Mayo athlete Thomas Devaney doing it his own way

By Stuart Tynan

For many high-performing athletes nowadays, they have a few highly skilled people helping them with their day-to-day preparations for their upcoming events.

That makes Thomas Devaney’s recent success even more impressive. The Islandeady native, who claimed the gold medal in the Under-23 men's 8,000m team event at the European Cross Country Championships last year in Dublin, revealed he mostly coaches himself.

“It’s quite rare that someone my age to be like ‘I’ll coach myself’ and it’s something which I wouldn't recommend to anyone!” he told The Connaught Telegraph.

“I have loads of people around me who are there helping me. Regina Casey is great for me and the coach in UL has helped me out loads but I write my own training programs like, which again, I wouldn't recommend to any young athlete. I like the fact that I can stand on the start line and if this goes well this is on me and if this goes bad this is on me as well. It’s totally what I love about the sport really.”

“A lot of people have told me like the next step is to get a coach. as I said, I've so many people around me that I can turn to with questions about training, even like I've trained with a group in Ballina now they're coached by a guy called Philip Finnerty. So there's people there that I can turn to if I'm like ‘what you think of this session?’ or this workout and stuff like that, and they'll help me out but at the end of the day. I like it that way.”

EDUCATION

It comes as no surprise that he is studying primary school teaching in the University of Limerick. It was two of his former teachers who became two hugely influential figures in his decision to focus solely on athletics having played a variety of sports growing up. Regina Casey, his business teacher in St. Gerald’s College, as well as Eamon Shaughnessy, his primary school teacher at Snugboro National School, where he did a teaching placement.

“I did everything. Islandeady GAA for Gaelic, Snugboro United for soccer, and Castlebar rugby for a bit. In primary school, then one of the teachers, Eamon Shaughnessy, sort of took me under his wing of age and he said, ‘you know, you have a bit of a talent for (athletics), I think you should join the local club’ and I did that.”

When he did join Castlebar AC though, his love for athletics wasn’t instant. In fact, it was anything but.

“I just hated it. I used to get so nervous for every race. I suppose from an outsider's perspective running is not fun and that's the way I saw it at the start until I got secondary school and Regina Casey helped me out loads there and took me under her wing again.”

He added: “I remember going into her in probably second year. I think I've won a few provincial titles at that stage and sort of things are getting a bit more serious and I was getting a bit frustrated with the soccer and Gaelic really. I sort of liked the individual aspect of running where it's all on you. You’re held accountable. If you don't put in the work, the results aren't going to come for you. So I had that chat with her and she said, she pretty much said like it's up to you but she thinks, you know, I could do something with it. I was probably 15 at that stage.”

COVID

Like many other sports, the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on athletics. But Thomas saw it as a major opportunity to put in the hard work and he believes he has come out, physically and mentally, a better athlete as a result.

“I think that's the reason I've taken the step forward is because so many athletes struggled during lockdown. They just couldn't get out the door. I probably didn't race for a year like but that was perfect. I just took a step back and I just trained. I put in so many hard weeks in a row and it just paid off this year. If Covid hadn't happened. I don't think I would have made that team. But I found it brilliant. It just allowed us to just take ourselves away from the race aspect and just get ready to go off to train

“With the initial 5k limits and stuff that was difficult. It was hard to just to run around in circles in the local village. Once we were able to get out, it was great. I travelled to the track and stuff because there was nothing else to do really but train.”

The hard work paid off back in December as part of the Irish Under-23 that took home gold at the European Cross Country Championships.

“It's crazy like coming into the season, it wasn't even a goal to make that team. I was still 19 when we had we what we call inter-varsity cross-country, which is like college cross-country, in September and I came fourth. The national endurance coach come up to me afterwards and he was saying, ‘You need to be looking at that team, you're in with a real shot.’

“As the season progressed, I kept getting better and better and then just to make the team itself was unreal, of course. We did not expect to win that race, so it was a dream come true, really, the whole thing.”

FUTURE

As to what the future holds, Thomas still has another two years to make that team again and he dreams, like many other athletes, to compete in the Olympics one day. But to improve, he cites consistency as the key.

“I just want to keep pushing. I think this year I started to establish myself as one of the top guys in the country but you know, some of the guys in the country are now the best guys in Europe. So I want to get to that level and like just keep pushing on from here. I made big strides this year, but I'm nowhere near sort of where I want to get to really.

“You want consistent days. Nothing standout, no 10 out of 10 days, like that's not what you want. You want consistent, just seven out of 10s. That's the goal in mind now and the results will come from that.

“(The Olympics is] the dream. I'm just taking it day by day. I didn't know what to expect to make the Irish team this year. The Olympics is the end goal but for now, just keep pushing on and taking it day by day and trying to get just that little bit better every day.”