it’s still a precious thing to me. I think the big lesson, looking back now, is that I didn’t have the balance. That’s so important. Running had become too obsessive, and because I never really felt comfortable, socially, outside of running, I just focused even more on the running.

“Then I found it hard to deal with anything outside of that. You don’t want to let people down, your family, your coach. Of course they don’t feel that way. But you do. And the type of person I was, very shy at the time, I wasn’t able to deal with it, and that was the point I stopped enjoying running, realised something was wrong.”

That Byrne is saying this almost exactly three years on from that point is significant on several counts: it’s taken her those full three years to find the balance in life that she needed; only now is she entirely comfortable reflecting on the issues that brought her to that point; and perhaps more importantly she wants to highlight those issues to athletes who might somehow find themselves in a similar situation, not just those that get to run in the Olympics.

Physical escape

It’s also important to understand, while running can work wonders for people suffering from anxieties or depression, why it was that running actually lead her down that road. For Byrne, running became a physical escape for some of the mental issues she needed to confront, and eventually they caught up with her.

She turns 30 next month, which means four years ago, with the 2012 London Olympics approaching, she was just turning 26, and in the prime of her running career. She’d always been an exceptionally talented and successful junior, winning countless underage and schools titles for both her club Dundrum South Dublin and Presentation College Terenure.

She represented Ireland in the World Cross Country in Leopardstown in 2002, running the junior race aged just 15, and in 2005, finished a terrific fourth in the European Cross Country junior race. The inevitable offers of a US scholarship followed although she chose, wisely, to stay closer to home, studying at Dublin City University (DCU), where she fell under the guidance of her coach Enda Fitzpatrick.

Although initially focusing on the track and cross country, Byrne’s strength was unquestionably her endurance, and along with Fitzpatrick she agreed the best chance of her qualifying for London 2012 was the marathon. It was a gradual transition and then in the 2011 Dublin Marathon, her debut over the 26.2-mile distance, she nailed the qualifying on her first attempt, running 2:36:23. She was also the first Irish women’s finisher.

Everything between then and London went according to plan. She won the Women’s Mini Marathon 10km that June, in an excellent 33:30, and the Olympics went relatively well also: she ran 2:37:13, not far outside her best, finishing 66th of the 118 starters.

“My goal was to be the first Irish woman, and I was,” she says. “The course was tough, three laps around London, and it was only my second marathon as well. Part of it was a positive experience, but I also felt I was there to do a job, really, to perform. Everything about the build up was a little overwhelming. Even the bit of media attention, I found, was quite tough.

“After the race the atmosphere changed completely, and I was able to relax, to sit back and watch some of the races. But then one of the nights we were in one of the Irish bars, which was absolutely packed, and I found that quite hard too. It was more of a relief, really, when it was all over.

“It still means a lot to me, to have run in the Olympics. That was always the goal, and something I can always say I did. I just didn’t see what was coming next, and the type of person I was, I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t know how to.”

There were some warning signs, none necessarily flashing, and her coach certainly didn’t see them either. Fitzpatrick admits that now also knowing Byrne wasn’t the sort of athlete to complain about anything, such was her unyielding level of dedication, again a part of the problem.

“She was certainly not overtrained,” says Fitzpatrick, himself an elite international runner back in his day.

“She ran 2:36 in her first marathon, but if she ran 2:33 that day it wouldn’t have surprised me at all. There was a plan there to make steady improvement and get her to Rio as a sub-2:30 marathon runner.”

Further improvement

Indeed in the months immediately after London there was further improvement.

Byrne was part of the Irish women’s team that won gold at the 2012 European Cross Country in Budapest, finishing eighth overall, behind individual gold medal winner Fionnuala Britton. That same team finished fifth at the World Cross Country in Poland the following March, although by then Byrne definitely wasn’t feeling her usual self.

“Then I just hit a wall,” is how she describes it. She was scheduled to race the Great Ireland Run in the Phoenix Park, exactly three years ago last Sunday, but rang Fitzpatrick a few days before saying she didn’t feel up for it. Only she changed her mind the night before, ended up winning it – although that proved a breaking point of sorts.

“I’ve looked back at pictures of me in that race, and can hardly recognise myself. My eyes were all black, my face all sunken in. I did not look well at all. I thought I had been listening to my body, but I wasn’t.

“I think I was still coming down from all the hype of London, and then it just hit me, I went into a new low, and I found it very hard to get out of it. I started having very bad panic attacks as well, but didn’t understand why.”

Nor did Fitzpatrick.

“In hindsight, there were warning signs there, some things that maybe we should have seen, but we didn’t. Initially she felt maybe she had a back injury, but then just stopped, didn’t want to train, said her head wasn’t right. That’s when we knew there was a bigger problem here.

“Her family and her family doctor got involved at that stage, but there was also a bit of luck involved. Because there were some cracks in the support mechanisms, for Irish athletes, and I’d still be a little bit concerned about that.”

The bit of luck that Fitzpatrick talks about started with his former training partner Gordon Harold, who had spent four years on a US scholarship and was now working as a child and family psychologist.

Fitzpatrick met him on holiday in Portugal that August, mentioned Byrne’s state of health, and Harold immediately offered to help. Then located in Cardiff (he’s now based at the University of Sussex), Byrne credits him for helping to identify some of the underlying issues, particularly her struggle to find some balance after London.

Shy person

“Yeah, I’d rarely go out with friends, and would never drink. Running has to be a like that, because there’s nowhere to hide. You can’t be going out at weekends if you want to perform at that high level. So I’d have no regrets about that.

“But I should have made more time to meet up with friends, do something different. But because I was a very shy person, I needed to learn how to come out of my shell. And I just didn’t realise that, when running is all you’ve known from a young age.”

Her family support was central and she also credits Emma Gallivan, then physiotherapist with Athletics Ireland, for recognising that her running injuries weren’t simply physical.

Gallivan identified a severe tension in Byrne’s back, shoulders and chest, an obvious sign of mental stress. She recommended some yoga classes which although a little uncomfortable at first Byrne now swears by (and teaches herself).

Byrne had to take on some of the healing responsibility herself in other ways too, and she knew it. Around the same time she’d started a part-time job in De La Salle College, Churchtown, teaching special needs students, where her brother Brian was teaching maths.

“It was mostly one-on-one, and I was enjoying that,” she says, “but I had to take a break, knowing I needed to get myself right first, overcome my own issues, if I wanted to help those students, because actually some of them had similar issues to what I had. I’m back doing that now, enjoying it again, and hope to do an MA in counselling later this year.”

What also helped her enjoy sport again was, somewhat ironically, sport itself, when one of her fellow teachers at De La Salle suggested women’s rugby, and recommended she join the DLS Palmerstown club, in Kilternan.

“Everyone thought I was mad, I didn’t have a clue about rugby, but it was great, something completely different, and I really enjoyed it. It was the perfect balance, because there’s much more of a social side to it, and I was able to learn some of the social skills I was lacking.

Very isolated

“With running, it can get very isolated. It’s not really a very sociable sport, at the elite level. Rugby gave me something different to learn, and just learning about tackling, I found, gave me strength.

“I also think it is more open now, the issues of mental health. I read some articles written by Niall Breslin (Bressie), watched some of his documentaries, and that helped a lot, got me thinking about why I was running too, away from deeper issues.”

That’s why she’s eager now to share that experience, coaching some of the women athletes at DCU, gentling advising on the need to keep things balanced.

And why, without much thought, she was happy to run again only last Saturday, exactly three years after running to a standstill, in the K-Club 10km at Straffan.

“And I really enjoyed it,” she says. “Such a beautiful course.”