Sonia ag Rith

Sonia5K
just under 2 weeks to go to be in with the chance to cross the finish line and be rewarded with a
World Championship Gold Medal

Not so long ago I was presented with the Replica Gold medal at the launch of the sonia5k.ie in Dun Laoghaire. What surprised me most was the weight of the medal, a bit like when I take any of my Championship medals on a school visit the thing that surprises everyone is the weight of the medal. This is something I never really think to much about as generally I will think about the preparation and training, the injuries and obstacles along the way that got me to be in a position to run my best and be rewarded with the World Championship Gold medal.

I did a lot of my training in teddington, UK in the lead up to the World Championships, a few days before I flew to Gothenburg it felt a little bit like being in a holding path that can often happen as you fly into Heathrow airport. All my training was complete there was no more fast sessions to do all the work was done I had to just maintain fitness and relax as much as I could. The relaxation often involved going for 2 gentle 5 mile runs through Bushy park, with Marcus O’Sullivan, Frank O’Mara, Bob Kennedy & Steve Holman who were also in Teddington waiting to travel just 2 days before their first round race. It was just one flight from Heathrow so we wanted to maintain a similar routine and just fly in and avoid too much of the hype that can surround a World Championship event. Its strange I can clearly remember those morning and evening 5 mile runs, we didn't have an exact measurement but 35minutes surely covered 5miles, we avoided the routes where you generally did some fast sessions or where you might be able to calculate what pace we were running. There are a number of plantation gardens in Bushy park where you have to enter gates within the park and weave through a maze of little paths. Marcus o’Sullivan used refer to these runs as the secret garden loops.

The aim of these runs was to get some fresh air, loosen up the legs and maintain some semblance of a training routine and generally pass the time in those slow days when waiting to race just like those extra minutes circling Heathrow can feel like hours, similar to those last few tapering days before a championship can really drag on as you try to conserve energy and absorb the training from all the weeks prior to the big Championship event.

When I think back now it all felt so natural and simple running 80 miles a week and feeling like i was hardly training, last week I ran 80km the furthest I've run for awhile and I'm sure very little at anywhere near the pace of those very easy runs in Bushy park back in 1995.

An article on Jumping The Gun on the training I did as a junior athlete. All the distances were estimates this was before the garmin or similar measuring devices. Particularly the 10x 200m in 28. Hope there's not too many out trying to match that !!

Sonia’s junior training secrets Sonia O’Sullivan kindly gave us a few weeks of her schedule as junior when she was growing up in Cobh in Cork in 1986 aged 16 years of age. Sonia was coached by Sean Kennedy before going to Villanova. She would return from her scholarship under his guidance to finish

It was a pleasure to talk at Mahers Sports shop tonight to a lovely group of Running enthusiasts hopefully there were some nuggets of inspiration taken home and I answered all the very interesting and well thought questions.

This weeks track session was a solo effort at the SOS track but hard to skip the opportunity to have a run on the track where I have so many happy memories, that flying last 200m is in the memory bank but 20 laps of combined endurance and "speed" was enough to satisfy me for awhile.