Irish Runner March-April 2012

TRUE GRIT

GREEN CORE

FIXTURES

The Gary O'Hanlon story p12

Ava Hutchinson's marathon quest p62

8-page special p72

MARCH / APRIL €4.75 / £3.95 COVER STORY

A Woman reborn ‘Running helped me lose 8 stone and rebuild my life’ – Hannah Nolan

MIDLAND LEADER The inside track on Athlone's world class indoor arena

with Vo2 testing

A WINTER'S TRAIL

WICKLOW WONDER Fionnuala Britton's Euro Cross gold

Gerry Duffy's long night on the Wicklow Hills ■ NEWS

■ SCIENCE

■ TRAINING

■ MOTIVATION

■ JUVENILES

CIARÁN Ó CATHÁIN has the busy walk of a man who starts his day with a list and makes damn sure he ends it with ticks.

As the President of Athlone Institute of Technology walks Irish Runner from his office to a second-floor lecture room that has a view over his building site, he simultaneously takes care of a problem at a local school whose board he chairs. The day after we meet, he’s off to Belfast for the weekend to take up duties as a starter at the National Indoor Senior Championships. Among other roles, he’s the chairman of Destination Athlone, a patron of the Peace and Justice Commission for his local diocese, and the Financial Director of Athletics Ireland. “It’s in my DNA to get out and do things,” he says.

No kidding. When we get to the lecture room, it’s immediately clear what getting out and doing things can lead to. What used to be a car park is now the site of Ireland’s first IAAF-specification indoor athletics facility.

Due for completion in August, the arena will have a 200m banked oval running track with six lanes, an internal 60m sprint track and seating for 1,500 spectators. In time, Ó Catháin sees no reason why Athlone can’t host its own indoor Grand Prix, much in the

manner of Glasgow and Birmingham.

“If they can do it, why can’t we have one?

Why can’t we have an Irish international meeting here and get the big stars to come and compete? When this is finished, it will be a fast track. It will be steel frame, on boards with a full IAAF finish, just like Paris where they had the European Indoors last year. We will be aiming to have the Nationals here next year and we’re in negotiations to bring some of the top athletes in the world here for that weekend,” says Ó Catháin. “The likes of Asafa Powell and Liu Xiang are what we’re aiming for. From the start, we were of the view that there was no point in doing it if the result wasn’t going to be at the top end. We don’t need mediocrity, we’re very clear on that.”

AIT already has excellent outdoor facilities, the legacy of €100m spent over the past 12 years. Their athletics track was built to IAAF specifications and their all-weather soccer pitch is a full-size, FIFA 2-star model. The indoor arena won’t be the end of it either. As it is being built, work is continuing on an adjoining sports centre which, when finished, will be the size of two basketball courts.

Built to cater for all sports from volleyball

to basketball to futsal, it will include a highperformance elite gym, a sports performance lab, a fitness suite for students, staff and the public, physical therapy suites, changing rooms and even some offices. When it’s finished, it will be capable of seating over 3,000 spectators and Ó Catháin envisages it hosting everything from concerts to boxing matches.

Fund-raising was as painstaking an affair as you’d expect. Ó Catháin’s links in Asia – he’s a visiting professor at the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing and an academic advisor to the University Malaysia Perlis – has brought a large contingent of foreign students to AIT. Through those links, student capitation fees and commercial activities within the college, they’ve managed to squirrel away €8m over the past decade to put towards developing the indoor facility.

The remaining €3.5m will be borrowed from the bank, pending final Department of Education approval. On a recent visit to AIT, Taoiseach Enda Kenny gave Ó Catháin “the 100 per cent support that we need to go and get it finished. He said he’d be back within the year to have a run on the track himself.”

Times being what they are, the project

team can do a lot more with the money now than would have been possible even five years ago. “It’s around 40 per cent cheaper to build now than if we’d tried to build it in 2006. The crash actually changed what we were going to do. We initially sat down and looked at building just a sprinting strip and a hall but this is what became possible with the money we had built up.” Ó Catháin stresses that AIT’s prospective agreement with the bank will see the loan repaid within five years, even without one paying customer walking through the doors.

He admits that in the first year they will probably have to entice people in to use the facility but he says that once word of mouth gets around, the centre will pay for itself. The new commercial manager starts in April and there has already been interest from teams and individuals across a multitude of sports.

Unsurprisingly, the AIT development has raised eyebrows in some quarters. Hackles too.

“There was opposition in Dublin to this because they thought it was going to undermine the case for Abbotstown,” says Ó Catháin. “We said very clearly that this wouldn’t undermine anything. If anything, it

“

When this is finished, it will be a fast track. It will be steel frame, on boards with a full IAAF finish, just like Paris where they had the European Indoors last year.

