FOR THOMAS BARR, standing on the starting block inside the Olympic stadium tomorrow afternoon will be an achievement in itself.
The Waterford athlete’s year has been plagued by injury to such an extent that he’s had to completely remodel his running mechanics. Not ideal in an Olympic year, but he’s there.
He very nearly wasn’t. A week before departing for the holding camp in Uberlandia, Barr felt a twinge in his groin during a training session at his base in University Limerick.
Having overcome a debilitating hip injury, this was a setback Barr didn’t need. Injury has followed him around the last few months.
But it wasn’t as bad as first feared and certainly not serious enough to put an end to his Olympic dream.
The 24-year-old will realise that dream on Monday when he takes to the track for the 400m heats but it has been a battle, both physically and mentally, to get in any sort of any sort of condition for his Olympic debut.
“Last year after having such a good year injury free. Top six in the world, I felt completely on top of the world and almost indestructible and now the season can just slip away so quickly,” he said.
“An injury that I thought was going to be a couple of days, turned into weeks and months and it does bring it back to reality that it all can go so wrong so to get to the line in Rio is tough but to get there in good shape is another feat in itself.”
Before injury intervened, this could have been Barr’s year.
2015 saw him announce himself on the world stage by winning gold at the University Games before he narrowly missed out on a place in the final at the World Athletics Championships in Beijing.
It must be so frustrating to think that 12 months ago he would have been in Rio as one of Ireland’s leading hopes on the track. Now, he’d be happy to progress through his heat.
“It was getting to a point where everything was just slipping away,” he continued. “We couldn’t get a proper diagnosis as to what was going on [with his hip], nothing was giving it real relief.
“I could do gym sessions but I couldn’t do any running, treadmill, cross trainer, swimming pool because I was still going to have to move the hip and it was the movement of the hip that was doing it, not the load as such.
“That was really frustrating and every week I was getting more and more unfit and everyone else was tearing ahead of me so it was mentally extremely tough and I did feel very isolated because I didn’t think there was anyone who could understand how I was feeling.”
Barr only returned to competitive racing at the National Championships in June after a three-month lay-off. He then qualified for the 400m hurdles final in Amsterdam but it was a week which highlighted the work he still needed to do to be competitive in Rio.
The last five weeks have been a race against time. Under the guidance of his coach Hayley Harrison and physio Emma Gallivan, Barr has been trying to regain his fitness and rediscover that stride pattern and rhythm on the track.
“I was a pain in the ass to be around because I was just so irritable,” he explained. “I had to apologise to all my friends afterwards. It was about six to eight weeks in when I said right this mentally, this attitude is not going to get me anywhere and that’s when I realised I just started needing to take it as it came and see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“I had to tear my six month plan up and include it all in six weeks but it’s the Olympic Games. I want to be getting there in 100% fitness and health but if I’m 90%. If there’s any chance at all that I’m going to be able to run I will.”
“It’s the pinnacle of your career to get to an Olympics and I would do anything just to get there and represent my country the best I can, obviously I would love to be there in the shape I was last year because I’d be very competitive.
“I’m not going to be in tip-top shape, that’s the reality of it. I’d like to get as close to that as I can but as long as I get the training done and the injury stays away then that’s all I can do.”
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