Success and hard Work is key for Ruth
RACEWALKER RUTH, 17, HAS AMBITIONS OF REACHING THE OLYMPICS
SHE first learned what racewalking entailed while in national school and to say Ruth Monaghan has been hooked ever since would be an understatement.
Some years later and the Kevinsfort native has won countless titles, including an International Bronze and Silver medal, as well as numerous Senior and Junior accolades.
She caught the eye of renowned racewalking coach, Ray Flynn, and the Calry man, who was mentor for many years to Olympic Bronze medallist Rob Heffernan, says Ruth has an extremely bright future ahead of her.
Getting into racewalking may not be a sport that would generally spring to mind from an early age, but Ruth says she fell in love with it straight away.
“It wouldn’t be a very common sport, especially in athletics, with kids that do running or field events. I definitely didn’t know about it before I started. It was in my primary school, Our Lady of Mercy school, they were holding primary school events and they were just looking for students to take part in them,” Ruth told The Sligo Champion.
“Me being a misbehaved child, I wanted to get out of school, so I took the chance to get the school time off!,” she laughed. “So I put my name down for it and I hadn’t a notion what it was. I was in third class. One of my teachers actually got us doing laps around the school and it was a big school, so it was a bit of an effort, and I generally had the foundations of it down.
“I was in a way good from the start so I went to races then and I actually started winning them, surprisingly out of the blue.
“I found I had a big interest in racewalking but it wasn’t until Dermot McDermott, the running coach now, he did an after-schools programme and he showed us the right way to do it, the technique, drills and stretches, just properly showing us how to do it, because we weren’t doing it properly beforehand.
“Dermot actually showed us how to get it down and the technique and everything like that.
“Competitions would come around and I’d be getting faster and winning more medals and that’s when I caught the eye of Ray’s daughter, Zola.
“She was judging one of the competitions and pointed me in the direction of Ray down at Sligo AC, where he is a racewalking coach.
“So I took a trip down to Ray on the track and the rest was history.
“I was about 10 maybe eleven and the rest of history. So Ray has been my coach for about 7 years now,” she added.
In terms of other sports, Ruth said they didn’t really catch her eye.
“I would have been a cross-country runner, I’d take a dabble in that, I wouldn’t be good now! But again I did it to get out of school,” she quipped. “I wouldn’t have been a big sporty person until racewalking.”
Her competitive streak for the sport showed almost straight away. “What drew me to it was probably the fact I was good at it at a young age and I got the drive from winning medals, I had the competitive streak and wanted the Gold medals! Once I saw I was winning, I continued with it.”
Another factor she liked about the sport was how it wasn’t particularly a generic sport that people were familiar with.
“It was the fact that you’d say ‘oh I’m a racewalker’ and people would look at you funny, they wouldn’t understand what it was.
“You’d have to explain it and that factor of it I did like, it’s an unusual and unique sport and I like saying I’m a racewalker, it made me unique and something different from the rest of the crowd.
“I like that factor of it,” the Sligo AC athlete pointed out.
She said that there is a small training group in Sligo of 4, three athletes and coach, Ray.
“The other athletes would be both older, Eva Delahunt and Ryan Roberts, they are both in college now but are still going strong with it.
“We are like a nice little group, we are lucky to have it. We’re friendly inside training and out of it, I’ve made life-long friends with them and it’s just made the sport so much easier and in training, having those people with you instead of doing it by yourself.”
Ruth admitted that racewalking is generally a very individual sport, as it’s solely the athlete themselves, so to have Eva and Ryan there too in training is brilliant.
“You’ve got those people pushing you on in training, so it’s really nice to have those people around you, it’s so relaxed in training and you help each other out and again, good friends.”
Ruth chuckled when asked if her talent for racewalking stemmed from her parents or family background. “No, my family wouldn’t be a very sporty family! “My older sister, Hannah, she would be a Gaelic player now and I kind of began in a Gaelic family, but I drifted out into the athletics which my family would not be a part of any athletic background or anything.
