O'Rourke looking to keep it simple

ATHLETIC:IT SEEMS not every Irish athlete considers the National Championships a priority – not even in Olympic year – and with London now calling loud and clear maybe there are better places to be.

But try telling that to Derval O’Rourke. The Morton Stadium will be one of her last stops in that quest to reach the perfect Olympic peak, and there’s nowhere else she’d rather be this weekend than Santry.

It’s often forgotten that for all her success on the world stage O’Rourke has never lost sight of the importance in bringing it all back home: unless she trips and falls she will win a 10 national title in the 100 metres hurdles, and not many Irish athletes can ever boast that.

She won the first of them in 2001, also five in succession from 2004-2008, and the last two back-to-back. It’s a competitive record that holds up against anything achieved in the past – and what a past it is. First staged in Trinity College on July 7th 1873, this the 140th consecutive edition makes them the longest running national athletics championships in the world, helped by the fact that war never got in their way.

For O’Rourke the timing of it all is crucial, and in more ways than one. She has just four weeks to complete her preparations for London, before the heats of the 100m hurdles on the morning of August 6th – and that means a series of races carefully designed to sharpen her speed and hurdling technique.

First up is actually this afternoon’s pre-Olympic meeting at Loughborough University, before flying back tomorrow morning to race in Santry – and from there it’s off to France to race again on Tuesday. O’Rourke has raced sparingly so far, and purposely so, yet now is the time to stare those 10 hurdles in the eye and make them rapidly disappear.

“This really is coming into the business end of things for me,” she says. “The plan is for a couple more races too, in the final two weeks before London. I’ve only had the couple of races in June, which were very low key. But that was the plan, because now is the time to start running fast.”

Ideally her 13.09 in Austria last month will want to be improved on before London, although not necessarily so. It wouldn’t be the first time O’Rourke has gone to a major championships with a time ranked well outside the leading contenders, only for her to end up beating most of them. That’s the strategy going into London too.

It’s also why she by-passed last week’s European Championships, even though she was the two-time defending silver medallist: “I’ll be honest and say I wasn’t sure, at first, if skipping Helsinki was the right thing to do. And I thought I might have some regrets. But now, having watched them, definitely not. Plus I just know I’ve never peaked twice in an outdoor season. I did consider Helsinki, briefly, after the World Indoors, in March, because I was so disappointed at the way I ran there.

“But my coaches Seán and Terri Cahill never considered it. They were never going to let me do it. Plus, I did a very heavy weights session last weekend. You can’t do that if you’re racing, but that’s what I need to do to peak at the Olympics. I know as well that I’m still far off my top speed right now, because again that’s all about peaking at the Olympics.

“I could have gone there, and ran well, but I take the championships too seriously, have too much respect for them, not to try to peak. Some people thought it would have been good preparation for the Olympics. But for me, a championship like that is not good preparation for another championships, when you know you can only peak at one.”

London marks her third Olympics, and while things definitely didn’t work out as planned in either Athens or Beijing, she’s not getting hung up on the importance of getting it right this time.

“Look, every year I focus on the major championships, and this year is the same. Of course there’s always the extra hype around the Olympics, but for me it’s about focusing on the two days that I run. It’s 100 metres, with 10 hurdles, and it will be the biggest day of the year for me. But it won’t be the biggest day of my life. I can’t look at it that way. Nor should anybody.

“But I think I’ve engaged a little less with the whole Olympic thing this year, compared to the last two. I haven’t done a lot of press, or any campaigns, or any of that kind of thing. I suppose I’ve tried to keep it low key.”

At 31 O’Rourke also knows her body can only take so much more, and preparations for London have been a sort of balancing act between pushing harder than ever and staying injury free.

What is certain is that she will be maximising the proximity of these Olympics by staying in her own environment for as long as possible before London. “I fly in from Dublin on the Saturday evening, and I run on the Monday morning: I’ll be cooking my own meals, sleeping in my own bed, bringing the dog for a walk. I want to keep it that simple,” she says.