”

MIDLAND LEADER Ireland is finally getting an international-class indoor athletics arena – thanks to the vision of Athlone IT President Ciarán Ó Catháin.

He tells Malachy Clerkin how it happened. PHOTOS: BRIAN LAWLESS / SPORTSFILE.COM

70 Irish Runner

An artist's impression of how the Athlone IT sports facility will look on completion – the existing track and all weather pitches will link with the Sports Centre (left of image) which in turn will be linked to the IAAF-specification Indoor Arena scheduled for completion next August.

Irish Runner 71

CIARÁN Ó CATHÁIN has the busy walk of a man who starts his day with a list and makes damn sure he ends it with ticks.

As the President of Athlone Institute of Technology walks Irish Runner from his office to a second-floor lecture room that has a view over his building site, he simultaneously takes care of a problem at a local school whose board he chairs. The day after we meet, he’s off to Belfast for the weekend to take up duties as a starter at the National Indoor Senior Championships. Among other roles, he’s the chairman of Destination Athlone, a patron of the Peace and Justice Commission for his local diocese, and the Financial Director of Athletics Ireland. “It’s in my DNA to get out and do things,” he says.

No kidding. When we get to the lecture room, it’s immediately clear what getting out and doing things can lead to. What used to be a car park is now the site of Ireland’s first IAAF-specification indoor athletics facility.

Due for completion in August, the arena will have a 200m banked oval running track with six lanes, an internal 60m sprint track and seating for 1,500 spectators. In time, Ó Catháin sees no reason why Athlone can’t host its own indoor Grand Prix, much in the

manner of Glasgow and Birmingham.

“If they can do it, why can’t we have one?

Why can’t we have an Irish international meeting here and get the big stars to come and compete? When this is finished, it will be a fast track. It will be steel frame, on boards with a full IAAF finish, just like Paris where they had the European Indoors last year. We will be aiming to have the Nationals here next year and we’re in negotiations to bring some of the top athletes in the world here for that weekend,” says Ó Catháin. “The likes of Asafa Powell and Liu Xiang are what we’re aiming for. From the start, we were of the view that there was no point in doing it if the result wasn’t going to be at the top end. We don’t need mediocrity, we’re very clear on that.”

AIT already has excellent outdoor facilities, the legacy of €100m spent over the past 12 years. Their athletics track was built to IAAF specifications and their all-weather soccer pitch is a full-size, FIFA 2-star model. The indoor arena won’t be the end of it either. As it is being built, work is continuing on an adjoining sports centre which, when finished, will be the size of two basketball courts.

Built to cater for all sports from volleyball

to basketball to futsal, it will include a highperformance elite gym, a sports performance lab, a fitness suite for students, staff and the public, physical therapy suites, changing rooms and even some offices. When it’s finished, it will be capable of seating over 3,000 spectators and Ó Catháin envisages it hosting everything from concerts to boxing matches.

Fund-raising was as painstaking an affair as you’d expect. Ó Catháin’s links in Asia – he’s a visiting professor at the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing and an academic advisor to the University Malaysia Perlis – has brought a large contingent of foreign students to AIT. Through those links, student capitation fees and commercial activities within the college, they’ve managed to squirrel away €8m over the past decade to put towards developing the indoor facility.

The remaining €3.5m will be borrowed from the bank, pending final Department of Education approval. On a recent visit to AIT, Taoiseach Enda Kenny gave Ó Catháin “the 100 per cent support that we need to go and get it finished. He said he’d be back within the year to have a run on the track himself.”

Times being what they are, the project

team can do a lot more with the money now than would have been possible even five years ago. “It’s around 40 per cent cheaper to build now than if we’d tried to build it in 2006. The crash actually changed what we were going to do. We initially sat down and looked at building just a sprinting strip and a hall but this is what became possible with the money we had built up.” Ó Catháin stresses that AIT’s prospective agreement with the bank will see the loan repaid within five years, even without one paying customer walking through the doors.

He admits that in the first year they will probably have to entice people in to use the facility but he says that once word of mouth gets around, the centre will pay for itself. The new commercial manager starts in April and there has already been interest from teams and individuals across a multitude of sports.

Unsurprisingly, the AIT development has raised eyebrows in some quarters. Hackles too.

“There was opposition in Dublin to this because they thought it was going to undermine the case for Abbotstown,” says Ó Catháin. “We said very clearly that this wouldn’t undermine anything. If anything, it

“

When this is finished, it will be a fast track. It will be steel frame, on boards with a full IAAF finish, just like Paris where they had the European Indoors last year.

”

MIDLAND LEADER Ireland is finally getting an international-class indoor athletics arena – thanks to the vision of Athlone IT President Ciarán Ó Catháin.

