I recently caught up with Louise Shanahan, an Irish Olympic 800m runner, multiple-time Irish champion, and Cambridge PHD alumna, now based in Belfast ahead of a significant sporting year. Whilst in Cambridge, she ran with the Hare and Hounds, sometimes testing herself on the gruelling cross country circuit, and has recently finished her PHD, to devote her full time to elite athletics. She’s doing something of a Radiohead, and is flourishing: somehow even ‘fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable’, et cetera, than before.
I began our interview by taking Pitbull’s advice (probably inadvisable for the most part, I must caution) and going back in time, asking Louise about her earliest days within the sport which has since dominated her life, governed her priorities, and dictated her every move. Like many professional athletes, her induction to running was modestly founded in childhood, school-based competitiveness – a local schools race in Cork grasped the attention of the nine-year old.
She claimed that ‘I felt like running was my sport’ from a young age, ‘having grown up around running’, and was desperate to win the school competition, but would regularly get knocked out in the early rounds. At the age of nine however, she finally broke through the ranks, only to miss out on further rounds of the competition for a family holiday – the first, and last, time that any such inconvenience would be able to stand in the way of the fiery athletes’ competitive tenacity! Attending the local athletics club was her dad’s solution to her ‘furious’ response to missing the competition – and as they say, the rest is history.
The athletes’ life can seem ascetic and dull to some, so I asked Louise, who has been running for over eighteen years, what it is that continues to motivate and inspire her today – and the youthful, fiery sentiment hasn’t changed. Her answer retains the very core of sporting ambition: ‘I just really want to see how fast I can run, how hard I can push myself’, testament to her authentic, unchanged sense of excitement as to the limits of the human body.
From a young age, a winning mindset was ingrained within her: ‘a very strong competitive streak’ which fomented a desire to ‘be the best at everything I do’ – something which Louise qualifies as ‘not always very helpful’ in every situation life throws at one – ‘card games’ being a hotbed for unwarranted feisty combatism. She also attributes a ‘resilience’ and an early, but steadfast decision to ‘prioritise running’ to her enduring success and motivation – ‘almost an insanity’, and perhaps scorned by some, but her ‘absolute prioritising’ of the sport has certainly reaped rewards.
She also cites the ‘measured goals’ which running offers, comparing the assignments, routine and schedule of school, exams and grades to the sport’s nuclei of constancy, accomplishment, ‘constant feedback’ and control: ‘I know when my head hits the pillow when I go to sleep, that I’ve achieved something that day’. Racing is the culmination of any athletes’ efforts, but the highs of victories are only opportunities that arise several times a year – so instead, the ‘small success’ of each training session and run ticked off endures as the overwhelming motivational force.
Louise directly celebrates the ‘sense of achievement’ which running garners as commensurate with that of academic projects, agreeing that the two planes of academia and sport complement each other. She laughs that many of her friends left school and university only to enter 5ks and marathons, taking up the sport they once swore to despise, in a bid to rekindle the feedback loop which academia provided – to them, a puny 800m now feels inconsequential…
I questioned her on her sporting role models, and Irish middle distance runners Sonia O’Sullivan and Ciara Mageean were the immediate replies; O’Sullivan the childhood heroine of school projects and scrapbooks, and Mageean the idol-turned-competitor-turned-friend. Surely it must be surreal to have a former role model transfigured into a friend and training partner, I wonder. But what stands out about the subsequent familiarisation of those we put on pedestals is their ‘normality’ – after all, ‘they have no more hours in the day than anyone else’. The truth is brought home: they are ‘normal people’, admired hugely and ‘incredible’, but ‘not superhuman’. Their accomplishments, she insists, once brought close into a sphere of interaction, swiftly start to feel reachable: ‘if they’re good enough to do it, then I’m good enough to do it’.
After nearly two decades within the sport, Louise strikingly claims that the ‘lows of elite athletics are incomparable to the highs’ – gesturing towards the increasingly discussed reward imbalance of professional sport; winners become accustomed to or reliant upon continued success, and winning foments more a sense of relief than unfiltered joy, whereas setbacks and losses are cause for devastation: ‘nothing can affect my emotions the way running does’.
