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FP News
5 Steps to Becoming an Olympic Athlete Former pupil Eilish McColgan, daughter of champion runner Liz McColgan (pictured bottom left), is a double Olympian middledistance athlete. This year she reached the final of the Women’s 5000 metres in Rio, and recently came to talk to our pupils about her experiences. Here’s what they learned from talking to Eilish about her journey to the top.
Start slow “My training was organised around school, and school always took a priority. It used to drive me insane but my Mum always used to say to me that whatever you do as a Junior really doesn’t matter. It’s not important in sport, because what you do as a Senior is what people will remember, and she is right. A lot of the kids that were training really hard and training like adults, really focusing on their training rather than being at school, those were the ones that had left the sport by the time they were seventeen, eighteen. They were burned out and didn’t enjoy it any more. It’s really about trying to balance it all. It’s difficult to do, but there’s no reason why it can’t be done, because when you become a Senior that is when the hard work does begin – that’s when you can allow your athleticism priority.”
Keep your options open “When I was in Form 4 I didn’t know I was going to be an athlete, that’s for sure. Obviously I was good at running but I was nowhere near the level needed to have a career in athletics. I looked at a lot of other career options. I looked into Physiotherapy, Dentistry – I tried quite hard to keep my options broad as I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do. I loved Maths throughout school, so I ended up choosing Maths and Chemistry at university. I’m glad I did; it was something I really enjoyed. Once my athletics career is over at least I’ll have something to fall back on and focus on. I first went along to my local club, the Dundee Hawkhill Harriers, when I was in Primary 7. At that point I had no ambitions to be a professional athlete, it was just a hobby, something that I loved doing. It was a hobby right the way through school. Then when I went to university, my main focus was getting my degree. I lived like a normal student as well – I had a great time and I don’t regret it at all. Then when I got to about eighteen or nineteen, quite late on in my career, I came to a crossroads where I needed to make the decision about whether I wanted to continue with running as a hobby, or whether I wanted to take it and become a professional athlete and see how far I could go. I wasn’t too sure. So it wasn’t until that point that I decided to really focus on it, and that changed everything. I stopped having a student lifestyle and started eating much better, started making sure I was sleeping so many hours a night. I started training much harder and I changed little things to try and give myself the chance to be a professional athlete. The improvement that I made within one year was huge.”