“It was quite a shock to both sides of the family to have someone like that, go into the athletics and be that good and winning, because it wasn’t a family history at all.
“It’s actually nice as well, I’ve got such support from them and they wouldn’t have heard about it before so they push it more and motivate me more just because I’m literally the only one in the family like that, so they are proud to have someone apart like that,” Ruth said.
Ruth pointed out that racewalking in technical terms is one of the hardest sports you could do. “There’s so many factors to it, the right technique and getting that down.
“In competitions as well, you can be disqualified unlike other sports. You can be disqualified due to your technique, so that’s why it is so important and it brings you that big forward.
“Having good technique, having one foot on the ground at all times and making sure you keep contact with the floor and having your straight leg, just all those little factors, you have to be on edge all the time during a race and concentrating, making sure you’re hitting all the spots.
“Because getting disqualified can happen, so you’re trying to refrain from that. You’re on edge all the time and there are all these judges around the track keeping an eye on you. It keeps you on your tippy toes basically and it is a very hard sport unlike other ones.”
Ruth’s coach, Ray Flynn, said racewalking is a very technical sport but credits Ruth as being a pure natural. “I’ve been coaching groups of racewalkers and obviously a lot of them fall off the wagon but Ruth caught my eye straight away, she was just naturally good. To see her walking, she’s a pure natural. We do a lot of video analysis and apart from being with Ruth coaching, we look at videos of her training and kind of adjust little things. We spend a lot of time at that.
“She may say she has to be careful with judges but she doesn’t, she’s just a natural, I’ve never even seen her getting a warning. Technically, she is one of the best in the country at the moment.”
Speaking about the competitions she has taken part in, Ruth continued: “There are All-Irelands every year, school and clubs. I’ve been lucky in clubs, I’ve been Connacht champion every year running that I’ve been in it. Then All-Irelands, I would be getting 3rd and second in clubs and schools it
would just be that bit harder for me, because I would probably be one of the youngest in the category. So I’d win Connachts but once I would get to All-Ireland level, I would get maybe fifth because I’d be up against a lot of great athletes that are just that bit better than me. I was lucky enough to go to Schools’ International, which was in Swansea in 2019. I represented my school, the Mercy College, and Ireland. I got third which was a complete shock to me, just getting over there was an achievement already and I wasn’t expecting anything because international level, I was just like I’m happy enough to be here.
“There were 2 athletes each out of Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England, it was a really tough field and I was just completely shocked at myself. It was another level I stepped up for that race which I had never seen before,” she added.
“It was great experience too, my first International and it was just before I went into Transition
Year as well. I couldn’t believe it and my family too were incredibly proud, because it’s such a big deal. Throughout my whole career, I’ve been taking it steady, just building it up slowly. It was only maybe until this year I took a more high-performance perspective on it and actually set my sights higher and become more invested in it.
“I’ve got my goals and everything for the future that I want to achieve,” the 17-year-old added.
In terms of her goals for the future, Ruth replied: “In the long run, Olympics yes, but for now, maybe like qualifying for European Cup, which is in the Czech Republic this year and getting my time for European Juniors in July, which I’m only 4 seconds away from!
“I’m working hard for it anyway, and I’m really looking forward to this year and hoping there’s a lot of competition for the year that is in it even with covid. It was a bad year in 2020, but for me, it was lucky because I had so much more time to train and focus and that’s what brought me higher and especially with Seniors and Juniors last year, I again shocked myself.
“Again it was through the whole training and I got 2nd in the Seniors which was just incredible. I was beating girls that were beating me last year and going up the field and racing against all these girls, it was an honour in itself but getting second behind Kate Veale who would be a big inspiration and who I’m good friends with, it was just amazing at Senior level too, I was ecstatic with that.
“Then Juniors the next week, I got 3rd in and it was happy days with another medal.”
Ruth said looking back on all the medals she has won so far, the most memorable would probably be Seniors and Lithuania.