He tells Malachy Clerkin how it happened. PHOTOS: BRIAN LAWLESS / SPORTSFILE.COM

70 Irish Runner

An artist's impression of how the Athlone IT sports facility will look on completion – the existing track and all weather pitches will link with the Sports Centre (left of image) which in turn will be linked to the IAAF-specification Indoor Arena scheduled for completion next August.

Irish Runner 71

would support Abbotstown because it would become a regional centre for Ireland, for the midlands and for the west. Build another in Abbotstown and it can serve the Dublin area and all around it. But what this facility will do while we’re waiting for Abbotstown – if it happens – is it will put Ireland on the map as a place that can host international competitions.

“The opposition and obstacles were such that I got to the stage where I wanted to just pull it. We got no financial support from anywhere. We had tried to get funding from the Department of Education and they were supportive to begin with but then we hit a dead end with them when they decided that it was a sporting facility and not an educational facility. Now, obviously the economic climate changed so you can’t blame them for that and we still get massive support from them in every other respect.”

But surely the whole project was ambitious enough for everyone in athletics at least to get behind it? Not so, it seems.

“In general, I can only think that there was a bit of Dublin bias going on. I felt there was a bit of, ‘What is this Ó Catháin fella doing thinking he can build something like this outside Dublin?’ And I basically said, ‘Well it’s like this – we have the money to build it so we’re building it.’ If somebody else had the money to do it, fine. I could have used €11.5m to do an awful lot of other things around the campus.

“But we said we’d do this because it’s good for the students, it’s good for the community and it’s another piece of national infrastructure that isn’t there. It also supports what we’re doing academically in terms of developing new degrees in sports science and sports therapy, as well as nutrition. There were times though that it felt like rolling a stone up a hill and it was ironic because our finance people who might have been a bit sceptical about it in the first place were the ones who convinced me to keep going.” Ó Catháin has been involved in athletics since his schooldays in Crumlin CBS where Brother John Dooley fostered his interest in the sport. Maurice Ahern got him involved with Donore Harriers as a juvenile and some of his best memories are of taking part in Ahern’s 24-hour relay marathons around Crumlin to raise funds. He was a decent enough runner but a bad knee injury curtailed his prospects. Studies and work moved him around, from Strasbourg in France, where he was the Residential and Finance Director of Schiller University, to Northern Ireland where he was Director of the NI Hotel and Catering College.

He landed in AIT in 2000, when the campus was very different to today’s. They used to host cross-country races in the scrubland out the back but constant investment in the sports facilities over the years has led to a campus any university would be proud of. When the current project

72 Irish Runner

Athlone IT President Ciarán Ó Catháin on site; (below) exterior and interior drawings of the Indoor Arena which will have a 200m banked oval running track and seating for 1500 spectators

“

Maybe as a sport we were happy at times to play second fiddle to the big three sports in the country.

Maybe we never got the recognition for what we achieved and produced.

”

is finished, the existing track will be linked to the sports centre which will be linked to the indoor athletics arena. Nothing like it will exist anywhere else on the island.

An official with Athletics Ireland since 2005, Ó Catháin has always been mystified by the lack of a top-class national indoor facility in the country. “I think at times, maybe we didn’t push it hard enough as an association. Maybe as a sport we were happy at times to play second fiddle to the big three sports in the country. Maybe we never got the recognition for what we achieved and produced going back to Sonia and Coghlan and all the way back. I don’t know why it never happened.

“It always amazed me that we never got the full facility built to really stimulate athletics in Ireland. We have the fastest growing sport in the country with joggers out everywhere every night. But when it goes from summer to winter, we have so little in terms of indoor facilities. We have athletes leaving every weekend do go and compete in the UK, in Europe, everywhere.

“This facility will allow us to host those kinds of competitions. Instead of exporting people every weekend, we’ll be bringing people in. Now why has that not happened over the course of 30 years? I don’t know. I haven’t been involved. There’s always been talk about it but it has never happened. We decided here that we wanted to do something.”

Looking ahead, he envisages the new AIT facility will help nurture our current crop of exceptional young athletes for the next couple of Olympic cycles. It’s too late for London, of course. But for Rio and beyond, maybe not.

“Boxing got its act together," he says.

“They put their high-performance programme together, they got them together in the one facility and they went out and took on the world. Gary Keegan and Billy Walsh put together that programme and that system and look at the success they’ve had. There’s no reason we can’t do the same.

“We have our high-performance director in Kevin Ankram and now we will have this facility in place where a HP Director can bring a team together. If he wants to bring them here, we have all the best student accommodation he’d need. We’ll have stateof-the-art facilities here for them and you can create that dynamic. The place will be temperature controlled at 16-17 degrees so there’s no need to be miserable about training in the cold. Everything will be there for them. It can be done. The boxers have shown it can be done. We will see it in 2016 and 2020, we will see the fruits of Kevin’s work then.”

