Nick Griggs: A swift rise from obscurity to the real deal

At first they thought he was lying. It just didn’t make any sense. When 16-year-old Nick Griggs entered a 5000m race in Belfast back in May, looking to line up against some of the best Irish seniors, event organiser Seamus McCann was dubious, to say the least. The rest is history

Nick Griggs leads the field in the Junior Men’s 1500m last June in the Irish Life Health Junior Championships & U23 Specific Events at Morton Stadium, Santry. Sunday in Abbotstown, he faces the biggest test of his fledgling career, taking on a field of serious quality in the U-20 European Cross Country Championships. Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

At first they thought he was lying. It just didn’t make any sense. When 16-year-old Nick Griggs entered a 5000m race in Belfast back in May, looking to line up against some of the best Irish seniors, event organiser Seamus McCann was dubious, to say the least.

The young athlete from Newmills, Co Tyrone had never broken two minutes for 800m, never broken 4:10 for 1500, and had zero 5000m form. Yet here he was, claiming he’d recently clocked a 14:26 5k in training — on his own.

McCann called Mark Kirk, a coach who knows the Northern Ireland running scene as well as anyone. Kirk had never heard of Griggs but after doing some research he came to the same conclusion: don’t put him in the A-race.

“He’d no pedigree,” says Kirk. “We were thinking, ‘there’s no way you’re going to run that; you’ll make an eejit of yourself.’”

But the kid knew what he’d done, and he knew what he could do.

“They were all like, ‘no, this isn’t true, he’s not done this,’” says Griggs. “I don’t blame them.”

To change their minds, Griggs asked a friend to film him doing a 3000m time trial, in which he clocked a blazing 8:20 on what was a horrible day in Magherafelt. He sent the video to McCann, who agreed to give him a shot in the A-race.

“He said he was crapping himself before that race because we were all watching and basically thinking he’s going to fail,” says Kirk. “The rest was history.” Griggs ran 14:15.98 for 5000m, the fastest time in history by an Irish U18.

A month later, he obliterated the best Irish teenagers to win the national U20 3000m title in Santry, clocking 8:11.15 — another Irish U18 record. In the space of a month, he’d gone from total obscurity to one of Ireland’s top medal hopes for the European U20 Championships.

And now people were starting to believe.

But amid his triumphs on the track, Griggs was having to come to terms with tragedy off it. In early June his older brother Josh, 19, died in a workplace accident.

“He was always my biggest influence and my biggest supporter,” Griggs told  BelfastLive last month. “If anyone ever doubted me, he always told me I was good enough. When I came back from a mini-marathon in London and I told him I didn’t think I would ever be as good as some of the guys there, he said, ‘keep training and you will be.’”

In the aftermath of Josh’s death, he stayed true to those words.

At the time Griggs was coached by Barry Holmes at Mid Ulster AC, an octogenarian who’s primarily focused on sprints. But talent is talent, and even off rudimentary training Griggs’ gift was starting to flourish.

“He’s very determined,” says Kirk. “Before he went to Euros he said, ‘I want to win that.’ That’s all he was interested in.”

Griggs didn’t just win that European U20 3000m title in Estonia. He beat the best of Europe’s teenagers with absolute ease — athletes two or three years his senior. The youngest athlete in the race, he coasted to the front with a kilometre to run, winding the pace up slowly and unleashing a blazing 55-second final lap to come home in splendid isolation.

It was a jaw-dropping performance for an athlete his age, and word of talent like that tends to travel fast. The European U20s is an event closely watched by US college coaches, and that night a horde of the highest-paid, highest-profile among them were scrambling to get a contact for Griggs’ parents, trying to secure his services with a scholarship offer.

Griggs, though, is adamant his path will be paved at home, with UCD his intended destination when he finishes school in 2023.

In his childhood, GAA was the big passion, with Griggs following his older brother’s lead and lining out for Brackaville Owen Roes GFC since the age of five. Shortly after his European gold, he was back playing with them again, making a 20-minute cameo off the bench. But after aggravating a back injury Griggs figured he’d “hang up the boots there.”

