Nick Griggs shaping up well in advance of bid to defend his U-20 crown

On the middle Saturday in October, keen to test his fitness after an illness-delayed return to winter training, Nick Griggs ran a parkrun at Victoria Park in East Belfast and was first home over the 5km course in a time of 14 minutes and 15 seconds.

It was the fastest parkrun time clocked anywhere in Ireland that day, or the United Kingdom for that matter.

Last Saturday, keen to test his fitness again, Griggs was first home in the same East Belfast parkrun in a time of 14:10, the fastest parkrun time ever clocked in Ireland. Only he didn’t stop there, following that with his proper training session of the morning, ten-times a minute at full-on tempo, with 30 seconds slow recovery in between.

Griggs is still only 17 by the way, a month shy of his 18th birthday, and will next put his fitness to a first real test at Sunday’s National Cross-Country Championships, set for Rosapenna golf course in Donegal, when he looks to defend the Under-20 title won last year, aged just 16.

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That’s ultimately about testing himself at next month’s European Cross-Country in Turin, ideally as part of an Irish Under-20 team looking to improve on their silver medal performance in Abbotstown last December, when Griggs finished, by his own admission, a well below-par 16th.

“Obviously, when I set out the goals, it’s to medal individually but that’ll be incredibly tough,” Griggs says of Turin 2022. “The main thing is the team title, I feel last year I did cost us the team title with a poor performance in Dublin, it’s heartbreaking when you’re one point off it and if I ran anywhere near what I can run, we’d have 100 per cent won.

“I just had to pick myself up; one bad race doesn’t define you, as an athlete or as a person. So hopefully I can get a bit of redemption this year and we can take home that team gold.”

Griggs certainly redeemed himself several times in 2022, running a 3:56.40 mile indoors, in March, which ranked him as the fastest teenager over the distance anywhere in Europe.

From there, the goal was to medal over 3,000 metres at the World Under-20 Championships in Cali, Colombia. That experience, Griggs finishing ninth in a race where Ethiopian, Kenyan and Ugandan runners filled the top-five places, he now describes as a reality check of sorts.

“It was a mixture of things, raw emotions at the time, kind of disappointment, but also proud to be in a World final, to finish ninth,” says Griggs, in his final year at Cookstown High School in Tyrone.

“I went into that season, after indoors, with the target of medalling at those World Championships, and obviously I didn’t achieve that, so at the end of the day when you don’t achieve your goal you’re always going to be somewhat disappointed, disheartened.

“But it was actually something that needed to happen, because it gives you a reality check, that you can’t just come and medal at these championships. That’s the expectation, but it’s a lot harder than maybe I thought before I was put in that situation.

“It definitely gave me a lot more drive and motivation to come back even stronger, so that next year, and this coming year, I don’t miss out on my main goals of the year.

“I always like to set high expectations because you want to do as well as you can. But I didn’t take into account the altitude. I had never been to altitude and even though it was only wee bit of altitude I didn’t realise how much it affected me.

“I remember doing a session on the Saturday and we were racing the semi-final on the Thursday and it like a tempo and a few 200s and it was a really light session. We were 32s, 33s for the 200s and I was gassed. I was thinking at that time I am in serious trouble. I don’t even know if I am going to make the final here.

“I didn’t really understand the Africans, whatever their age or whether they are older than they say they are. At this stage, when you are younger, they are a lot further ahead and more advanced and they are coming from altitude and stuff like that. They have that over me and they still do. That’s not going to change until I leave school and start going to altitude and doing all those extra things and focus specifically on running.

“It is good to know that in the long term I can bridge that gap. Hopefully anyway.”