IRELAND’S top-ranked triathlete Aileen Reid says she will only feel as though she has competed at next year’s Rio Olympics if she makes the top 10.
London 2012 ended in disappointment for the Derry athlete, coming off her bike in terrible conditions nearly at the gates of Buckingham Palace. She remounted and finished, but nowhere near where she wanted.
As part of an elite programme she spends a minimum of nine months of the year out of the country, with training bases in San Diego and the south of France.
It’s all geared to getting her around the 1.5 kilometre swim, 40km bike ride and 10km run that combine to make the Olympic distance in the shortest possible time.
The42 caught up with her recently during an early season break at home. When she’s in Ireland she lives with her husband Dave in Lisburn. Training locally, she even pays £4 to use the nearby Mary Peters Track just like every other member of the public.
Earlier this week Reid jetted out to Japan to take part in the World Triathlon Series race in Yokohama, which takes place in the early hours of Saturday morning Irish time.
Reid is 32, she’ll be 34 by the time Rio rolls around, and like many triathletes, she fell into the sport almost accidentally.
“I was a swimmer and a runner and I said to myself that anyone could ride a bike,” she explains. “I did a few local races and I did okay in them.
“After a wee bit of training on the bike and going to the national champs in 2007, I won those, I met Chris (Jones), who went on to be my coach, and he said I could be good at this and race internationally.”
She competed in her first race locally while still in school, borrowing a bike from a friend. She did the same 12 months later and shortly after turning 18 she bought her own set of wheels with her birthday money.
After working as a development officer in with Athletics Northern Ireland she trained and then worked as a PE teacher before taking the plunge and becoming a full-time triathlete in 2008.
“It is a crazy sport! I always tell people that — it’s so silly and why would you want to do three sports?” she laughs.
“I started out as a swimmer and I really enjoy running so I took up cycling because it is part of this crazy sport. I was alright at that and then you put them together.
“Now I’m racing all over the world, competing against the best in the world, going to Olympics. It’s everything any sportsperson could want. It’s something I found out I was good at, so why not?”
Reid, who competed as Aileen Morrison until her 2012 marriage to Dave Reid, doesn’t log the hours she trains. But rest assured, she trains a lot – twice a day most days and then there’s stretching, gym sessions, yoga, physio and all the rest that’s required.
Even her hobbies are healthy and low-impact on her body, ensuring that she’s in prime condition to train and compete.
“If I swim 5.30 to 7.30 in the morning then I’ll sleep for another two hours,” says Reid. “If I don’t get that sleep there’s no point in me doing the rest of my training that day because I know I won’t have recovered properly and I won’t be able to do it.
“I enjoy baking. I made banana bread the day before yesterday and it’s going down well. I’ve been making date and nut balls, which are handy snacks in the fridge. It’s all healthy stuff.
aileenmorr / Instagram
“When I’m going to bake unhealthy stuff, you have to get into the mindset that you’re making it for other people — you’re a feeder!
“When you’re doing hobbies, or things you enjoy outside of training, they have to be low-energy. Things like going to the cinema, going for a coffee or baking.
“You don’t have to stand up all day, or go hiking; there’s no point in me putting canoeing or hill walking as my hobbies. I saw Natayla Coyle (Ireland’s modern pentathlon Olympian) put a picture of walking her dog online recently and I was thinking to myself ‘where does she find time to walk a dog?’. I don’t think I’d ever own a dog!”
This year Reid has spent time at a training camp in the US, raced and trained in Abu Dhabi, Australia’s Gold Coast and Auckland, New Zealand. Currently she’s in Japan, then it’s France and there’s the European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan, in June – a key Olympic qualifier.
The first 11 months she was married, she reckons she was on the road for nine of them. Wifi is the head of her hierarchy of needs when she’s on the road so that she can Skype home daily.
“Davy is half the reason I’m a triathlete,” she says about her husband. “Whenever I met him he was in charge of the high performance side of Athletics Northern Ireland and he’s the one who told me what it is to be an elite sportsperson, what’s involved and what I’d have to do.
“That made me want to be really good. He’s there and really supportive, he wasn’t telling me it was a silly thing, so I’m delighted to have someone like Davy who is able to understand it all.”
Of course she misses home and family when away for long periods of time, but it’s a life she’s committed to and a life she loves.
“If you’re going to do elite sport, that’s what you sign up for. I’m not going to do it half-heartedly – you might as well do it properly. I want to do it,” she revealed.
“The beauty of living away from home is that you don’t get to see your husband, you don’t get to see your family, and that’s is almost the reason you do it. It sounds terrible to say, but all you have to do is think about swim, bike run, eat, sleep. You do your training, go home and there’s no one to speak to, there’s no one to go and visit and you just go to bed.”
