Giving mothers a sporting chance

Accomplished women in sport explain how they manage to juggle family life, training and other regular activities

FOR INTERNATIONAL horse rider Sarah Wardell it was the worst fall of her life. She broke her back, was paralysed down her left side and shattered a cheekbone and eye socket. To make matters worse, she was pregnant.

“But Phonsie was fine,” she says cheerfully of her second son, who is nearly one now. Not surprisingly, that accident during the cross-country phase of a three-day event in Germany in the summer of 2008 put an end to Wardell’s riding – at least until the baby was safely born seven months later.

Within eight weeks of his birth, she was back into the top level of a sport that makes most people’s list of the Top 10 Most Dangerous Sports.

In comparison, Wardell’s first pregnancy was relatively uneventful. She managed to ride in the European Eventing Championships at five months – “and finished the best of the Irish” – before hanging up her boots at home in Dunlavin, Co Wicklow until after Tighe was born in January 2006.

She had weighed up medical advice. “The doctor said to me ‘you’re fit, you’re healthy, you are not doing anything different from what you usually do. Obviously if you have a fall you are going to be putting both of you at risk but I can’t stop you from making that decision’. I was on a very experienced horse and all was well,” she explains.

What about her husband, David? Was he happy with her continuing to ride? “I don’t think he had a huge choice,” she says candidly. “I don’t think he enjoyed it.”

Any woman trying to combine motherhood with high-performance sport, faces not only physical, but also emotional and logistical challenges to keep her career on track. The unusual sight last autumn of a woman tennis player celebrating a major tournament victory with her 18-month-old daughter in her arms was a reminder of how rarely mothers are able (or want) to return to world-class sport.

When Belgium’s Kim Clijsters won the US Open last September, after a two-year break, she became the first mother for 29 years to win a Grand Slam title. She joined the roll-call of other outstanding “mummy athletes” such as Lindsay Davenport and Evonne Goolagong Cawley within the tennis world, and long-distance runners such as Scotland’s Liz McColgan and our own Sonia O’Sullivan.

Ireland’s most successful female athlete, O’Sullivan was reportedly back training within 10 days of giving birth to her first daughter Ciara in 1999. Her performance at the Sydney Olympics the following year proved to be one of the highlights of her career, winning a silver medal in the 5,000m as well as finishing sixth in the 10,000m final. Her second daughter Sophie was born in 2001.

Wardell (38) dreams of competing in an Olympic Games but she wonders if motherhood will prove to be incompatible with what it would take to achieve that. She was on the long list for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, but it was in the lead-up when she fell and broke her back, otherwise she would have been “very hopeful” of making the team. The previous Olympics she was first reserve. Could it be third time lucky for London in 2012?

“I have the horse power but maybe it is something that is going to be elusive to me,” she says. “Twelve years and I have been absolutely knocking at the door. I would love to – it would be my biggest dream come true. But I think reality has to set in at some point and family is more important.”

Inevitably, her responsibilities as a mother restrict her. But she says David is “amazing”. She can head off to competitions and he will hold the fort at home. “There aren’t many husbands who can do that.”

His only drawback, by the sounds of it, is that he works in tourism, which means his busiest period clashes with the eventing season that runs from March to October. He can be away for a week to 10 days at a time, taking Americans around Ireland. She is totally on her own then “and that really is quite chaotic”, she admits.

Juggling daily training with family life is second nature to marathon runner and mother of four Annette Kealy, who works as a barrister in addition to all that. She is a living riposte to all parents who say they just don’t have time to exercise!

The first Irish woman home in the last Dublin City Marathon – repeating a feat she had achieved on her debut in the race in 2003 – Kealy makes running part of her commute from home in Malahide to work in the Law Library.

She drives to Clontarf and then runs the rest of the way to Four Courts where she has a shower, changes into the suit she keeps there and is ready for work. At the end of the day, she takes a longer route back to the car, completing about 12 miles between the two runs.

“When I started people thought I was mad. But now I go into the Law Library and nobody bats an eyelid,” she says.

Work as a self-employed barrister is flexible and she tries to go into the Law Library just three days a week. She’ll catch up in the evenings or at weekends if necessary but she likes having two days where she can be around for Lia (10), eight-year-old Ellie, five-year-old Sean and three-year-old Aaron.

The three older children all attend St Oliver Plunkett School in Malahide and Kealy’s mother comes to the house to mind Aaron when she’s working. If she’s off on Fridays, she leaves Aaron with the other granny in Artane and heads off to St Anne’s Park to train; other days she’ll head out for a run for an hour in the grounds of Malahide Castle when her husband Eoin comes in from his teaching job in Hartstown, west Dublin, at about 4.30pm.

