WITH one bound she was free. Catherina McKiernan was a champion. It was December 1994 at Alnwich Castle in Northumberland. Julia Vaquero was challenging McKiernan over the final metres of the parkland course in the inaugural European Cross Country Championship. On the final lap McKiernan appeared to assume control as the last, sharp incline, 800 metres out, rose up.

She drove hard up the hill, with Vaquero practically down on all fours scrambling to gain lost ground. But the Spanish woman, gloved and scarfed from the chill, crested the slope and felt her legs had the distance. She pulled level with McKiernan, and coming to the fag end of the 4,500 metre race the two broke into a sprint towards the supporters crowding the tape.

Seasoned observers would have said McKiernan did not possess a sprint finish. They would have thought that, having been conquered by Lynn Jennings and Albertina Dias at world championship level before, the winning gene in her competitive DNA was fatally flawed. They were wrong. McKiernan shook off Vaquero and ran away to become the first European champion.

"Having been second on three previous occasions, I was determined that I was not going to be in that position again. It's a bit of luck," says McKiernan. "It's getting it right on the day."

Unshackled finally from the silver medals that were piling up on her sideboard back in Cavan, McKiernan had come out of the shade of other champions. True, a fourth silver medal in the 1995 world championships may have given a sense of unbalance to her career, as if she had reserved the role of perennial runner up. But McKiernan is wise enough to see just how much still lies in front. Her ambition still burns.

Translating European success into a world championship is this weekend's mission for one of the few Irish runners on whose head a world championship crown would rest easy. Tomorrow, along with Sonia O'Sullivan, McKiernan will again represent Ireland's best hopes of a gold medal.

Her natural reticence gives away no clues about Turin. But she is back down from the mountain refreshed and giddy. Altitude training in Alburquerque and a warm New Mexico breeze have eased the pain of a recent Achilles tendon injury and have left her hungry. McKiernan is back with the thin air in her blood and a mind to run well.

"It's there to be won," she says. "It would be brilliant to win it. It's hard to explain why you want it so much. I suppose it's the way you arc. Sometimes you need luck, a break or an opening. But I think I'm as ready as I can possibly be."

A world class runner steeped in the parish. A global traveller, a big city commuter, a country girl. Around Cavan they understand the component parts of what makes McKiernan one of their own. It's a boast. Her people burn fiercely with pride. "Catherina," they'll say with palpable warmth, "she'd like to jump a gate rather than open it."

The colloquial expressions, the gentle, kitchen table courtesies, the way she has stayed rooted to the community of Cornafean, unwilling to let in too much light, have come to define McKiernan.

FOUR times she has been beaten into second place in the world cross country championships; a foot injury put paid to the track championships in Gothenburg; the run in the Atlanta Olympics was hampered by an infection picked up in South Africa. After all that, it's her self sufficiency that comes shining through, and a preference for licking her wounds in private.

"In Atlanta the conditions were miserable. You can say the conditions are the same for everybody, but really they're not. I'd wished they had held it somewhere else. If it hadn't been so hot I think I could have maintained that pace I started at, but it took its toll three quarters the way around," she says.

Her coach, Joe Doonan, knows when there is something wrong with his athlete, such as the slight, unexplained fevers that first hit her two days before last year's world cross country event.

"It's difficult to put words on it," he says. "She's working away training all through the summer, and yet she knew in her heart and soul that she just didn't feel good. But very few runners got a super 10,000 metres out of themselves in Atlanta. With the exception of Ribeiro, none of the Europeans were up there. It was Kenyans, Ethiopians and Japanese. The conditions were cruel, but a 32 (minutes) in world terms is a very credible 10,000 metres."

The South African bug, which didn't leave McKiernan's system until October, dragged her down. An inflamed Achilles tendon before Christmas failed to respond to a short break, and she was ordered to stop running. Instead, she pulled on the buoyancy jacket and "like an eejit" jumped into the local pool and pumped away with her legs among the kids. She hated it. Hated the pool and the bike and the gym. They called it cross training. She called it "messin'". But she stuck at it.

"The first time it was sore I left it for three days or so and then went running. But it still hurt, so I had to take a month off completely. That was hard. The whole thing was just frustrating because you're not doing what you want to do. At night time and that, I'd sometimes get really down. You'd get so tired, so frustrated.

"I'd start talking about going back to work and that. The first time I got injured I did go back to work because of the frustration. This time I said to myself `Every time I get injured I can't go crying back to them.' So I gave myself a deadline, and luckily enough it got right just in time."

Short term goals. Patience. Rest. Watching the precious days tick by and the grass grow on the rolling hills around her training haunts at Cavan Golf Course, Breffni Park and Slieve Russell, McKiernan's mind turned to the comfort of stability. The telephonist job she gave up in Cavan County Council to go full time running was hinging on a red raw tendon. At such times an athlete can turn in on herself.

"You have to imagine an athlete who can happily run 100 miles a week to one who is allowed to run for five minutes on grass," says Doonan. "I've never met an athlete who has been philosophical in the face of injury but she was stoical. She was prepared to suffer on and plug on with it in the belief that it was going to work and that she was going to come out ok in the end."

Regrets are useless baggage to McKiernan. She is bound to the principle of now. She looks on her world cross country medals as a series of triumphs rather than a catalogue of tiny failures. If anything, they have been a mark of her calibre and her ability to generate a withering focus.

"Boston in 92 was the easiest of the whole lot. Maybe inexperience took its toll there. I was 21. Every year there was someone better than me on the day. In 93 it was Dias, and in 94 a Kenyan won it who no one had heard tell of before the race and who hasn't been seen since. Derartu Tulu, she had me in 95."

BY THE end of this January McKiernan was fearlessly back into full training. Loving it. With 13 weeks to prepare for the world championships, she was cutting it fine. But it was just about attainable.

We made the judgment before going to New Mexico that she was capable of making it for the world championships," says Doonan. "It went very well. We know it well and it works well."

Just one cross country race in her legs so far this season and the Cavan woman is quietly optimistic. She ran in France at the beginning of February and came second to one of this weekend's favourites, the Romanian Elena Fidatov. Importantly, though, McKiernan learned enough about herself to know that she was back. A refresher course.

In terms of speed, she holds the 10th fastest 10,000 metres of all time and is the fifth fastest of those athletes still active. In America, she travelled to Dallas and ran a 31:32.00 10k road race, almost half a minute faster than she covered the same distance in Atlanta.

She's still off the 31:08.00 which she ran in Paris in 1995, a run she felt could have been covered 30 seconds faster if someone had pushed her harder. She hopes another day will come like it.

You feel that you've never had enough.

But I think I've had enough time just about. I didn't have many days to play around with. In other years I've run the whole series of cross country races, but you reach a certain peak and it can sometimes be very hard to hold onto it for the world cross," she says.

People have come and gone from Cavan shaking their heads at McKiernan's benign reticence, her reluctance to provide the sound bite, the bitchy comment, the apocryphal tale. Everyone holds an opinion, but McKiernan, least of all, feels the need to spread her gospel. It's not in her nature.

Doonan believes her best days are to come. He knows her talent is unique. He has worked many years with Irish athletes, some of them very good, trying to get them to run 34:00.0 for the 10k. McKiernan easily gets 32:00.0. She's in a different orbit. If she's spared from injury and fatigue, the marathon may ultimately be her distance.

"Eventually I will try a marathon, alright," she says. "I like the road, you get a good bounce off it."

Coming from McKiernan, that's as good a confession as you will get.