Loughnane gets back into action in Milan
It will be a day of mixed emotions for all three. Olive Loughnane had to pull out of her opening race of the season when she fell and injured her knee eight kilometres into the first leg of the series in Rio Maior, Portugal.
The world championship silver medallist had gone there with high hopes of launching her European championships campaign in style but the signs were already ominous before she toed the line. Her knee flared up 48 hours earlier and the fall compounded the problem.
Robert Heffernan will line up buoyed by the new national record he set at 3:50.08 on his debut over 50k in Dudince at the start of the season while Jamie Costin will have his first race of the season after sustaining an upper body injury while training at altitude in South Africa earlier in the year.
Unlike Heffernan and Costin, who will travel from the Irish warm weather training camp in Portugal, Olive Loughnane availed of the good weather at home to get in her training and left Cork on Thursday for Milan excited about the assignment that lies ahead of her.
“Hopefully I will get off to a better start than Rio Maior,” she said. “It was one of those things. A day and a half before the race my knee flared up and then I fell in the race and that made it worse.
“So I am going into this race still not knowing what to expect but I just want to put a marker on the board – to keep building. If I finish I will still be ahead of this time last year. Before the world championships in Berlin last year I just had two finishes and a seasonal best of 93:40.”
Her silver medal at the world championships in Berlin coming on the back of her battling seventh place in Beijing when the top dozen were inside the Olympic record have raised the bar to a heady height for the Cork housewife.
This morning she will line up with Vera Santos (Portugal), the winner in Rio Maior, and Melanie Seeger (Germany) and Yanfei Li (China) who were second and third.
The other top names are Johanna Jackson (Great Britain) who was fourth in Lugano and the Swiss sisters Marie and Laura Polli who hail from Lugano and are coached by the legendary Italian walking trainer Pietro Pastorini.
Robert Heffernan still has the 50k in his legs, according to the new chair of High Performance, Ray Flynn, who said the venture into unknown territory was the best thing the tough Corkman could have done.
“He was a bit stale doing the 20ks,” he said. “When he decided to move up to 50k he put in work he would not have done otherwise and that will stand to him in Barcelona.”
Costin, who competed over 50k at the Sydney and Beijing Olympics, was planning to drop back down to 20k for the European championships and he will line up for the shorter event this weekend when he won’t be the only 50k specialist in the field.
Martin Fagan who became the first Irishman to win the Great Ireland Run two weeks ago will also have the European championships on his mind when he lines up for the Great Edinburgh Run tomorrow and he will follow that up with the Great Manchester Run two weeks later.
“I am still pretty tired and I feel I need a break soon so that I can get ready for the European Championships,” he said. “I’ll go out and enjoy the two races then take a break.”
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