Sonia O’Sullivan: Why being at your best is a numbers game

There is a lot of talk about analytics and ‘marginal gains’ in sport these days. It’s one of the fastest-growing areas for monitoring athletes and getting them to the start line in peak condition, or at least as close to it as scientifically possible.

It’s about taking some of the guesswork out of it, with every little detail of an athlete’s life monitored and decisions then made based on their current state of health. It’s particularly useful for athletes during those times when they might be feeling a bit under the weather, unsure if they should push through with a training session or else rest up. Their state of health can be evaluated with evidence, and a more calculated risk-assessment.

One company in Ireland based in Sligo has been working in this area for a number of years now, helping elite athletes and professional teams across the world improve the amount of time competing while reducing time on the sidelines, injured or unwell, or even both.

This company – Orreco – was a pipe dream as we entered the new millennium, when Dr Brian Moore was pursuing his goal of analysing athlete’s blood profiles while they trained hard, pushed their bodies to the limit in training and races.

I was one of the athletes tracked by Brian at this time, while he was compiling his PhD, even though I understood very little of the science behind the ‘bio markers’ and ‘blood reticulates’; but I quickly understood the confidence you could get when told by someone monitoring your blood that things were looking good on the inside, and to just keep doing what you are doing.

There is no doubt I often trained on the edge of a cliff, and without consistent monitoring there were times when I went over that edge, all the training wasted on a subpar result. I trained around much of the old-school philosophy: the more you train, the faster you run, the better the results. This works up to a certain point, then you come crashing down; because no matter how mentally and physically tough an athlete can be there comes a time when the body will not be able to cope; as fit as are you one week, you can be half the athlete one week later due to the constant stress on the body.

In the mid 1990s when I was racing around the tracks of Europe and breaking records in most races, there always came a point in the season when I started to run out of steam and ended up just hanging on for those last few races. I still picture it all as a mountain peak: I raced to the top, which coincided with the major championship event of the year, then afterwards just raced until I could go no more.

I remember one race in Rieti, Italy. This was a small stadium in a small town, two hours’ drive from Rome, but known all over the world as a super-fast track, which had produced numerous world records. In 1995 I turned up all set to attack the world record for the mile. On paper it was all set up; great pacemaker, a good field, and all I had to do was run. Only thing, this was about my 20th race of the year and I was on the downhill slide.

The pacemaker took off, and I was nowhere in sight. I couldn’t make myself keep up, barely managed to claw back what looked like an insurmountable lead, and at least took the win on an extremely lethargic day for me. If I was being monitored at this time it would have been obvious how ludicrous the record attempt was; but back then, once you committed there was very little to tell you to back off.

Then towards the end of the 1996 season, when everything came crashing down for me, the writing was firmly on the wall.

It was time to take a step back, listen to some experts, instead of thinking I had all the answers myself.

It wasn’t until the build-up to the Sydney Olympics that I realised how important this had become. Things seemed to be going well in training, and racing was pretty good too, until I turned up at the London Grand Prix. I had a subpar run, and in my eyes it was a disaster. I could see no positives from a 15:18 over 5000m, finishing ninth. Two months out from the Olympics and there were a lot of questions racing around my head.

That was when I got the call from Brian, reminding me to check my blood values. With my mind in turmoil, desperate for some answers, the blood scores were actually the best he’d seen all year. That performance in London had been a minor blip, not the major drop I’d feared, and a week later I was racing in Zurich, back to my best.

Still there is a part of me recognises that there are times when athletes will be a little reckless, do things that may not seem rationally possible. I think back of those world and Irish records I set in the 1990s, when I was certainly fearless and probably reckless too, would I have set the tracks alight if I’d been carefully monitored before each race?

What I do know is that, even though it was in its infancy at the time, the analytics and marginal gains I got from Orreco did in some ways resurrect my athletics career, helping me win an Olympic silver medal, and still set Irish and world records, when as close to my peak as scientifically possible.