FIRE STILL BURNING
Hannah Miley is more determined than ever to achieve record pool success for Scotland ... and keep the lions at her back
“Are you chasing ice cream or being chased by a lion?”
Her face cracks into a broad grin as the nonsensical idiom trips off her tongue. One of her dad’s favourites apparently. The hunter or the hunted. Miley style. At 28, with back-to-back Commonwealth gold medals to defend, Hannah definitely has more predators behind her than cones in front of her these days in the brutallycompetitive life cycle of swimming.
But with the Gold Coast looming large on her horizon, Scotland’s darling of the pool insists she still has the taste for the kind of success a history-making third straight win would bring.
One that would be all the sweeter considering the bitterness of two spiritcrushing near misses in the two years since the glory of Glasgow in 2014, falling short of World and Olympic medals by the most agonising hundredths of seconds.
By her own admission those failures – if fourth on the planet can ever be considered failure – left her in a dark place at times, consumed by her inability to live up to her own sky-high expectations.
Now, however, revitalised physiologically and psychologically, she is more than ready to go again.
Miley is completely at ease in her own skin and the one she wears with the Saltire, after dealing with the answer to the simplest yet most complex question in the world. “Why do I swim?” she said.
“If you’d asked me five, six, seven years ago, I’d have said, ‘It’s to be on the podium, to win medals.’ It was very materialistic.
“Whereas now, it’s still nice to do that but it’s not my sole purpose.
“The easiest thing would have been to stop after Rio last summer.
“It didn’t go my way, I didn’t get a medal – why go on after all these years?
“And even now I struggle to describe what swimming means to me but I knew I didn’t feel finished.
“And listen, I may never win another medal between now and the end of my career but I still feel happy knowing I’ve made a transition as a person with that knowledge I now have.
“And once I hang up my goggles I want to be a good person. I want to finish happy. I want to finish on my terms.
“I don’t want it to be a moment or an event or a perceived defeat that decides when my career will end.”
That maturity has come with age as well as experience – good and bad – but any of her rivals who think it means the fires aren’t still burning are in for a rude awakening.
Making the move from her long-time home pool of Inverurie to Aberdeen, Miley is grafting harder than ever in the Olympiccalibre venue to make a glory run at Australia, 12 years after the trip Down Under for her first Games as a 16-year-old.
Her training regime – backed throughout her career by the Institute of Sport in Stirling – is eye-watering at the best of times.
But it has been augmented by a 25-day stint in an oxygen tent in the waterside flat she shares with fiance Euan.
Her commitment to finding the small margins to keep the lions at her back rather than mauling her is unsurpassed.
“I had to be in the tent for 12 hours a day for three-and-a-half weeks,” she admitted.
“Did it make a difference? Yeah, they did some physiology tests and there seemed to be an impact.
“My body changed and responded but we won’t know the actual result until I start racing. It’s not an exact science obviously. The attention to detail has to be that good because the sport demands it now.
“But while the science side of it is great, you can’t afford to get too lost in it.
“There’s something to be said about gut instinct as well.
“My dad Patrick, who is my coach as well, loves his numbers as much as the next guy but sometimes he wants to stop and say ‘Hang on... ’ and realise they’re not the answer to every question.
“I get lactic acid testing, for example, and my reading is always low compared to other sprinters in the squad. They’ll be up in the mid-teens and I’ll be at four. Why?
“Sometimes you feel like you’re burning and the figures suggest you’re not trying hard enough – and I’m like ‘I AM!’
“My regime is still quite intense but it’s a lot more specific now to make sure I keep my body robust.
“Six days a week, with the Sunday off. I’m in the pool twice a day apart from Wednesday and Saturday. I’m in the gym three times a week, circuits twice a week and physio twice a week.
“I’ll swim between 14 and 15,000 metres in a day, maybe 300 lengths, which adds up to 65-75kms a week. And sometimes on a Saturday I’ll
do a bit of rock climbing with my fiance. For mental health, you need to switch off and relax. I put my hands up, I work myself into the ground at times so it’s healthy to have a break and allow body and mind to unwind.”
Miley will swim the Scottish Short Course championships next month as her main pre-games warm-up.
But the conditions when she eventually goes Down Under in April will be like night and day.
And the 2018 Games’ aquatics set-up will be new to many of the competitors because the pool is outdoors.
Which sounds great in theory, the sun beating down on you, but in truth it throws up a dozen variables to make life even harder for the swimmers.
Hannah said: “I think 2009 was the last time FINA sanctioned an event outdoors.” So why is it harder? She explained: “If the wind is blowing one way, it makes it tougher going against it.
“And if you’re swimming backstroke, normally you look at the roof and you can see your line.
“Outdoors if you follow a cloud, you’ll end up swimming 60m rather than 50 and hit the ropes along the
way! If it’s sunny you’re wearing mirrored goggles and trying to keep your head angled away
“I’m trying to practise by not looking at the roof just now and keeping my peripheral vision on the lane rope.
“But I’m getting some complaints because I’m unintentionally scratching my fellow swimmers when my arm goes under!
“And if there’s a cross wind when you are swimming outdoors it costs you energy as you are trying to fight against it.
“The temperature is also an issue. One of my first outdoor events was the European Championships in Hungary in 2006.
“I went out in shorts and a T-shirt but because the sun wasn’t on the pool, I ended up freezing and didn’t swim well because of it.
“But there’s a fun aspect to it as well. Swimmers are fundamentally solar-powered – when it’s sunny everyone just feels so much better.”
That feelgood factor is something she’s hoping to embrace all the way through the dark days of a Northeast Scotland winter before she gets there.
She said: “I’ll approach the Commonwealths the same way as I have the last three games. It’s another competition. It’s a process, I’ve done the training, this is the performance.
“It’s not in my head that I’ve won gold twice, I need a third. It goes back to the question – why do I swim?
“No Scottish athlete has won three gold medals so I’m aware I can make history but it’s abstract.
“The times I’m posting are still competitive but sport moves on.
“There are lots of youngsters coming through and making jumps towards the times I hold now.
“But it comes back to the lions and the ice cream,” she adds with a laugh.
“If you have a target in front of you and you want to gun for it, it’s easier. A bit like my last 100m in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, I was chasing down Aimee Wilmott because I could feel how close I was.
“The effort and the momentum you have to catch someone is far greater than the anxiety you feel trying to stop someone catching you.
“The hardest thing in the world if you’re in front is staying in front – but I’d still rather have the target on my back.”
Hannah is a National Lottery-funded athlete. By playing The National Lottery you help support and grow sport across Scotland, from grassroots clubs to our Olympic and Paralympic heroes.