Olympic hopeful Michael Doyle's Diary - Part One

Hi all fellow Meath Chronicle readers. My name is Michéal Doyle and I'm a full-time International athlete from Rathfeigh, Tara.I hope that these blogs will give all the readers an insight into my lifestyle as an Olympic hopeful and other hopefuls around the county such as Modern Pentathlete Natalya Coyle. I started athletics at the age of seven with Tara AC. At that stage I just participated for fun and to run after some young one I fancied at the time, but behind all that messing exterior I hated losing races no matter what standard it was and if I'm to be honest I struggled at this age to put any sort of results on the board. I was a sport fanatic; I used to play rugby for Ashbourne RFC and Gaelic for Skryne up to the age of 18. I loved every minute of it, but the lure of competing on the global stage was irresistible. Once I got a taste of success at this age I wanted more and more, I was never happy at the standard I was competing at and I always wanted to progress. I started race walking at the age of 12 and I was rubbish at it. I only tried the event as I thought what 99 per cent of the readers will think "walking - sure how hard could that be, how is that a sport, I'll do it for a laugh". I did my first race and got lapped even though the race was only three laps of a 400 metre track. I was useless at the event, but for some reason I really enjoyed the technical aspect and, more importantly, the aerobic capacity required to be successful at the event. At a young age I loved training over the longer distances and would love to run for as long as possible. As I was never blessed with speed I was never going to be competitive over the shorter running distances. Walking always had the longer distance races so I thought I would try and take it more seriously. My next race was the Meath Community Games which I won and progressed to the National Championship. The Tara AC club coach, Noel Hanratty, helped me as much as he could at a young age, but once I knew that I wanted to take racewalking more seriously my parents got me in touch with Pierce O'Callaghan who was, at the time, our leading senior athlete. I qualified for the National Championships, but didn't even finish the race, but I was hooked. Over the next six years I stared to make progress and began winning some under-age national titles. If I'm to be honest I was living in a fantasy world at the time. I thought I'd hit the big time by winning some national titles, but in truth, in terms of where I was in the global scene, I was far behind the other national champions. At the age of 17 I competed abroad in an International Grand Prix as a National champion. I got absolutely destroyed by the other national champions and was far from qualifying for any junior global competitions. This is when it really hit me - how competitive the athletic scene is and how hard it is to compete at a global level. The perception at home is that when you're a national champion at your sport you are seen to have made it. Although I was only 17, everyone in school thought I was going to qualify for the Olympics just because I was national champion. Being a national champion at any sport is a great achievement, but I wanted more than that! The results of the Grand Prix event showed me how far I was away from achieving this. I was nowhere near the required standard to even qualify for a global event. I would be the first to admit at the time that I didn't think race walking would be very competitive, but I was wrong. I was competing against other athletes who were involved in provincial/national academies and even living in racewalking-specific schools. It was at this point that I decided to commit to my athletics career and no other sport. At the time I was training for Gaelic football and also five or six times a week for racewalking, but it obviously wasn't good enough. It was time for a change! So with my coach at the time, Jimmy McDonald, we decided to completely change my lifestyle with the aim of qualifying for the World Junior Race Walking Cup in 2006.