Sarah Healy is sitting in a hotel room in Dubai, a glowing picture of health and confidence, and talking openly through some of the back pages of her running career. As if she was another athlete then, and very different from that now.
She takes the Zoom call on a six-day stopover en route to Nanjing, where at the World Indoor Championships starting on Friday week, Healy hopes to add another medal to the gold she won on the European indoor stage in Apeldoorn last Sunday – that 3,000m victory at the age of 24 a liberation of sorts.
By her own repeated admission, Healy had often buckled under the pressure of her own expectations, and those of others, losing focus in races right when it mattered most. Perhaps worse still she lost some of the enjoyment from the sport she first discovered at Blackrock AC in South Dublin at age nine.
“I’ve always enjoyed it, always enjoyed training and everything,” she says. “I think it’s more having fun with competing that has been the problem. I’m not even sure if I’ve taken it too seriously, but I’ve also associated competing with some really big disappointments, and I think when you’re bringing that much emotion into it, it can make it more scary, because you know there’s this possibility that you’re going to be so devastated.
Sarah Healy on becoming European Indoor champion: ‘I knew people thought I was capable of a lot more’
From Apeldoorn to Nanjing, Kate O’Connor chases another podium place at the World Indoor Championships
Sarah Healy, Mark English and Kate O’Connor to chase more medals at World Indoor Championships
Kate O’Connor in focus: ‘It’s who can stay injury-free... that’s who ends up coming out on top’
“So I think this indoor season, I’ve kind of like just been reminding myself that it’s not such a be all, end all thing. And remind myself that I’m going to be okay no matter what happens. And then that in turn just makes it less nerve-wracking, or less pressurising, because it just doesn’t feel as daunting that way.
“I suppose it’s just trying to appreciate where you are, realising how lucky I am to get to do this, to travel around and race as a job. That is really cool, so just enjoying the competing aspect a little bit more, and obviously it brings out better performances.”
This sort of thing can happen to any athlete, only for Healy, given her exceptional underage success which included a European under-18 1,500m/3,000m double in 2018, any growing pains entering the senior ranks were certainly magnified. The 2022 European Championships in Munich, for example, where she bombed out in her 1,500m heat after running a world-class 4:02.86 earlier that summer, taking three seconds off Sonia O’Sullivan’s Irish under-23 record set 31 years previously in Monaco.
Healy mentions several critical turning points since then, bringing her to where she is now. It started with her move to Manchester in late 2023 to train with husband-and-wife coaching team of Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, whose M11 group includes Keely Hodgkinson, the Olympic 800m champion in Paris.
“Just because that was a really hard decision to make, and quite a big thing to do,” she says. “And then I think it also kind of represented me sort of becoming a full-time athlete, and really just kind of going all in on athletics. So I took confidence in the fact I was able to get through that and make a home for myself over there.
“Then of course it was obviously a turning point just in terms of having a team and training group, which has physically, obviously, pushed me on so much.
“Then I think the other major turning point would be the Olympics last year, and kind of just the aftermath of that [she finished fourth in the Paris repechage, one place short of the semi-final]. But I think after some time, I managed to turn that experience into a bit of a lesson, or a big lesson, and this indoor season really changed the way I was approaching things, based off that.”
Moving to Manchester also afforded her the first-hand experience of living and training alongside Hodgkinson and Georgia Hunter Bell, who won the Olympic, 1,500m bronze in Paris.
“When you think of someone like her [Keely], who’s just been such a prodigy and an Olympic champion, you feel like they probably wouldn’t be a normal person and do normal things, but Keely is a similar age to me and is just like a friend now, and so it kind of normalises that as well.
“She’s training really, really hard but at the same time, I think both with her and Georgia that they have something special in their mindset as well. And I think in Paris last year, Keely just had that mindset. And the same with Georgia, she just thinks, ‘no, there’s no reason I can’t come in here and be one of the best’. Obviously, they’re both physically extremely talented as well, but you need that mindset too.”
Comparisons with O’Sullivan may continue for a while yet – O’Sullivan won a World Indoor 3,000m silver back in 1997 – but Healy views those things differently now.
“I think when people would say things like that, I definitely never got carried away and thought, ‘oh, I’m going to be amazing just because I’ve done these things as a junior’.
“It’s just been the last few years, as a senior athlete, I underperformed a good number of times at major championships. Because it happened so many times, I definitely felt a bit of pressure to perform, because I knew people thought I was capable of a lot more than what I was doing.
“I think another thing that has helped my performances recently has been really just focusing on myself. At the end of the day, no one really cares too much what I do, apart from myself. I think worrying about other people, what they think, is definitely not helpful.”
