Derval O'Rourke: 'It's been a huge honour to guest edit the Irish Examiner's Weekend magazine'

We invited Olympian, business woman and columnist Derval O’Rourke to be our guest editor for this Saturday's special edition of Weekend. Here, she outlines her vision for the magazine

Derval O'Rourke: I needed a theme for the whole magazine. That theme is taking care of yourself, and being your own authentic genuine self, and for that to be enough. Picture: Patrick Browne

When I started out in my athletics career, my goal was to get to an Olympic games. Once I got to those first Olympics, I was driven to get to a second. Then, my goal became winning a medal. I kept raising the bar for myself, setting my sights higher and higher.

There were two reasons for this and the first was my genuine ambition, but the second was I felt a lot of external pressure that if I didn’t win that medal, all the effort and time wouldn’t have been worth it. I internalised that pressure: my value as a person became very attached to winning that medal.