Shane’s a man with a plan in tough times
Fastest woman in Ireland has re-located to Wexford
IF YOU happen to be on Curracloe beach for a much-needed stroll to break the monotony of this cursed Covid-19 crisis and out of the corner of your eye you spot Ireland’s fastest woman running on the hardened sand, your eyes are not deceiving you.
Record-breaking sprinter Phil Healy has temporarily relocated to the Wexford seaside resort as she prepares for an Olympics which may, or may not, go ahead.
The athlete’s visit to the scenic strand is borne out of necessity, rather than the usual touristy trip to the beauty spot, with her coach, Wexford man Shane McCormack, sorting out her accommodation in the area so she could keep the show on the road during these most uncertain of times.
Healy has described the former Clonard footballer as the ‘mastermind’ behind her success and, in true Magnus Magnusson style, it’s clear that he’s determined to finish what he has started as he leaves no stone unturned to try to get the Cork native to peak at the right time.
As far as preparations for major championships go, things couldn’t go much worse, with the will it, won’t it uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated by the fact that normal training routines go out to the window.
It’s at times like these you have to think outside the box and be willing and able to alter the bestlaid plans, and McCormack was quick to act, having foreseen the difficulties that have engulfed the nation.
‘I saw this coming a couple of weeks ago. At the national indoors back in February I said to her, “this could be your last race of the year”. I wasn’t joking, I kind of saw where this was going.
‘She said “not at all” but I told her to run it as if it’s her last race and she ran a blinder. She’s the top-ranked European athlete at the moment,’ McCormack said.
‘A friend of mine has holiday villas down in Curracloe so I was thinking worst case scenario, if everything shuts down we’d have the beach, which is a good flat surface and we’ve got the dunes and the forest.
‘I moved weights and other equipment into the house as well. I thought I’d give her a few weeks there and then when everything settles down she’ll probably move in with myself and my wife, Melissa, and the family and we’ll try to adapt from there.
‘At least if we go into full lockdown and I can’t get out to her she has everything on her doorstep down there,’ he said.
The father-of-three, who lives in Killeens in Wexford town, has been in the athletics coaching game for two decades, with an injury he suffered as a promising sprinter in U.L. sending him down that path earlier than most.
He’s seen enough not to be fazed by the current situation, having in his own words ‘made all the mistakes and learned the lessons along the way’, and he admits twelve months ago was an even more trying time, when his star pupil fractured her metatarsal.
‘Phil broke her foot this time last year, so last year was a real struggle. She still qualified for the world championships but she just wasn’t fully fit at the time.’
Preparations looked to be going much smoother this time around as the greatest sporting show on earth, the Olympics, loomed large on the horizon, only for coronavirus to raise its ugly head and it continues to hover like a dark, threatening rain cloud over us all.
Healy set a new Irish 200 metre indoor record with a time of 23.10 seconds at the A.I.T. International Grand Prix in mid-February and two weeks later she was just .06 of a second slower, posting a championship best when claiming the national title in Abbotstown, so at that stage it was certainly all systems go for Tokyo.
‘We put in a good shift over the winter and things were looking good. The times she ran indoor pretty much qualified her for the Olympics on ranking points alone. There’s two ways you can get into the Olympics: on time, which she’s just outside of, or you go in on ranking and she’s 29th in the world out of 56 so she was never going to slip out of qualifying, and Sport Ireland are treating her as a qualified athlete.’
Of course, the question on everyone’s lips is will the Olympics take place at all, and if they do will it begin on July 24 as scheduled, and with the clock counting down McCormack thinks it’s all very much up in the air.
‘I can’t see them pushing it out to October. I can see them doing one of two things, they’ll either cancel it, and it will never happen, or it will happen next year.
‘The I.O.C. came out and said full steam ahead, but realistically, what can be done when athletes can’t qualify? Phil is pretty much certain to qualify, but whether it goes ahead or not we have to keep going regardless.
‘We can’t stop, because if you do you’re going to lose three or four months of your life that you’re going to have to try to get back, and then things are going to come around very quick,’ he said.
They say if you want something done ask a busy man and McCormack is certainly that, holding down a full-time job as director of I.T. software development at Sun Life in Waterford, training a group of athletes at Waterford I.T., where Healy studies, as well as lending his expertise to All-Ireland hurling champions Tipperary.
As a proud Wexford man with strong family ties to G.A.A. in his home county, working as a sprint coach for the Premier hurlers might not have been high on his list of jobs of choice, and McCormack admits that he remained tight-lipped about the role until it was revealed to all and sundry in the full spotlight of the television cameras in Croke Park.
‘I tried to keep it as low-key as I could until Seamie Callanan announced it on the steps of Croke Park. The secret was definitely out then,’ he laughed.
