A breed apart
“I couldn’t join them until Monday,” she says, reflecting on her other hobby. “I had a horse sales in Goresbridge on Saturday and I just had to go with it. I had a filly ready to go she was eating me out of house and home. I had to sell her before the winter.”
The 32-year-old Carlow athlete breeds sport horses for hunting, jumping, eventing and riding schools and it is just one of a number of activities that keeps her ultra busy. Her day job? She is a teacher in St. Andrew’s College in Blackrock, Co Dublin.
Her passion is horses, she once rode out for the successful race horse trainer Jim Bolger, and she also breeds them, trains them and hunts them.
“My mother has a farm and I keep them there. It keeps me going because I hunt as well. It can be very time consuming and frustrating but I just love it,” she insists.
In the public eye she is something different a sensational athlete who set the Irish middle distance scene alight this season with a string of ultra-fast times over 800m and 1,500m distances she had never dared to explore during an illustrious collegiate career in the United States.
She became the first star product of Brendan Hackett’s fledgling Irish Milers’ Club when she ran 2:04.06 in the special race promoted during the Kit Kat Irish Schools championships in Tullamore.
Earlier she had run 4:17.84 for 1,500m at one of their meets in Belfast. But now she returned to Belfast oozing confidence and it was reflected in a a 4:09.56, beating her career best time set at 4:14 in Montreal back in 1994 en route to the European championships in Helsinki.
Then came the Grand Prix meet in Lausanne where she became the third fastest Irish athlete ever with a 4:05.72 run for seventh place in a star studded 1,500m.
Only Sonia O’Sullivan (3:58.85), and her former Providence College team mate, Sinead Delahunty (4:04.22) had run faster than that. But she became the second fastest Irish 1,500m runner of all time at 4:03.18 which she ran in the Golden League meet in Monaco on July 19. She now smiles with satisfaction as she looks back on a whirlwind two months that took her to new heights.
“I honestly did not think I had this kind of speed. OK, after Tullamore I knew I could run around 4:09 in Belfast and then, once you break 4:10, it is amazing what it does for you.” In 1987, the year Sonia O’Sullivan was creating her own set of sensations at junior and senior level as a 17-year-old, she was an equally sensational juvenile.
She won the national cross country championship in her age group and went on to complete a 1,500m/3,000m double on the track before helping her club, St. Laurence O’Toole’s, to a 4 x 400m relay title.
At the end of it all she won the overall BLOE Allstar Award which was presented to her at a Gala Banquet at the Bloomfield House Hotel in Mullingar.
The following year she put the finishing touches to her schools athletics career, completed her Leaving Cert and was snapped up by Ray Treacy for his Providence College squad that already included Geraldine Nolan and Sinead Delahunty. It was an exciting time at Providence where Ray Treacy was the head coach.
And Geraldine Hendricken would share in all the glory. She was runner-up to Sonia O’Sullivan, now in Villanova, in the 3,000m in her junior year.
She was runner up to Suzy Favor Hamilton in the mile in her sophomore year and placed fifth in the mill in her Freshman year. She capped it all by becoming the NCAA champion in her senior year.
In all, she was seven times All American before going on to join the administration at Providence College as Assistant Coach to Ray Treacy.
She joined Natalie Davey, Geraldine Nolan and Anita Philpott to break the world record for the 4 x 1,500m relay a record which has since been broken by the Australians.
As Assistant Coach she brought in a number of girls who contributed to a great era in the athletics history of Providence College where Ray Treacy put a team together to win the cross country title. She had earlier been part of a team that finished second.
“But it also gave me a new flexibility,” she recalls. “I could now get into the meets. I ran 4:14 for 1,500m in Montreal having run nine minutes flat for 3,000m two days earlier. Neither are included in the AAI records and I don’t know why that is.”
The performances took her to the European championships in Helsinki but she picked up a virus in London a short time before that and was a mere shadow of her old self in the national championships and then the Europeans where failed to get out of the semi-finals. Then came a series of disasters. In 1995 she picked up the first of two serious groin injuries that wiped out two seasons for her. Then her father died and she returned to Ireland. She returned to Providence for six months to complete her course but came back to Ireland, worked full time as a substitute teacher and went to Trinity College in 1997 and did her Masters in Sports Science.
While her athletics was forced into the background she kept touch at the highest level.
She had competed at the world indoors in Toronto, the wold cross country championships in 1992 and the European championships in 1994 and in 1999 she was back in the Irish team for the European cross country championships. She was now coaching herself and did not set her sights on greater things until the end of last year when she began training for the indoor season and ran 4:14 for the 1,500m title at the national indoor championships early this year.
She failed to get the qualifying standard for the European indoor championships.“I thought I might just do it but, on reflection, it was better I did not. I know now I would have been really out of my depth,” she said. But she was selected for the world cross country championships in Leopardstown.
“Unfortunately it was the end of term and I was knackered tired,” she says. “I got a sore throat and did not run well.”
Then came the outdoor season and Tullamore and Belfast. She rang up Andy Norman and he got her into Lausanne. She rang up the organisers in Monaco herself and they took her into the 1,500m at the Herculis Golden League meet.
“Lausanne was quite an experience. You are there alongside the girls you have been watching on television. You wonder if you should be there at all. Then you realise the difference between them and you is not all that great.
“But Friday night (Monaco) was different again. It is amazing how close I was to being dropped on the first lap. I had been off the track for a week with that calf muscle strain. I thought I was out of my depth but I just held on by the skin of my teeth.
“Maybe the reason I ran the PB was because I ran so slow at the start and the splits were even and that’s possibly the way I should run every race. I came through in the end. And the calf muscle held up. I have trouble with them allthe time.”
The Europeans provide her with an exciting new challenge. There are four ex-Providence College athletes on the team, herself, Marie McMahon Davenport, Maria McCambridge and, of course, Mark Carroll.
“At the world cross country championships in Leopardstown there were 13 Providence athletes from five different countries in action. I think it is compliment to Ray Treacy’s coaching. He is getting longevity out of his athletes,” she says.
And last week, en route from Dublin, Ray dropped in to see her and she was delighted with that.
“He asked to see my training diary. It was so funny when your old coach wants to see what you are doing.”
The heats for the 1,500m in Munich are scheduled for Friday morning and she will be hoping to get through those with the least possible pressure.
“Looking at the world rankings right now there are 10 Europeans ahead of me but, on the day, anything can happen. I mean the title was won in 4:14 last time around but I’d hate to be trying to outkick those Rusians with a lap to go. It is not going to be in anyone’s interest if the pace is slow,” she says.
“But look at Monaco. Maria Cioncan from Romania was behind me and she won the race at the Bislett Games in Oslo. You look at that and you say ‘she is a Golden League winner’. Then you realise that maybe your time will come.”
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