Surefooted on long walk to Athens

ATHLETICS: Ian O'Riordan finds the World Championship silver medallist treading an unwavering course on the road to the Olympics

Normally this is the time of year when athletes start their grand training plan for the new season. Fresh ideas and new resolutions written in large capital letters, anything that might create an extra edge. Work harder. Play less.

Often the plan has started by now. The decathlon champion Daley Thompson once recalled training on Christmas Day, not because he wanted to, but because he feared his opponents would be doing so and thereby gaining an edge. And when the new season climaxes with the Olympic Games then the plan better make for tough reading. More pain means more gain.

Gillian O'Sullivan doesn't have a grand new plan for 2004. And she didn't train on Christmas Day. That's surprising because over the next eight months she'll be repeatedly billed as Ireland's greatest medal hope at the Athens Olympics. Expect to be glued to the TV screen when they set off on the 20km walk on the morning of August 21st.

Instead O'Sullivan is content to keep on doing what she did last year, and more or less what she's done for the six or seven years before that: train hard but sensibly; avoid anything obsessive; listen solely to coach Michael Lane; endure some isolation; and most of all don't look back.

In O'Sullivan's case the last could be the hardest part. After winning the silver medal at the World Championships in Paris last August, she is in danger of being constantly reminded of the possibility of turning silver into gold. Yet it's clear she won't be thinking much about Paris in the next eight months.

"I had always seen the World Championships as a stepping stone. Paris was brilliant, and a great inspiration for the future. But after a few weeks people were still going on about it, and I really wanted to put it aside. I never wanted to dwell on it, because if you do then you start losing your hunger very quickly.

"Of course it was a great season, some good wins and the medal too as the highlight. It was the sort of season I'd been working towards for a long time, and for it to happen was great. But in a way it won't be until I stop and really start looking back that I'll really appreciate it. And hopefully I'll be around a bit more. But when you're looking towards the next season you can't really let it all sink in."

The truth is O'Sullivan was back to her normal training plan within four weeks of Paris. They gave her a fine homecoming in her native Killarney and she complied with as many requests for her services as she could but in the back of her mind the whole time was only one thought: Athens.

"To be honest I was so glad to get back training. It gave me an excuse not to be somewhere else. And I had to be careful. You could easily get carried away with the whole thing, and this year is so important."

The plan, like last year, is relatively straightforward. Stay in Cork for a few indoor races and then head to Mexico, the first stop on the IAAF Grand Prix walking circuit, which started last year and put a whole new shape on the walking season.

Then altitude training in the US, some more Grand Prix races in Europe, back home for the peak of summer, and then isolation in the countdown to Athens.

It's a plan that worked a dream last year. After winning in Mexico, and getting enough points elsewhere to ensure she won the overall Grand Prix, O'Sullivan headed to the south of France before the World Championships. There she went through the key phase of training with her coach - cutely avoided any sense of pressure - and got into the sort of mindset that practically made medal winning a formality.

"The way I looked at it, I'd arrived in Paris knowing I couldn't have done much more. It was time to go out there and give it a shot. I was thinking about getting into the top five, a really good performance. Just the best I could do.

"I remember feeling good the days before, and getting a good night's sleep. As it turned out I was in a medal position almost from the start. Then I remember, somewhere between 12km and 15km, thinking that I hadn't got any warnings, and that I could do it. Just to keep the head, and keep pushing it and not forget about the people behind you."

At one stage she thought hard about chasing down the great Yelena Nikolayeva, the 37-year-old Russian up ahead. But she let that thought go for another year and concentrated on the medal already in her hand. And all the recognition she's received over the past four months has never been diluted by the colour of that medal. O'Sullivan was a champion now.

There are other reasons for O'Sullivan's caution in laying out a grand plan for the new season. Great Olympic plans have a tendency to go astray. And this time last year she was coming off an Achilles tendon injury suffered while training in New Zealand, and the farthest thing from her mind when she got back for the New Year was a World Championship medal.

"It's only when you start racing that you get any true idea of how things are going. That first race in Mexico did go well, but it was much later in the year before I thought about how well things were going. So you do have a plan to some extent. But you'll have to wait and see how the year pans out as well. And people do forget sometimes how easily you can get injured. After that injury at the end of last year I managed to avoid any more for the rest of year, but you're always hoping it stays that way."

Over the next few months, then, she'll walk towards some more improvement, gradually adding an extra few miles a week out on the roads, all the time thinking of not just progression, but consistent progression. There are other things to work on, such as improving her heat acclimatisation, which will clearly be a factor in Athens.

And in the final countdown to the lighting of the Olympic flame she'll head off somewhere quiet and think only of her next race, the one that coincides with her 28th birthday, and let the rest of us worry about Ireland's greatest Olympic medal hope.