Following a fracture in 2015, she was ‘absolutely distraught’ – six months of no exercise lead to overwhelming excess energy and ‘frustration’ – ‘stepping back’ and simply resting being the hardest obstacle to surmount. Her most recent lesson within the sport has been the revelation that it’s actually ‘the things you don’t do that make you better’ – taking the time to listen to your body and properly recover, in a way Cambridge terms don’t allow – and her move to a professional, full-time running career has enabled such a crucial, but understated change to take place.
Ultimately Louise’s biggest lesson learnt can be filtered down simply: ‘not to give up, to keep working away at something’; ‘any one run is unimportant’, but it is the stacked-up years of turning up to work hard that count – an attitude that can be transposed into ‘any area of life’. In my next article, my conversation with Louise will take us further afield, to the more glamorous areas of an athlete’s life, abroad on training camps, and to the Olympic Games.
I next move the conversation outwards, questioning how modern day running looks to an insider, and whether there are systemic challenges which require concerted change. Louise responds with a testament to the ‘incredibly difficult’ situation of transgender and DSD runners, such as 800m runner Caster Semenya. DSD athletes were treated, she says, in a manner ‘nothing short of appalling’ by the sport’s governing bodies – her attitude is that although levels of ‘respect’ towards these athletes have improved over time, the sport still needs to further ‘appreciate that we are talking about people, people’s lives and people’s mental health’ – something that she feels is ‘sometimes forgotten’.
The politics of sport also arises here – the right of certain countries to bar others from competing is questioned; there are ‘several conflicts happening in the world right now’, and she questions the extent to which we can always decide conclusively – without political agenda and ‘powerplay’ overshadowing the motives behind such decisions – ‘who is right and who is wrong’, and which countries should be allowed to compete.
Zooming from Cork, to Cambridge, to the banned countries of the world, we dive back to Belfast, only to swiftly be transported away on training camps: South Africa over the Winter, Portugal coming up in March, and Switzerland in April. Having been ‘really nervous’ to embark upon a new chapter as a professional runner, ‘procrastinating and wasting time’ – which is a less generous way of saying ‘effectively recovering’ – has been easier than feared.
Louise’s typical week sees her run fifty miles, a combination of high lactic track sessions – these are the ones which can become quite Jackson Pollock-esque by the end – longer reps and easy runs. She also crosstrains for the dual benefits of ‘aerobic base and injury avoidance’, and uses the gym – a regime composed of plyometric drills, robustness, core, stability work, and lifting. The two under-celebrated golden stars of sporting performance – fuelling and sleep – are also not to be neglected. Although her fueling was ‘always good’, since leaving Cambridge she ‘sleeps so much more’ – 8 hours having shifted from her prior ‘best case scenario’ to ‘the bare minimum’, plus naps. I think we’ll have to live through Louise on that one.
Her move to Belfast has reduced the busy and pressured schedule of the Cambridge PHD student of just months prior, but doesn’t feel hugely changed. The most significant alteration has been the ability and flexibility to train abroad, with an amateur club in Belfast – a group whose set-up mirrors Cambridge’s Hare & Hounds in many ways, but whose athletes are not based in a university, and are thus free to fly out mid-term, something that ‘just wasn’t an option in Cambridge’. Even during her PHD she was able to travel though, having written the bulk of her thesis at altitude in Font Romeu (with the riveting company and culinary prowess of yours truly, to support her taxing work) – so the flexibility to travel isn’t entirely a dramatic, newfound shift.
‘In an ideal world’, she tells me, she would have maintained her Cambridge setup, but couldn’t realistically transport her coach and training partners away to South Africa, so needed to find a group that could travel – the Belfast group’s training methods and atmosphere most closely resembled that of CUH&H, allowing for a comfortable transition.