On Saturdays and Sundays, it is a parental relay as she goes in the morning and Eoin minds the kids; and then he will go for a run when she returns. They try to fit this around the children’s own activities on Saturdays.

It would be nice to train with a group of runners, she acknowledges, but logistics rule that out most of the time. “If you have to drive or meet somebody, that’s all extra time so most of the time I train by myself.” As a busy mother, she finds the running is “hugely beneficial”.

“You feel good afterwards and you’re probably better all round and able for more. As long as I have got my training done, I don’t mind lugging around with the kids, bringing them to their activities, or going to the park or bringing them to parties. It’s nice if you have your own little exercise done first.”

Even family holidays are built around running. The last few summers they have headed off to Colorado where a cousin lives. “It is at altitude,” she explains, “and we kind of use the summer holiday as a training camp. Some people would be horrified at that!”

Kealy (42), whose main sport as a teenager was basketball, only took up competitive running by chance in her fourth year at Thomond College in Co Limerick, where she was studying PE and English. She was invited to join the women’s cross-country team and “loved it from then on”.

Before Lia was born in 1999, she had represented Ireland in the World Student Games and the European Cross-Country Championships. She kept up running during all her pregnancies, but says she wouldn’t go as far as calling it training. You lose the “guts of six months” training, she estimates.

“As the months were going on, I ran less and less. Say I’d usually do an hour, then it was 50 minutes, then it was 40 minutes, and then down to half an hour. The bump then was very big and I’d go for swims.”

She generally went back to it about six weeks after giving birth. “The funny thing about running, and anybody who likes it will probably empathise, you like your little run, it is not a hardship. There may be one or two days in a week that you’re pushing yourself very hard, the rest of the time you’re just ambling along. I couldn’t wait to get back.”

Those early years of motherhood seem to be a bit of blur to her. “Somewhere in between the babies, I made another European cross-country team and a world cross-country team.” There was also a little matter of combining studying law at night with her day job at the time, teaching in St Paul’s College, Raheny.

Kealy’s best time for the marathon is 2.43 but she has only ever run it in Dublin which is quite a hilly course. Up to now, with the children to consider, she has not wanted the extra complications of running one abroad.

“I am still hoping there is a better marathon in me,” she explains. “I would love to get under 2.40 but the question is could I do it? I know I’m getting old but I think there is still a bit of time before age starts kicking in.”

If she achieved that, she could be close to an Olympic qualification time. Fellow athlete Pauline Curley, who she beat in the 2009 Dublin marathon, went to the Beijing Olympics after comfortably reaching the “B standard”, with a time of 2.39 on a flatter marathon course in Rotterdam.

Kealy reckons lack of rest is her biggest downfall – “I don’t get enough sleep”. She remembers reading that world marathon record holder Paula Radcliffe gets 12-14 hours, including naps during the day. “I’d love a nap during the day,” she says wistfully.

Generally she does not find it a big problem squeezing in daily runs of an hour, to an hour and a half, but coming up to a marathon it is more difficult. “You have to do a few long runs and it is a bit of a project that you take on. You would have to disappear for two hours or two and a half hours.”

However Eoin, who she started going out with when they were both teenagers living in Artane, is equally enthusiastic about running and never complains about her going off. Such a supportive, long-suffering partner is a pre-requisite to sporting success for a mother.

Wardell’s husband feeds and mucks out the horses for her most days before he goes to work. She exercises the three of them from 9am to 1pm while Tighe is at school and a local woman comes in to mind Phonsie. The boys are with their mother all afternoon and then she puts them in the buggy while she does the evening stables.

In between, she manages to run a part-time business making curtains at home. “I then have to try to stop the children eating pins.”

This year she will be bringing on two younger horses, in addition to her two experienced mounts, Killeenduff Boy and Kincluny, which will entail a lot more competing as they build up experience in the three different disciplines that make up eventing: dressage, cross-country and showjumping.

“I haven’t quite got my head around it yet,” she admits. “I don’t know how I am going to work it.”

Wardell agrees that there is a new sense of mortality after having children – something that also comes with age.

“I love what I do and I love the cross-country,” she stresses. “If I start thinking I’m not enjoying this, I just won’t do it anymore. So much effort goes into doing it – you would want to be loving it!

“It is a high-risk sport and we definitely know that,” she adds. “I’m not as gung-ho and brave as I used to be but I don’t know that I have lost my nerve, I think I have just got sensible.”

swayman@irishtimes.com