‘I’d say about six people knew, family and one or two close friends. I didn’t want to put it out there, my mother is involved and my sister works for Wexford G.A.A. as well. If it doesn’t work out you’re a gobshite,’ he said.
‘I got a text in February of last year from a mutual friend of mine and Tommy Dunne asking would I take a phone call from Liam Sheedy, and I knew where that was going. I took the phone call and I met Liam.
‘You go down there with the best of intentions of saying no and you leave signed up. He’s just that type of man,’ he said.
That mutual friend was none other than former Clonard teammate Ross Dunphy, who previously worked with Tipperary as their fitness, strength and conditioning coach, and is now helping Jack O’Connor with the Kildare footballers.
‘Tommy and Ross would be very close so he was the mutual friend that connected the dots. They were looking specifically for someone to work on speed.
‘My background is not hurling, I would have played Gaelic with St. Joseph’s and Clonard. Myself and Ross trained Clonard the year we won the county title in 2011 so I would have done a lot of pitch work with him.
‘I knew going into Tipp how to adapt sprinting into what they needed. Just keep it as simple as possible and keep them moving. Thankfully they bought into it and they all got faster and it gave them a little extra edge – the GPS doesn’t lie and the proof is in the pudding,’ he said.
While helping out the Tipp hurlers is something he clearly enjoys, his real passion is for athletics, and coaching in that sphere is a labour of love for the Wexford man considering the financial rewards are non-existent.
‘I’m 20 years at it now. You’re travelling all over the world and the money isn’t always there. To be honest it’s a pittance what the federation give you, but if you’re doing it for the money you’re in the wrong game.
‘I would push back and say we should at least cover the expenses and things like that. It’s not even for me, I can afford to do this, but what happens the next coach that comes along with a sprint star that doesn’t have the money to do what they need to do?
‘It’s an amateur sport but I think the coaches have definitely been neglected for a long time,’ he said.
As a coach, McCormack definitely couldn’t be accused of neglecting his athletes as he soldiers on in difficult circumstances to keep the eight competitors under his stewardship in the best possible shape.
‘I give them all daily challenges on the Whatsapp group and they’re all adapting well, finding forest trails or cinder tracks or whatever they can to keep going.’
One of McCormack’s first notable successes as a coach was when he guided Menapians sprinter David Hynes to national 100 metres title in 2013 and, seven years later with Healy under his wing, he continues to try to find ways to knock that extra tenth or even one-hundredth of a second off her times.
There’s no doubting that getting any sort of edge over your competitors is doubly difficult in the current climate, but McCormack is not one for moaning, realising there’s plenty of top athletes all over the world in the same rocky boat.
‘We were using Enniscorthy track, but I just got word that that’s closed now. We have options, there’s the beaches and there’s a couple of cinder tracks around pitches and things like that, and we’ll just have to make do.
‘The beach is good but you have to work around the tide. The option is there from Sport Ireland that we can go to Dublin and use the Institute of Sport. That’s still staying open for Tokyo athletes but where do you stop with the risk and reward?
‘If we go up there, there’s still people around you. You don’t want to bring an athlete all the way to Dublin and take a risk,’ he said.
‘We can make do with what’s here. We just have to adapt. A track isn’t the be all and end all. We went through a broken foot situation last year when she couldn’t run, so to me this is not an issue.
‘Once she’s running and lifting weights, we can do all our triometrics and medicine ball sessions. There’s loads of things we can do that we wouldn’t have had the time to do.
‘We can make her a better 400 metre runner, which is what’s going to come around next year in the world indoors. We can use this as an opportunity,’ he said.
The old adage ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ could have been penned by McCormack as he illustrates his Mister Brightside character by concentrating how he can somehow turn this awful situation to his advantage, hoping to make improvements that they wouldn’t otherwise have time to focus on.
‘Phil has the Irish record for 100 and 200 metres but doesn’t have the record for the 400. It’s not her natural event, so I’m going to use this time to make her a better 400 metre runner.
‘When you come around to January, February, March next year it’s indoor season. There’s no 200 indoor. The 400 is the only event she can compete in internationally.
‘There will be Euro and World indoors next year in February and March so worst-case scenario we’re training for that. It’s keeps her going as well. All athletes want to do is train and have something to aim for,’ he said.
‘Japan could be okay and get rid of this, but how are they going to get people in?
‘We could get to the point where Japan gets the all-clear and they could say it’s going to be athletes only and no fans, just management and team staff.
‘You could travel over and have two weeks’ quarantine. Something like could potentially work, but for us it’s just the unknown.’
The planet may be crippled with uncertainty, but despite none of us knowing what way the wind will blow in the sporting world, McCormack still appears to be a man with a plan.