O'Sullivan eyes half-marathon in Brussels

Sonia O'Sullivan is set for her first major road championships providing her training remains on course over the next week.

Athletics Ireland has received her entry request for the IAAF World Half Marathon championships, to be held in Brussels on May 5th. O'Sullivan is currently altitude training in near isolation in mountains north of San Diego, California, but has been discussing the event with her London coach Alan Storey.

It will be sometime next week before she makes a definite decision. Earlier this month O'Sullivan was sidelined for a number of days with a stomach illness, picked up on route to California for the Carlsbad 5km road race on April 7th. She decided to run the event but finished well below her best in seventh place.

"The illness was actually a big setback for her," explained Storey yesterday. "She wouldn't have raced at all out there except that she travelled so far to get there (so) she took a chance. But she was out of training for three or four days afterwards and is only getting back into form now."

The Brussels event is seen as a suitable stepping-stone ahead of the summer track season. O'Sullivan has twice run the 13.1-mile distance before - on both instances at the Great North Run in Newcastle. She won there in 1998 and finished fourth a year later, just 10 weeks after giving birth to her first daughter Ciara.

The World Half Marathon would clearly involve more intense competition, something O'Sullivan has yet to truly experience during her brief diversions into road racing. This year's event, however, won't feature as many leading names because of its recent repositioning in the IAAF calendar.

The last edition of the event actually took place last October in Bristol. The IAAF have now decided to switch it from autumn to spring, and few of the competitors who ran in Bristol are expected to return to the event so quickly. Definitely ruled are the two current title-holders - Britain's Paula Radcliffe and Ethiopia's Haile Gebrselassie - who are recovering from their recent excursions in the London Marathon.

But it is a world title nonetheless and carries substantial prize-money. Typically, some 250 athletes from around 50 countries compete, although O'Sullivan will be the only Irish entrant this year.