Determined walker chasing his goals one step at a time

ATHLETICS:AFTER 21 of the 50 kilometres that made up Rob Heffernan's attempt to qualify for the London Olympics a fortnight back, he found himself a target.

Heffernan likes targets. Reckons that with anything in life, if you get yourself the right target and do the right thing the right way, it will inch towards you as much as you will towards it. You don’t need to be a race walker to appreciate the value of each small step.

His target that afternoon in Naumberg, Germany, took the shape of a 21-year-old Pole by the name of Adrian Blocki, who had burst clear of the field after three kilometres and by now had built up a 45-second lead.

Heffernan was at the front of the chasing pack, alongside Jesus Angel Garcia, a four-time medallist at the World Championships. The two class walkers in the field, neither he nor Garcia were minded to do the other’s work for him so Heffernan figured he’d go about catching Blocki on his own.

After 22 kilometres, the gap was down to 44 seconds. After 23, it was 36. After 25, not only was it down to 27 but Heffernan had opened up a 10-second gap on Garcia. He was in full predator mode now, insinuating his way across the ground and taking chunks out of Blocki with each passing lap. By the 26th kilometre, the gap was down to 15 seconds – half a minute gone in the space of just four laps.

And then, just as he was about to reel Blocki in, just as he was about to plant a dart in the bull’s-eye he’d set for himself just under half an hour earlier, the Pole dropped out of the race. He finished out the 26th kilometre and then pulled stumps. Heffernan could have punched him.

“Next thing,” he says, “I’m in the lead and I have about 15 seconds on the guy behind me, who I know had won a medal in the World Championships just two years ago so I know is not going to die. And my heart just kind of sank. I was going, ‘I’m out on my own here, there’s nobody watching the race, there’s nothing to be gained. We’ll just get this over with and get the (qualifying) time.’

“I slowed down a bit to let him catch up so that we could have a bit of cat and mouse over the rest of the race. In the end I finished second. I was disgusted.”

He was able to wash it off him easy enough though. In the normal course of a season, he wouldn’t have been in Naumberg at all. His year had been building up to the World Championships in South Korea where he would have hoped to medal and where the very least he’d have achieved would have been the qualifying time for London. But no sooner had he arrived in Daegu than the news reached him from back home in Cork that his mother had died suddenly.

The tragedy of it is numbing and he isn’t anywhere close to making sense of it yet, just six weeks on. She was there and then she wasn’t there. He finds it impossible to wrap a sentence or even a coherent thought around it. But through the fog, he was able to make out a target. Clinical though it sounds, a qualifying time for London had to be achieved before the end of the season.

Otherwise, he’d have had to set about it next March, which is far too close to the Games to be putting himself through a 50-kilometre race. The time itself wouldn’t be a problem – his best time for the 50k is a good 14 minutes inside the A Standard – but he had to find a race and go and do it. So he laced up his shoes and got out and walked.

“I was only training once a day and hoping that the work I had done would carry me through. To be honest, the level that I’m after getting to, these things should be coming easy enough to me. I was a bit worried alright going over but I was able to tell myself I’d be okay. When other stuff happens in your life, you’re able to stand back from it and go, ‘Rob – you’ve aspirations of winning the Olympics. This is only a qualification, you know? Just get it done. Shut up, like.’ Whatever happens, you’ve still got to be professional.”

That’s kind of him in a nutshell. At 33, he’s in the prime of his race-walking life. The horizon doesn’t just have London on it – Rio is there too. And after that, he rules nothing out. These will be his fourth Olympic Games and he builds up to them methodically and thoroughly because it’s the only way you can do it. Strip out emotion, strip out luck. Nothing left only small improvements that are down to plans and systems and actions.

He’s married to the 400m runner Marian Heffernan (formerly Marian Andrews). A member of the Irish women’s 4x400m relay team, she was with him in Daegu when the news came through about his mother and she flew home with him.

Within the week, she was back in Korea competing. The relay team finished 12th and if they can consolidate their position in the top 16 in the world next season, they will go to London.

“Marian went back out,” he says. “Everything we do, we do as a team. We want to have more kids (they have a six-year-old son) and so Marian going to London is as much a part of our future as me going. We plan together that way. So I just said to her, ‘No Mar, you need to go. I’m after losing enough.’ But again, it wasn’t an emotional decision, it was a practical one. It was bang, you need to go. And she went and did great. The Olympics is the most important thing, it’s the be-all and end-all. Everything is geared towards the Olympics.”

For now, anyway. Some day, he’d like to be able to coach kids in Ireland, to maybe change the culture of athletics in some significant way. He went to see his daughter Megan run a cross-country race on Sunday and they snagged him for a fiver on the gate, just the same as everybody else. The fiver didn’t annoy him but the fact a Corkman who has just qualified for his fourth Olympics doesn’t get his face recognised at a local athletics meet picked at him just a little. It will only change if the sport grows and the people care. Some day, maybe.

“I’d love eventually to be able to practically apply what I know to kids here. I look at some young fellas here and a lot of what’s needed to make these guys better is just organising their lives. I can see it from my earlier career when I was training sporadically and where I came from a culture where you might take a few weeks off and then go at it hard when you come back to make up for it. It’s rubbish. It’s not structured. That’s what I’d like to do eventually.

“The way things are for me now, because I’m successful enough at 50k and because my body has developed so late, I’m young enough to keep at this for a long time yet. Yer man who beat me last week won a medal at the World Championships and he’s 41. If you’re very motivated, if your family are happy for you to keep doing it, if I can still fund what I want to do and keep things going at home, then why not keep going? Sure once you stop, you’re finished. Once I drop off that, it will be time to pack it in. I’d never want to be just a journeyman.”

No danger of that.