Ciara Mageean experience can show Sarah Healy how to win mind games

After a fourth straight track championships where the 21-year-old underperformed, she could look to her room-mate for advice.

EXPERIENCE: Ireland's Sarah Healy after finishing 11th in her 1500m heat.

Standing in the dungeons beneath Munich’s Olympic Stadium, listening to Sarah Healy explain with raw, unfiltered, ruthless self-criticism how her mind had sabotaged her performance, how she “just decided to check out” at the key point of her 1500m heat, I thought back to a conversation from 2014.

It was in New York, and I was sitting with Bob Larsen, a hall-of-fame US coach who guided Meb Keflezighi to an Olympic marathon medal alongside victories in the Boston and New York City Marathons – alongside many other achievements across six decades of coaching.

We talked about athletes who mentally collapse in races, how a coach might address it.

“The first thing is to accept it, sit down with them and tell them: ‘That isn’t the way you are. It’s the way you’ve chosen to be, and we can do these things to get you closer to 100 percent,’” he said. “The main thing is teaching an athlete that this is a changeable trait. You’re not just a certain way; you choose to be that way. Even if, in the past, you caved or you jogged it in, you ultimately chose to do that.” 

It seems obvious, but it’s a profoundly powerful way of re-framing psychological meltdowns on the big stage – not as an external force of nature, the athlete a helpless victim, but as a conscious choice, a decision that, with the right coping strategies, does not have to be made.

Here in Munich this week, Sarah Healy and Ciara Mageean are roommates, two athletes who know in intimate detail something most of us never will – how it feels to don your nation’s colours, step out in front of tens of thousands of people, and fall to pieces.

Earlier this summer, Healy smashed Sonia O’Sullivan’s Irish U23 1500m record in Ostrava, clocking 4:02.86, making her second fastest of the 13 athletes in yesterday’s 1500m heat. She finished 11th, running 4:10.75.

This was the fourth straight track championships in the past year where Healy underperformed. At the Olympics in Tokyo, she admitted the occasion got to her after finishing 11th in her heat in 4:09.78. At the World Indoors in Belgrade, a mid-race lapse in concentration cost her a place in the final and she finished fifth (of six) in her heat in 4:12.44. At the World Championships in Oregon last month, it happened again – 12th in her heat in 4:11.31.

There are some athletes who seem impervious to mid-race psychological frailty, and I’m thinking here of Fionnuala McCormack, whose dogged attitude was exemplified on Monday, a marathon medal slipping from her grasp in the last 10km, McCormack nonetheless digging in, emptying everything she had left to claw her way up to seventh at the finish.

But such athletes are rare. Very rare.

For many, there’s an unfortunate thing that can happen on the big stage: if one little bulb glitches in their pre-race plan, the whole building quickly goes dark. It happened to Healy here on the penultimate lap when she started to get shuffled back in the pack.

“If I’d just been a bit tougher, I could have kept going,” she said. “But I just decided to check out – again.” That last word carried a world of hurt.

It feels intrusive at such times to ask what went wrong, the athlete still riding a tidal wave of shock, but ask we did.

“Obviously, it was terrible,” said Healy, who came here after her “best ever” training block. She had taken steps to address her psychology but admitted she does “struggle a lot mentally” on such stages. “It’s like my energy just goes. It’s like I don’t care when I’m racing, even though I care so much.” 

Healy is 21, and one of the brightest talents in Irish athletics. Mageean is 30, and was once in the very same shoes. Minutes after Healy walked through the mixed zone, distraught, disillusioned, Mageean bossed her 1500m heat, advancing to the final as a huge medal contender.

Seeing the confidence oozing from Mageean, I thought back to the 2017 European Indoors in Belgrade, where she dropped out of the 1500m final and left the track in tears. Something had glitched midway through that race – Mageean losing contact with the leaders – and the whole thing quickly went dark.

Dropping out was a choice, but it’s one Mageean has never made since. A big reason is that following that race, she began working with sports psychologist Kate Kirby at the Sport Ireland Institute, whose influence she has often credited.

Yesterday morning, I told Mageean what had happened with Healy, and it was a feeling she knew well.

“I don’t think people fully appreciate how hard it is out there, the thoughts that go through our heads and how nerve-wracking it is. It’s certainly something I’ll chat to Sarah about. It took me a long time to get over those nerves, to try use them for my advantage and, believe you me, I’m still battling that. But every single athlete is doing the same. If it didn’t mean that much to you, then we’re probably doing the wrong thing.” 

Mageean has tricks she uses. She’ll plan everything out in fine detail. She’ll visualise mid-race scenarios, and how she’ll react and respond. It all helps to keep the system from going dark, to make the right choice.

“It’s half the battle, preparing your mind so that it doesn’t sabotage all the hard work,” she said. “I chat to the people that are closest to me who I can voice those really silly concerns to, and they don’t think I’m weak because of it.

“Because it’s not a weakness. It’s real strength to know it means that much to you.” 

There are many athletes afraid to admit to such a mid-race meltdown. The fact Healy did should be applauded. The fact she’s taking steps to address it, just as Mageean did in 2017, is a sign of her ambition. She’s shown in the past, at multiple underage championships, that she can succeed when the pressure is high, and there will come a time in her future when this no longer happens, when she can look back at the past year the way Mageean looks at 2017.

And she’ll realise then that all this, as hard as it was, might just have been the making of her.