Thesis can wait as Louise Shanahan wants Worlds semi and her record back

Her thesis now has 3,000 words, which is 50-odd thousand short of what it needs. It's not due until December, and next week she will be competing in the World Championships in Budapest

Tue, 15 Aug, 2023 - 07:00

Cathal Dennehy

As she pops up on a Zoom call from the University of Cambridge, the white lab coat Louise Shanahan is wearing and the mystifying equations etched on a whiteboard behind her give a quick indication that this is not your typical world-class athlete.

The 26-year-old Cork native is a European finalist, the second quickest Irishwoman ever at 800m, but given her current setting it seems fair to open by asking how how that PhD in quantum biophysics is going. “It's fine,” she says. “The thesis now has 3,000 words, which is 50-odd thousand short of what it needs. It's not due until December, so hopefully it grows quite a lot over the next couple of weeks.”

Shanahan has been based at Cambridge since 2019, when she finished her undergraduate at UCC and moved across the water, coming under the guidance of Phil Odell, who coached her to the Olympics and an Irish 800m record in 2021 along with last year’s European final in Munich.

Her PhD involves taking “really tiny diamonds, about 50 nanometres in diameter” and putting them inside cells to measure temperature and viscosity. “I’m studying how the inside of a cell changes its thickness or its pourability, as you change the temperatures of the cell. That will be useful in cancer treatment and drug delivery.”

Last Saturday, Shanahan took a break from life in the lab to fly out to the Irish holding camp in Samorin, Slovakia, ahead of the World Championships, which begin in Budapest on Saturday. Her opening round of the 800m is next Wednesday. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and at last year’s World Championships in Oregon, that was as far as she got, but the Leevale athlete is intent on going further.

“Last year I missed the semi-final by one place, which we can't do again. I really want to walk away from this World Champs happy. I'd really like to make a semi. To run a nice time would be great but that'd be a bonus.”

Shanahan is ranked 21st of 59 athletes, with 24 set to reach the semi-finals. The path towards a championship is never linear, but this one has been especially jagged. She spent “most of the winter on the bike” due to an issue in her plantaris tendon. “I eventually tore it in February and that solved all my problems,” she laughs.

She got back training in the spring and opened her season with a superb 1:59.53 in Belfast, just outside her national record of 1:59.42, which Ciara Mageean has since lowered to 1:59.27. Last summer, Shanahan faced a bout of covid in the middle of her season that halted her progress, while this year it was a new issue: in mid-July, she was doing leg swings as part of her warm-up when she rolled and sprained her ankle.

“It was just a complete freak accident. It wasn't the worst time of year for it to happen, but it definitely wasn't the best.”

She got back running the following week, clocking 2:01.01 in Switzerland, before utilising her renowned finishing speed to take 800m victory at the nationals. “I feel like the last year has been anything but consistent. I've learned a lot about how I can still pull out performances even off non-ideal circumstances.”

A horde of her friends and family will travel to the World Championships in support, along with many colleagues from Cambridge. “They decided when they saw the price of the Olympics that they wouldn't go to Paris, but they'd come to Budapest instead,” she says. “I had to break the news to them that I was going to continue running after the World Championships, which they weren't that impressed with. It ruins the ability to celebrate properly afterwards.”

However next week goes, Shanahan will continue racing into early September, given the Olympic qualification window is open and she has yet to hit the automatic mark of 1:59.30. She’d also love to reclaim the national 800m record, even if surrendering it to Mageean has some advantages. “It is an honour to stand on the start line and have someone say, 'Louise Shanahan, national record holder' but I also think it's a pressure and it's a pressure that I'm happy to avoid where possible. (But) of course I want that record back.”

After her season is done, Shanahan will head to Font Romeu in the French Pyrenees where she’ll start preparations for 2024 with a block of altitude training, a trip that will double as a writing retreat. Fifty thousand words still to go on the PhD, but that’s an issue for another week. For now, it’s not about that marathon, but an elongated sprint. Two laps. Two minutes. One chance to go somewhere she’s never been.