Beating your 17-year-old self: Louise Shanahan a role model for plateauing athletes

Louise Shanahan thought her 800m time of two minutes, eight seconds would be written on her gravestone.

She first reached the mark impressively as a 16-year-old at the European Youth Championships in 2013. Shanahan, who now holds the Irish 800m record having run 1:59.42 in May, did not break that 2:08 barrier for another six years after 2013. The time became a brutal barometer of a child prodigy failing to improve.

The barren run had a devastating effect on a young athlete supposedly destined for greater things. As a Tokyo 2020 appearance and that Irish record show, clearly, Shanahan was, but it didn’t feel like that from the ages of 16 to 22.

Now 25, in the space of three years, Shanahan has gone from being unable to better a teenage time to running at the Olympics, entering the sub-two-minute club and earning a maiden World Championships appearance in Thursday’s 800m heats.

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Now that she’s out of the other side, Shanahan calls her 2:08 era her plateau.

It’s not uncommon for athletes to hit their peak and fail to better it; it’s unrealistic to expect constant improvement in times year on year. But it does seem strange that an athlete in her early 20s nowhere near her physical prime should flatline for so long.

Shanahan believes she is not alone in failing to record better times while still young. Individual circumstances dictate different stories, but she has spotted a pattern in young women, particularly who take time to better their teenage selves and feels the conversation around these athletes needs to change.

“I put a graph of my annual progressions up on Instagram and plenty of people came to me saying they showed it to their sister or girlfriend or athletes in their club and it really helped them,” she explains. “Clearly there are people in the plateau who saw it. This is the graph that I needed when I was 16, if I had received that it would have made those years easier for me so I would be happy to help younger athletes.”

Georgie Hartigan, another middle-distance runner on the Irish scene, went through a similar process, running 2:06 for three consecutive years from the age of 20 to 23. Now 26, she is still trying to figure out why.

“Our bodies definitely go through a dip in performance around 18, 19, 20,” she explains. “I don’t know why I couldn’t run any better and then suddenly my body got on its right track.”

Both runners hint at this plateau being a female-specific problem. Shanahan believes the reason is linked to teenage physiological changes.

“I’m not an expert in it but the changes for girls and guys in puberty happen at different rates in their teenage years. The changes for men, a lot of them like higher testosterone levels are beneficial towards running fast whereas the changes for girls aren’t. Often I think the body of a 14,15-year-old has is better for running than the body of a 19, 20-year-old.

“It’s not true that a teenage woman will always run faster than an adult but it takes time to get the strength to run quickly in an adult’s body. Once you develop the strength you can improve but it takes time to get there. I’m a much stronger athlete now than I was even at 20, 21.

“I now do a lot of strength training as well,” Hartigan adds. There could be something in that. It just took my body a little bit of time to be able to handle the amount of training required to train at that level as well.”

So if it was a strength issue to be able to run in a post-pubescent body, why not simply undergo strength training earlier? For Shanahan, a broken foot aged 18 meant she was reluctant to overtrain for a number of years after, plus the mental effect her plateau had nearly forced her out of athletics.

“I think the fact that my coach, who was my dad, kept me in the sport during those years was an incredible achievement. He probably sees now the training I needed to break 2:08 but he also saw the athlete I was during those years and realised that mentally there was no way I could have done that [strength] training.

“I’m healthier and structurally a lot sounder than I was. In a way, The type of training I was doing wasn’t drastically wrong. People would love this quick fix and say, ‘she should have been running 500s instead of 400s and she would have improved quicker’ but things needed to run their course. Everything worked out.”

[ Louise Shanahan takes Mageean’s 800m Irish record in stunning run ]

Katie Kirk from Belfast has a similar story to tell, albeit with subtle differences. North of the border, she actually did undergo an extensive strength programme from a young age, yet still plateaued. She ran 2:02 as a 20-year-old in 2014 but did not better that time until last year, aged 27.

“We have a different system in Northern Ireland,” explains Kirk. “We get S&C [strength and conditioning] support from a very young age. I was in that system since 15 so I did lots of S&C so I wouldn’t say for me that’s why I plateaued.

“Post-2014 I had an eating disorder. I struggled with that and then I was injured consistently afterwards.

“I plateaued for a slightly different reason to Louise, it wasn’t because I didn’t have strength training or I put on more body fat during puberty. I probably didn’t gain enough weight during puberty to be honest.”

Different stories, but similar outcomes in terms of finally breaking through the plateau. All three runners also agree on the solution to plateauing: there is none. Injuries, the mental strain of high performance, and the body taking time to adjust to development will always be there in whatever way they manifest themselves.

“A lot of people ask what I could have done to not have plateaued or come out of it faster and I don’t think that’s the right question to ask,” maintains Shanahan. “It was a case of accepting the plateau and keeping the training going through it and then being ready for when my body was able to handle more sessions to get out of it.”

Kirk agrees: “You want to manage that time better, make that plateau period shorter, how can we improve, is it a mental state that causes it? I’d say it’s a mixture of mental and physical. How can we support young women through that? Also boys, because they experience plateaus as well.”

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Hartigan brings the issue to one of knowledge sharing. “Maybe if there was more coach education or more said to people if they make junior teams. Let’s not put younger athletes under as much pressure.”

Education is the crucial point. All of these athletes had to figure out why they weren’t improving on the fly with piece-by-piece information. Just twice in six years Shanahan was told that what she was undergoing was normal, once by a long-jump coach watching her from afar, another by seeing an Instagram story put up by a runner in Australia who was going through a similar process.

Clearly, there is some awareness out there of the plateau, from athletes and coaches alike. These athletes want to see that awareness grow and bring with it an attitude change.

“When I was 15, if I was looking at an athlete plateauing ahead of me I just thought they weren’t committed,” says Shanahan. “There was nothing there saying this is natural and probably will happen to you. There was a lot of people saying progression failure was down to overtraining as a youth.

“I still think if people run well as a youth and don’t make it, people think they’ve done something wrong. There isn’t a narrative around a plateau and supporting them to get out the other side.”

“I knew that once teenagers started to go out drinking and start socialising with their friends they were less likely to perform,” adds Kirk. “I didn’t do that. I wanted to perform well. I knew it existed but never wanted it to happen to me. No one said to me that plateauing was normal, I just wanted to avoid it.”

If a widespread attitude shift is required, is there a coaching campaign to be put together? Would more female coaches who have gone through these processes make a difference? The year Shanahan finally broke 2:08 was the year she trained with a female career 2:03 runner who demanded she did more strength training.

Perhaps, but for all the potential solutions to plateaus that can happen for myriad reasons, the focus of those who have come out the other side is still on support and mitigation, not prevention.

“I don’t like the glamorisation of the struggle within the sport,” says Kirk. “The journey is just part of it, though. I wouldn’t want anyone to go through the same things Louise and I went through but also, sometimes we can’t prevent them.

“In some ways you have to let it happen.”