Coach Ray said that covid in a way was a blessing in disguise for their training. “There was lockdown in March and it gave these athletes more focus, they were off school and all that. Ruth was at the age anyway, 16 or 17, where we really had to get serious or give it up.
“So we increased the workload and all summer we put in a huge summer of training. Luckily enough, Athletics Ireland held the National events, the Juveniles wasn’t held but the Juniors and Seniors were.
“Ruth got a Silver in the Seniors and a Bronze in the Juniors on different distances, the Junior was 3,000m and the Senior was 5,000m.
“The workload that Ruth had put in all summer helped her a great deal. Through my contacts then in the athletics’ world, we got to a race in Lithuania in September which was
nearly a month after the Nationals. Ruth got into the youth race there, the 5,000m again and she raced brilliantly to finish 2nd. I think that gave her great confidence because it showed no more than in the Schools’ International, it showed she could compete at a higher level.
“2020 was good but now we’re into lockdown and there’s no Indoors but at the same time, we’re doing everything we would be doing if there was competition.
“For example, last week, Ruth was on half-term, so we’ve been training twice a day everyday that week and normally it would be once a day after school.”
Putting in the hours, like any sport, is an essential part of training as a racewalker, Ruth added.
“You really have to with that type of sport if you want to get anywhere, you have to put in the kilometres and the effort like you do with any sport really but with racewalking you really do feel it, say if you were off for 2 days, when I get back training, you actually feel like you’ve lost back a bit so it is important keeping on top of the workload.
“That’s what we are trying to maintain, especially if school comes back into play again, you have to work around that.”
Ray said the calendar for 2021 is somewhat up in the air at the minute.
“There was a micro meet on at the weekend but it was only a few events that they are really trying to get people qualified for the European Indoors.
“I think come the summer, it will be okay. “The competition abroad seems to be going ahead, like the Spanish championships were on 2 weekends ago and there’s a race in Slovakia on the 20th of March and we’re hoping for that, subject to quarantine rules and that.
“It (covid) is problematic but you cannot be looking at it in a negative way, you can’t being an athlete, you have to be positive. If it happens, it happens. But if it doesn’t, it’s like money in the bank, all the training Ruth is doing or any of them are doing, it’s in the bank for the future.”
When asked about the future and the possibilities of reaching the Olympics, Ray said; “She said about Paris in 3 years because of the cycle, but Paris would probably come a bit too soon. But 4 years after that, definitely, and she will only be 24 then.
“But nothing is guaranteed and I’ve told Ruth that. I’ve heard so much of ‘this is the next Rob Heffernan’ or ‘this is the next Sonia O’Sullivan’ and it doesn’t happen. So nothing is guaranteed but the thing I want to emphasise is that Ruth has 3 of the main ingredients to make it.
“She has got loads of natural ability, she has the hunger and she has the commitment, those are 3 very important ingredients.
“Another thing too is we’ve exposed her to a high performance environment. We’ve been to training camps with the likes of Rob, I know he’s retired now, but Rob’s group. We’ve gone to Spain twice, it’s a huge learning curve and she’s trained with some of the top Spanish walkers, for example Maria Perez..
“In the Spanish championships recently, she went within 30 seconds of breaking the World Record for 35km. So Ruth has actually trained with her. As I said to Ruth this week, ‘you’re no different to Maria, Maria is even smaller than you but she’s got loads of drive and commitment and that is what it takes.
“I’m not bragging or anything, but Ruth is in a good environment and it’s up to herself now.
“But I think she’s got the right mindset and the commitment.”
Ray said: “I’ve known Ruth since she was 10 or eleven and I’ve watched her grow not only as athlete but as a person.”
Ruth added: “I’ve a brilliant coach in Ray, I wouldn’t be anywhere without him. He’s the one that made me the athlete I am and person too.”
I’VE GOT MY GOALS AND EVERYTHING FOR THE FUTURE I WANT TO ACHIEVE. IN THE LONG RUN, OLYMPICS YES, BUT FOR NOW, QUALIFYING FOR THE EUROPEAN CUP.