“I love Gaelic football, I love watching it, but now it’ll just be running,” he says. “With the time (commitment) and with injuries, it’s so different, so high-intensity and I’m so prone to injury so I can’t be doing that if I want to be good at running.”

What happened next for Griggs is something that rarely occurs in Irish sport, with Holmes recognising he didn’t have the coaching skillset to take him to the next level and deciding to pass him on to someone who did.

Holmes emailed Kirk with that proposition, and Kirk admits it was “a hard thing to say no to”. Until then Griggs mostly trained alone, but since August he’s made the trip to Belfast twice a week to train with Kirk’s group, which numbers close to 30 athletes.

A bout of Covid in September meant Griggs’ autumn training got off to a slow start but since then he’s been steadily working, developing, under Kirk’s guidance. The first thing Kirk had to do was slow him down. Before, Griggs’ idea of a threshold run was to smash a 5K in 15 minutes, while his Sunday long run was reeled off at an unnecessarily swift six minutes a mile. His volume has climbed slightly in recent months to 55-60 miles a week but the intensity has decreased, with Kirk ultra-conscious of keeping him healthy.

“You could say, ‘he’s a talent, let’s get him doing X, Y and Z, racing seniors and running 80 miles a week,’ but I’m trying to do things gradually,” he says. “There’s a lot of responsibility: I really want to do right for him, to make sure he progresses well and fulfils his potential.”

Anyone who watched Griggs in the summer knows that potential could be just about anything. Once Kirk took over he put Griggs through lactate testing – a quick way to look under the bonnet at a runner’s engine, assessing their ability to sustain certain speeds. He could barely believe what he saw, with Griggs hardly producing any lactate when running 5:20 miles compared to others in the group.

“Physiologically he’s unbelievable,” says Kirk. “He’s a real aerobic animal, there’s no doubt about it.”

But it’s not just endurance. On a warm-weather training camp run by Athletics Northern Ireland in October, Griggs fared best in a max speed test over 10 metres and he also came out tops in gym tests measuring maximum force — all this despite Griggs never lifting weights, his only strength work being an eight-minute core circuit he does at home each night.

“He’s ahead of the game strength-wise, speed-wise and he’s got fantastic endurance, naturally, so he’s something else that way too,” says Kirk.

But whatever about physiology, perhaps what matters most right now is Griggs’ enjoyment of the sport, and Kirk couldn’t be happier in that department, explaining the teenager’s habit of smiling at friends during races – even in that European final.

When he first showed up to train with the group in Belfast, Kirk figured he might carry with him an ego after all his summer achievements, and perhaps try to show off his class in training, but the youngster was happy to sit in the pack, quietly going about his business.

“He has no airs or graces,” says Kirk. “He listens to anything you tell him and does anything you want.”

Sunday morning in Abbotstown, Griggs will face the biggest test of his fledgling career, taking on a field of serious quality in the U20 race at the European Cross Country Championships. At the nationals in Santry last month he coasted to victory with his trademark flying finish and while this will be an altogether different test – with a cluster of athletes who’ve run 20-30 seconds faster than him over 5K – he is a strong contender.

“To pull the Ireland jersey on again and represent my country is the biggest goal of the whole cross country season,” he says. “You never want to jinx anything, but it’s obviously a home championships.”

Still a week shy of his 17th birthday, Griggs will again be one of the youngest in the field so there’s no pressure, no expectation, no such thing as failure.

For an athlete so young, projecting into the future is always an exercise in futility, given the many rivers to cross before any of this translates to senior success. But one of the key lessons from those who either burnt out or faded away is to enjoy the here and now – appreciate the athlete he is while taking the right steps to become the athlete he wants to be. Griggs is doing just that.

“It’s a completely different environment to the track,” he says. “So I’m just going to do my best, stick with the front and see what happens.”

Wherever he ends up at the finish, you get the feeling it’s only just the beginning.