Where it all started

I wasn’t one of those kids who was good at all sports. In fact I was quite the opposite, yeah I was that kid who was always last to be picked in PE.  In primary school football was the game of choice and I couldn’t kick a ball into the sea if I was standing on a pier! In a school of 96 pupils I was jealous of my younger brother who had trophies from school sports day.  My lasting memory of sports day was the humiliation of my ill-fitting shorts falling down around my ankles during the 100m. Sport wasn’t for me, I was much happier playing for hours in the fields near my house.

In secondary school it didn’t start much better; rugby. Now anyone who knows me will know I am not built to be a rugby player and back then I was short as well as skinny, so it didn’t take long before I gave up on school sport and went back to spending my days playing in the mud, this time on my bike. My bike had always been a source of freedom and it wasn’t long before I saved up enough money from my Saturday job and bought a second hand mountain bike (a 1990 Kona Cinder Cone with custom Joe Murray paint job for all you bikers.) I was hooked and spent most of my weekends in the saddle.

As I approached the end of school people started talking about and the fact that you needed something other than GCSE results to put on there. Apparently, hundreds of hours spent playing on a bike with my mates didn’t count for much. I had recently started doing the odd run with my good friend Neil around the hills of Drumbo so I joined the cross country team at school.

This I suppose is where my first foray into structured training began. We trained 3 days a week, a lot of our time spent in the grounds of Stormont Palace. I learnt jargon like Fartlek (Speed Play in Swedish, in running terms variable intervals) and pyramid sessions (e.g. 1min, 2 min, 3min,4min, 3min, 2 min, 1 min of effort with rest in between). As it turned out I wasn’t a totally lost cause on the sporting front after all. Nothing outstanding but I achieved honours at school and came 11^th in the Ulster Schools Cross country champs. My competitive nature came to life.