Swimming pool epiphany put Cotter on road to glory

At her lowest moment, Stephanie Cotter decided to aim high. It was August, and the 20-year-old was treading water at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado — back and forth, across the pool, again and again and again.

Almost 5,000 miles from her home in from Coachford, Co Cork. Injured. Frustrated.Depressed. Determined.

“I had an epiphany,” she says. “I said to myself: ‘You can’t get any lower than this, here, right now, so why not just be crazy and shoot to win a national title?’”

The NCAA Division 2 Cross Country Championships were three months away, but she hadn’t trained properly in months, her track season ruined by tendonitis in her Achilles and peroneals.

At the time, she wasn’t thinking of the European Cross Country in Lisbon — the truth is, she thought she wouldn’t be picked for the Irish team — but there’s no better way to escape a dark place than to look for a brighter destination ahead.

And so she cross-trained, a couple of hours a day in the pool or on the bike, sometimes alongside fellow Irishwoman Roisin Flanagan — who was sidelined herself with a stress reaction — but mostly alone.

By October, Cotter was back running, and she soon realised all that work had stood to her. In November, she led the Flanagan twins — Roisín and Eilish — in a 1-2-3 for Adams State at the National Championships in Sacramento.

It was a realisation of that vision in the pool, an arrival for the journey she started two years before, when Cotter first opened an email from head coach Damon Martin at Adams State. She had just won the Irish Schools 1500m title at the time and later that year she first visited Alamosa, a town in the Rocky Mountains with fewer than 10,000 residents that sits at 7,500 feet above sea level.

“It was a massive culture shock,” she says. “I loved growing up in Cork and there’s this saying: your vibe attracts your tribe. When I was dropped in [Alamosa], I felt like I’d come home.

I was surrounded by people who did things the same way. They wanted the same goals. I had people pushing me to be like this: my professors, my teammates, everybody.

The everyone-knows-everyone vibe reminded her of Coachford. “It’s similar to the culture in rural Ireland, people are very generous,” says Cotter, who’s doing a bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology, after which she hopes to specialise in exercise physiology.

In just her second year at Adams State, she had become a national champion, but celebrations had to be postponed last month as her focus turned to last weekend’s European Cross Country in Lisbon, where she and the Flanagan twins would spearhead the Irish U23 women’s team. Ahead of one of their final workouts, Martin gave the trio a pep talk.

“He said: ‘You guys can go out and do something really, really special in Lisbon. You can give so many little girls in Ireland hope.’”

That struck a chord with Cotter, a confessed athletics anorak who grew up devouring books about the sport and watching every major championships on TV.

“I looked up to so many athletes growing up, watching Fionnuala (McCormack), and I always envisioned myself in that position.”

Last Sunday she was in that position. She and the Flanagans shot to the front from the start of the U23 race.

“Nothing is guaranteed,” says Cotter. “We knew we were going to have to go out and take it.”

Cotter likely cost herself an individual silver by choosing to go with Denmark’s Anna Moller in the middle of the race, and on a hilly course the last two laps drew out like a blade. Nonetheless she battled to win bronze, which, when backed up by Eilish in ninth and Roisín in 17th, also earned the Irish team silver medals.

“I went out so hard and I died, but I said I have to hang on, not for myself, but for everyone who was by the sides cheering,” says Cotter.

“It was all the Irish flags, all the people I knew who were watching at home. Our coach always says: ‘Run for something bigger than yourselves.’ We did that at the weekend and it’s amazing what it can do for you.”