I ask her to retrospectively describe her time at Cambridge, and her answer is overwhelmingly positive: ‘I loved training in Cambridge’ – she had experienced training with ‘a group of girls’ during a year in Berkeley, California, and had assumed that that would be the only time it would be possible. She celebrates Cambridge’s ‘team atmosphere’, making it ‘so much easier to turn up to training', ‘so much fun’ and a brilliant place to form lasting friendships.
I wonder her if she has any advice to current Cambridge students as to how best make the most of our time here, and she holds up sport as the holy grail of any endeavour: people ‘fear’ that their sporting career will have to take the back foot or end when they start at the university, she suggests, but this ‘does not have to be the case in the slightest’ – as she has proven.
She implores people not ‘to give up on sport before they’ve even arrived’ – ‘we’re not going to study for 12-15 hours a day, it’s just not going to happen; you can carve an hour out for sport, and most elite athletes don’t train much more than that’. She cites the importance of needing ‘something other than your degree’, sport’s ‘mental health’ benefits and capacity to help ‘clear your head’: ‘it is very possible to do sport and a degree in Cambridge; just put your head down, decide to make it work, and stick to it’.
We can’t go into an Olympic year without talking about the Olympics, and I ask Louise how she would’ve reacted over time to hearing that she would be a 2020 Olympian. She laughs that as a late teen, she was ‘running reasonably well’, so at 16, would have replied, ‘well yeah of course I will, why wouldn’t I’. Yet this confidence and invincibility would plummet over the next few years, as she hit a plateau in performance, ‘not improving between the ages of 17 and 23’. This period of stagnation was a ‘real struggle’ – she was ‘angry, frustrated, there was a ‘why me?’ mentality’ – they were the ‘without doubt the toughest years’ of her life and career, but seeing the evidence of other female sporting plateaus, and enjoying the social side of training helped her have the faith that you can ‘come out the other side’. She claims that ‘the girl who arrived in Cambridge to start her PHD’, would ‘not have imagined going to the Olympics, and would have been overjoyed’.
Her experience at the Tokyo Olympics was wonderful, even if ‘a bit weird’ due to the myriad Covid regulations. Even her father, who had coached her for a long time, was not permitted to watch – but this has become her ‘main motivation’ for making the Paris Olympics: ‘I’ve already had the Olympic experience, but so many people have worked so hard to get me to this position: my parents, family, Phil O’Dell (my coach in Cambridge), who got me to the Olympics and didn’t get to experience it’. ‘It’s so important that all those people who should’ve come to Tokyo get to come to Paris, and have that experience, because they deserve it so much’.
Looking on to Paris, she is ‘excited – athletics is the main sport in the Olympics and it’s the one time when everyone sits up and suddenly wants to watch it’. She claims that ‘new TV companies are starting to get behind athletics, and buying the rights to show the sport – more sponsorship is coming into the sport, and the atmosphere is already building’. ‘I need to make sure I get myself on that plane, but at the moment it’s about getting my head down, putting the training in, not getting injured, and being in the best position possible to get on that start line’.
I conclude our interview asking her about the best piece of advice she has ever received: ‘you do you’, she instantly replies. We are ‘all on our own journey, we can only control our own actions, so you’ve got to focus on yourself and stay in your own lane’. Making a list of what you can do to actively ‘improve your situation, whatever the situation is – doing what’s in your control, as hard as it is, letting everything out of your control just pass’.
I continue our trend of spatial and temporal travel, asking Louise where she sees herself in five years; and although she’s not certain, one thing is absolute – ‘I genuinely love running, which hasn't always been true, so I’m going to run Paris and then see’. She intimates that LA could be a ‘realistic goal’, if she continues to enjoy the professional life of running as much as she currently does – but ‘it’s almost equally as likely’ that a job or degree will shift into the top priority.
From being carried around a cross country race at just six days old, to training for her second Olympic Games, Louise has been immersed in a sporting environment for her whole life. Although this very premature experience of cross country perhaps goes some way to explain her long-time aversion to the grass, hills and mud of Britain’s XC scene, she is full of wisdom and advice, having used the tools fostered from elite running across her life and academic career too, in an inspiring display of resilience and dedication.
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