My childhood with Sonia O'Sullivan: The daily run to school sparked my champion mindset
Sonia O'Sullivan after receiving the Irish Life Health Hall of Fame award on the occasion of her 50th birthday Picture: INPHO/Morgan Treacy
The celebrated long-distance runner Sonia O’Sullivan remembers a time when she struggled to keep up with her mother. Theirs was a one-car family, and her father would drive it to work every day, which meant everyone else had to use their own two feet to get around.
“We’d get the train from Cobh into Cork to go shopping, and it seemed to me that Mam walked so fast,” says O’Sullivan. “It was like she was on a mission.”
On one occasion, O’Sullivan decided to ride her bike alongside her mother in an attempt to match her pace. However, she wasn’t old or strong enough to ride it very far. Her mother hailed down a passing car and asked them to drop the bike back to the family home, but O’Sullivan misunderstood what was happening and thought her mother was giving her bike away.
“I wasn’t very happy with the outcome of my plan,” she says.
When O’Sullivan started school – which involved walking there, walking home for lunch and back again and then walking home at the end of the day – she devised another strategy for speed. She says, “Those four daily trips taught me it was faster to run”.
Always an independent child, she describes herself as knowing her own mind from a young age. She gives the example of opting to attend Cobh Vocational School.
“My younger sister and brother, Gillian and Tony, and I all went to St Mary’s Primary School, and my parents wanted us all to go to Coláiste Mhuire for secondary,” she says. “But the vocational school was closer to where we lived and all my friends were going there. So that’s where I went. Gillian and Tony went to Coláiste Mhuire.”
She is quick to point out that getting her own way this one time didn’t mean she got her way on everything. “Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in Ireland, your parents were regarded as your elders. They set the rules and you did as you were told.”
O’Sullivan’s parents were John and Mary. John was from Dublin, while Mary was from Cobh. They met when John was serving in the navy, married and settled in the nearby townland of Carrignafoy. John got work in a fertiliser plant in Carrigaloe, and Mary looked after their three children.
Her memories of childhood revolve around the adventures she would have with her friends. They would cycle their bikes around the East Cork countryside.
“We’d build fires on the strand at White Point to cook sausages and beans,” she says. “We cycled to White Bay a few times. We slogged apples and used to climb up the back of Bevelly Castle to wave down at the cars passing by.”
It was thanks to her friends that O’Sullivan discovered that running could be more than a way of getting around. She started cross-country running in secondary school and with the local Ballymore Cobh Athletic Club because she saw it as an opportunity to spend more time with those friends.
“Running was one of the few sports available to girls back then, and quite a few of us did it,” she says. “But I really enjoyed it and loved going away to different places to compete at weekends.”
It took her a long time to consider becoming a professional athlete and even now, she believes there wasn’t a decisive moment, but that she “evolved into it”.
“Running was an amateur sport back then, and although I was winning races, I couldn’t see it as a career. But a college in America offered me a scholarship, so I decided to take that step. I think that’s always been my way. I don’t look too far ahead. I just focus on the next step.”
That next step brought 17-year-old O’Sullivan to Villanova University in Pennsylvania to study accountancy. She recalls being “young and excited to experience all the new things and being part of the cross country and track teams”.
She had very little communication with home, but didn’t suffer from much homesickness.
“My mother would send letters from home and those letters would make me miss home for a while but then my attention would swing back to whatever it was I had to do in Villanova,” she says.
What she found more difficult to deal with were the injuries. She was frustrated that she couldn’t run in competitions and says she had “to find a way through by focusing on making myself better in the swimming pool and gym while also making time for my studies. That experience made me grow up and take responsibility for my life and career as a sportsperson”.
O’Sullivan believes the example set by her parents as she was growing up helped her through this challenging time. “They always taught me to be grateful for what you have and to be as good a person as you can be,” she says. “So I tried to focus on the opportunities I had at Villanova and to get better as an athlete.”
She hopes she passed some of her parents’ values onto her children, Ciara and Sophie. One of the things she was adamant about was making them walk to and from school every day.
“It’s what my sister and brother and I had to do when we were young, and it taught us the importance of doing things for ourselves and not having our parents do everything for us,” says O’Sullivan. “I wanted my kids to have that, to be independent like I was.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
