Sport

Phil Healy on the hunt for more personal bests and Irish records

Irish 100m and 200m record-holder has renewed hunger to get to Tokyo Olympics

Ireland’s Phil Healy during the 200m final at the World University Games in Naples, Italy, in July 2019. Photograph: Tommy Dickson/Inpho

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Mary Hannigan
Thu Jan 30 2020 - 06:00

Phil Healy’s list of resolutions for 2020 was a lengthy enough one, among them getting her indoor season off to a speedy start. That one, then, has already been ticked off after she ran the third fastest 200m by an Irish woman in Athlone last weekend, just 0.11 off her own record.

On Saturday she will be looking for another tick when she will attempt to start her international indoor season in Vienna, Austria, in a similarly encouraging fashion. She enjoyed success at the same meeting in the past two years when she won the 400m on both occasions, yet this time around her focus will be on the 200m.

Beyond that it’s the busiest of years, the calendar including the World Indoor Championships in March, the European Championships at the end of August, and the small matter of a Tokyo-hosted event in between.

Come the beginning of September, the Cork woman will hope to have ticks beside all of them too, with a few more personal bests and Irish records thrown into the mix.

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Yet perhaps top of the list of her resolutions is to “avoid all steps on cobbled streets”.

She is laughing about it now, but there were tears last April when a simple stumble on a street in Valletta, Malta, resulted in her breaking a metatarsal in her foot.

The misfortune didn’t end her season, and she was back in action at the World University Games less than three months later. However, it put paid to her hopes of building on the momentum she had achieved in the previous couple of years.

“You’re on a high one year breaking records, and the next year you’re in a boot and learning how to run again.”

And she literally had to learn how to run again.

“You would think it would be a natural process, that everyone can run no matter what level you’re at or what age you are. But it was a real challenge getting that co-ordination back, the technique. I was clipping my feet across my calves, I still have the marks from it.

“You even have to learn how to walk properly again, never mind run. You have to avoid the limp because you’re in that pattern for so long. It felt weird, alien, when running is what you used to do all the time. It was daunting – running is what I do, and that was taken away from me.”

Waste time

“But I couldn’t wallow over it. I couldn’t waste time that I didn’t have on my side. I would be that way very much in general, I’d be like, ‘this is the way it is’. Plan A had gone out the window, it was time for plan B. I couldn’t run at first, so I had to make the most of everything else. I was straight back into it with Shane [McCormack, her coach].”

“I broke it on the Thursday, and we were training on the Saturday. In the gym, cycling, rowing, aqua-jogging. I couldn’t press down on the right foot so I’d have one foot in the rower and the other hanging out over the side. We made the most of what we could actually do.

“For many that could be a season-ending injury, so it showed that I could come back. I feel mentally stronger for it, I fought the whole way to come back.

“ And when I did I had a new hunger. Maybe it’s only when it’s taken away from you that you realise how much it means to you, how much you love it, how big a part of your life it is.”

The Irish 100m and 200m record-holder is taking that renewed hunger into 2020, and while there will be more to the year than the Olympics she would quite like to be part of the Irish team that sets off for Tokyo.

“And I realised just how much I wanted it when I watched the women’s hockey team qualifying, when I saw their joy, how much it meant to them. As an athlete you’re an individual, you’re competing for yourself, so to be part of that Irish team going to the Olympics would be special.

“In a way you don’t even want to be talking about it. Sometimes the Olympics is all people ask you about, it’s the only thing in their heads, no matter what level you’re competing at. But obviously there’s a bigger prestige around the Olympics, much more than, say, the World Championships, even if the level is just the same.

Day to day

“But of course I want to be there. For me, though, it’s about day to day, week to week. Shane looks after the longer-term planning. If I don’t take care of business now it’s not going to happen – I won’t be on that plane.”

The 25-year-old, who is in the final year of her MSc in applied computer technology at the Waterford Institute of Technology, will keep her focus on the 200m in the months ahead.

Her 200m record is 22.99, short of the Olympic qualifying standard of 22.80. Yet even if she wasn’t to make that time before the end-of-June deadline she could qualify if she was ranked in the world’s top 56 – going into the new season she was at 36.

“I know I could have made 22.80 if it wasn’t for the injury last year. But that’s in the past, I’m looking forward now. Everything went really well through the winter. I’m just ready to race, the hunger is there, all the hard work is done, now it’s time to go and show it off.”

* Phil Healy was speaking at the launch of the AIB Future Sparks Festival 2020, a careers festival for senior-cycle students which is taking place on March 26th in the RDS. For more information visit www.AIB.ie/FutureSparks

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