The view out of the window of that second-floor lecture room lays bare the fruits of Ó Catháin’s work. And you get the feeling he’s nowhere near finished yet.

Irish Runner 73

would support Abbotstown because it would become a regional centre for Ireland, for the midlands and for the west. Build another in Abbotstown and it can serve the Dublin area and all around it. But what this facility will do while we’re waiting for Abbotstown – if it happens – is it will put Ireland on the map as a place that can host international competitions.

“The opposition and obstacles were such that I got to the stage where I wanted to just pull it. We got no financial support from anywhere. We had tried to get funding from the Department of Education and they were supportive to begin with but then we hit a dead end with them when they decided that it was a sporting facility and not an educational facility. Now, obviously the economic climate changed so you can’t blame them for that and we still get massive support from them in every other respect.”

But surely the whole project was ambitious enough for everyone in athletics at least to get behind it? Not so, it seems.

“In general, I can only think that there was a bit of Dublin bias going on. I felt there was a bit of, ‘What is this Ó Catháin fella doing thinking he can build something like this outside Dublin?’ And I basically said, ‘Well it’s like this – we have the money to build it so we’re building it.’ If somebody else had the money to do it, fine. I could have used €11.5m to do an awful lot of other things around the campus.

“But we said we’d do this because it’s good for the students, it’s good for the community and it’s another piece of national infrastructure that isn’t there. It also supports what we’re doing academically in terms of developing new degrees in sports science and sports therapy, as well as nutrition. There were times though that it felt like rolling a stone up a hill and it was ironic because our finance people who might have been a bit sceptical about it in the first place were the ones who convinced me to keep going.” Ó Catháin has been involved in athletics since his schooldays in Crumlin CBS where Brother John Dooley fostered his interest in the sport. Maurice Ahern got him involved with Donore Harriers as a juvenile and some of his best memories are of taking part in Ahern’s 24-hour relay marathons around Crumlin to raise funds. He was a decent enough runner but a bad knee injury curtailed his prospects. Studies and work moved him around, from Strasbourg in France, where he was the Residential and Finance Director of Schiller University, to Northern Ireland where he was Director of the NI Hotel and Catering College.

He landed in AIT in 2000, when the campus was very different to today’s. They used to host cross-country races in the scrubland out the back but constant investment in the sports facilities over the years has led to a campus any university would be proud of. When the current project

72 Irish Runner

Athlone IT President Ciarán Ó Catháin on site; (below) exterior and interior drawings of the Indoor Arena which will have a 200m banked oval running track and seating for 1500 spectators

“

Maybe as a sport we were happy at times to play second fiddle to the big three sports in the country.

Maybe we never got the recognition for what we achieved and produced.

”

is finished, the existing track will be linked to the sports centre which will be linked to the indoor athletics arena. Nothing like it will exist anywhere else on the island.

An official with Athletics Ireland since 2005, Ó Catháin has always been mystified by the lack of a top-class national indoor facility in the country. “I think at times, maybe we didn’t push it hard enough as an association. Maybe as a sport we were happy at times to play second fiddle to the big three sports in the country. Maybe we never got the recognition for what we achieved and produced going back to Sonia and Coghlan and all the way back. I don’t know why it never happened.

“It always amazed me that we never got the full facility built to really stimulate athletics in Ireland. We have the fastest growing sport in the country with joggers out everywhere every night. But when it goes from summer to winter, we have so little in terms of indoor facilities. We have athletes leaving every weekend do go and compete in the UK, in Europe, everywhere.

“This facility will allow us to host those kinds of competitions. Instead of exporting people every weekend, we’ll be bringing people in. Now why has that not happened over the course of 30 years? I don’t know. I haven’t been involved. There’s always been talk about it but it has never happened. We decided here that we wanted to do something.”

Looking ahead, he envisages the new AIT facility will help nurture our current crop of exceptional young athletes for the next couple of Olympic cycles. It’s too late for London, of course. But for Rio and beyond, maybe not.

“Boxing got its act together," he says.

“They put their high-performance programme together, they got them together in the one facility and they went out and took on the world. Gary Keegan and Billy Walsh put together that programme and that system and look at the success they’ve had. There’s no reason we can’t do the same.

“We have our high-performance director in Kevin Ankram and now we will have this facility in place where a HP Director can bring a team together. If he wants to bring them here, we have all the best student accommodation he’d need. We’ll have stateof-the-art facilities here for them and you can create that dynamic. The place will be temperature controlled at 16-17 degrees so there’s no need to be miserable about training in the cold. Everything will be there for them. It can be done. The boxers have shown it can be done. We will see it in 2016 and 2020, we will see the fruits of Kevin’s work then.”

The view out of the window of that second-floor lecture room lays bare the fruits of Ó Catháin’s work. And you get the feeling he’s nowhere near finished yet.

Irish Runner 73