GREGAN’S LOCKDOWN LESSON

OLYMPICS hopeful Brian Gregan admits lockdown taught him a valuable lesson about his ‘obsession’ with qualifying for the Games. The 400m runner missed out narrowly on reaching the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. His dream remains to make it to Tokyo 2021 – though he’s able to put it all in perspective now. ‘Yeah, it’s still my dream but lockdown taught me that it was actually too much of an obsession and that when you Dream: Brian Gregan get too clued into something it can be a negative,’ said Gregan at the launch of the European Week of Sport. ‘Obviously you need to focus everything you have on it but sometimes you become too obsessive with it and that brings stress and anxiety with it.’ Gregan missed out on Rio 2016 after being ‘wiped out’ by a mystery bug that attacked his system after pushing too hard in training. ‘I was doing absolutely everything I could possibly do to get on that team, overtraining and undereating, because with athletics you need to be pretty much as light as you can but also as powerful as you can. ‘I woke up one day and my resting heart rate, which was normally in the low 50s, high 40s, was about 70 beats per minute, I couldn’t walk 100 metres without my heart rate going well over 130, 140 beats. “A lot of tests didn’t show anything, I was in and out of hospital, and eventually I came out of it, I think it was May or June time. My energy came back and I started to race and stuff like that. ‘But I’d missed two or three months of a key time to try to train and qualify.”