Ciara Mageean within touching distance of a major champs podium

Irish middle-distance runner talks to Stuart Weir about a winding athletics journey and the mentors who have helped guide her through the twists and turns to put her to the brink of a global medal

Not long after Ciara Mageean crossed the finish line of the women’s 1500m final at the World Championships in Budapest, the tears came. Yes, she had produced a PB of 3:56.61 which also broke the Irish record but she found herself unable to hide the disappointment of fourth place and coming “the closest I’ve ever been to a global medal”.

While Faith Kipyegon had strode to her third world 1500m crown, Diribe Welteji and Sifan Hassan took the other podium places. “I did cry when I got off the track,” says Mageean. “But then, with reflection, I knew there was nothing more I could have done. I needed somebody else to have had a bit less of a good day. I ran the best race that I could possibly run and it was tactically perfect on my part.

“That 3:56 was a time that in the past I thought I never could have run and I was fourth in the world. So, that disappointment very, very quickly made way for pride and a great sense of achievement.”

It was also a confirmation of just how far Mageean has come.

Her journey began when a PE teacher spotted that she could run quickly and the development curve was similarly rapid.

“It was really an upward tangent and, under the guidance of Eamonn Christie, I really excelled as a junior athlete,” says Mageean. Indeed she did. There was an 800m silver medal at the World Under-18 Championships in 2009, while another silver arrived the following year, this time over 1500m at the World U20s. “With my innocence of youth I thought that was how it always would be,” she smiles wryly. “That every time I went out there I would run a PB and every time I would win a medal.”

A serious ankle injury, which ultimately required surgery, brought that idyllic state to an abrupt end. For someone so used to things falling into place, it presented a first major challenge for the then 20-year-old. Yet, while recovering from the operation, Mageean realised how much of her identity had become tied up in athletics.

“My home town [Portaferry] isn’t a big athletics town,” she says. “I would go down the street and people would say ‘Here’s the runner’. At university I couldn’t run, and I wondered what I would be if I wasn’t ‘the runner’?”

It was her new coach, the late Jerry Kiernan, who supported Mageean through that period of her life. “He helped me see value in myself as a person, that I was still Ciara and I wasn’t just ‘the runner’,” she says. “Throughout that whole injury period, I still went to training. I stood on the corner of the field with Jerry and I cheered on my training partners.”

Mageean effectively missed the whole of her potential under-23 career. She reached the semi-final of the senior European Championships in 2012, but then did not run at all in 2013 and very little in 2014 and 2015. She became used to hearing: ‘Oh, she was just a good junior. She’s not going to make it as a senior now’ and began to believe the doubters. The turning point came in 2016 with bronze at the European Championships and a first Olympics in Rio.

“I was so grateful to Jerry during that time because, really, he brought me back from not being able to walk to winning a European medal and making an Olympic semi-final.” A run of 4:01 in Paris which followed the Olympics enhanced the feel-good factor. “It was 2016 when I realised, ‘I’m back and I can make it as a senior athlete now’.”

Mageean’s long-term base has been Manchester, where she trains with the New Balance group which was previously led by Steve Vernon. However, when he was appointed endurance performance manager at UK Athletics in May 2022, Mageean found herself approaching a season featuring three championships without a coach.

Vernon brought in Helen Clitheroe to take on the coaching responsibilities and Mageean decided to give her a chance. It proved to be a very wise move indeed.

“I was like: ‘I want to see how it goes’ and Helen was really honest, saying ‘If it doesn’t work, if we get through this season and you don’t feel I’m the right person, then I completely support you in going elsewhere and I’ll help you’.

Having had to miss the Oregon World Championships through injury, Mageean finished the season with silver medals at the Commonwealth Games and European Championships. The pairing had “worked pretty well”.

Clitheroe is the first female coach Mageean has ever worked with but is the latest in a line of mentors who have been in the right place at the right time for her.

“I’ve had different coaches and really different styles of coaching throughout my career, and I think each style of coaching has been really well matched to the person I was at that time and the type of coaching I needed,” she says.

“Eamonn Christie was my first coach and I knew nothing about athletics so he very much guided me through that and taught me a lot about the sport. It was kind of like ‘this is what you do’ and I’d go and do it. And then I had Jerry, who was there at a time that I struggled with my identity as a runner because I was injured and then really struggled with my confidence coming back and he not only nurtured me in athletics, but nurtured me much deeper as a person.

“Then I came over to Manchester and Steve gave me a real sense of belonging in athletics. I came from an Irish sport called camogie and I actually always felt that, despite being good at athletics, I didn’t quite belong. I didn’t have a lot of friends in the sport, I didn’t belong to a big club. I didn’t go to club training, so then this team in Manchester really gave me a little tribe, a little wolfpack.

“With Helen, she has been very nurturing and given me confidence in what I know. We sit down to plan races and race tactics and, in the past, I’ve often looked to coaches for advice and coaches to tell me what to do. But Helen says: ‘What do you think?’

“She’ll say: ‘you’re just as experienced as me. You know yourself better than me. What do you think is your best way to run this race? Are you happy with this race plan or do you feel confident in this training going forward?’ And I quite like that. It’s giving me an awful lot of confidence in my knowledge and I’m learning a lot through Helen.

“It’s a real wee partnership. In my first ever Commonwealth Games in India in 2010 I raced with Helen and it felt like it had come full circle when she was the woman who really helped me get my first ever Commonwealth medal. I think that’s a beautiful process.”

Changing coaches has also resulted in changes to training down the years. That, too, has been an education.

“In the past, the highest weekly mileage I would have run would have been 80 but as I’ve got a little older, I’ve noticed that more is not necessarily better. It’s probably made me realise that quality is much better than quantity, so I now like to top up my training with a bit of cross training. I’d say anywhere between 60 and 70 miles per week is now my sweet spot and during some of the bigger weeks in the winter, it might get just above 70.”

Given that she studied physiotherapy at university, few athletes will be quite as in tune with their bodies as Mageean. However, she hasn’t completely decided if that heightened sense of awareness is a blessing or a curse.

“I have a better understanding or bodily awareness and I think it helps when it comes to things like learning new skills, she says. “I’m working with a strength and conditioning coach, learning new lifts, and I think the physiotherapy background gives me a better understanding of how the body moves, or how the body should move. I have a good eye for that and but it also probably does help a little bit whenever I’m reflecting on any rehab that I have to do and the processes.

“I will say that sometimes it probably serves as a disadvantage because you have a bit more knowledge, and sometimes I wish I was more ignorant. When something hurts, I’m like: ‘That sounds like it’s X, Y or Z’, and sometimes it would be a lot nicer to just be able to switch that off and not know just how serious an injury is.”

The accumulation of knowledge both on and off the track has served Mageean well throughout her career, though. As she enters Olympic year to resume that search for a global medal, she is all too aware that every little helps.

» This article first appeared in the January issue of AW magazine, which you can read here

Ciara Mageean within touching distance of a major champs podium appeared first on AW.