Profile of John Treacy

The coyness of our long distance runner ,  by Selwyn Parker

IRELAND'S LATEST sporting hero is a pigeon-toed, wisp-like running machine who looks as though he would have diffficulty catching the Dublin-Ballymun bus, let alone winning the world crossscountry championships. He's John Treacy, 20, and he weighs barely nine stone.

Floating over the mud in the appallling wind and rain at Glasgow in March, Treacy not only gave Ireland its biggest athletic win since Ron Delaney's 1500 metre gold meal at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, but also emerged from virtual obscurity. As he scammpered towards the tape, blowing kisses with uncharacteristic emotion, jourrnalists, foreign team officials and speccta tors hastily consulted their proggrammes to find out who was this interloper who had so comprehensively burned off the world's best.

Treacy is a 20-year-old of remarkkable assurance. The victory euphoria left him hardly fazed at all. While Irish supporters actually wept, the new star behaved with his own special brand of objectivity. He couldn't see that he had done anything earth-shattering.

"I hoped in fact that I would just be able to slip into Ireland and spend a few quiet days with my parents and friends (in tiny Villiersto wn , County Waterford). But when I got on the Aer Lingus flight and the hostess asked, 'Is Mr. Treacy here?' I knew something was up".

The days that followed were the runner's baptism of fire, his introoduction to the demands of being a star. Henceforth, he will be required to carry the weight of champion, the man to beat. Already Irish newspapers predict Olympic medals. For Treacy, the burden has just begun.

He picks it up where Ron Delaney dropped it off and now carries the aspirations of the whole nation starved of major international sports success. (Eamonn Coghlan, for all his achieveements and promise, hasn't yet won any really decisive race).

Probably, John Treacy has the right kind of personality to handle the consequent strain. In a few hectic days Treacy had a long chat with President
Hillery, talked with the Sports Minister Jim Tunney, garnered all sorts of compliments at various civic functions, received an award at a National Dairy Council luncheon in Jury's, and generrally became a thoroughly unwilling VIP. He went along with it all and, indeed, took the dazzling round of engagements with aplomb. But what he really wanted was to spend some time in Villierstown (he only got a day).

At first sight, Treacy is not the stuff of publicity. You would notice Coghlan in a crowd, but not Treacy. Slim as a pencil, Treacy has a pale face. Spectacles make him even more anonymous. His choice of clothes is conservative - slacks, pale shirt, striped wind cheater.

Underneath Treacy's delight in anonymity is an unusually strong will. "I've got a good head", he says. "For me training and study go hand in hand. I have to do two things. It's not enough for me just to run."

Has he mapped out his post-athletic career? "Put it this way. I know what I'm doing."

Treacy says very little; but what he says is quite definite, as though he has thought it all out before. For instance,

Asked why, according to his Providence College team-mate Gerry Deegan, he doesn't train hard, he replies: "I like competing. I prefer to enjoy my trainning and to race hard. I pick my races and I run to win. Gerry has this philosophy that you must feel pain, even in training. I'm the opposite. It's competition that keeps me going." Deegan is the American inter-collegiate indoor two mile champion and with Coghlan and Treacy is among the top three Irish middle distance runnners. Deegan was expected to do better than Treacy at Providence and the latter's success is therefore all the more surprising.

One of Treacy's secrets is, one guesses, an extremely cool head. He didn't get nervous until 15 minutes before the Glasgow event. "It was just another event for me. But then I noticed the adrenalin was flowing in some of the runners around me and then I started to get nervous. I startted yawning, which is a sign."

Like most runners accustomed to a stiff training schedule, he accepts pain as the inevitable price of the fun. "You don't think about pain. In the wet going (at Glasgow) it's the legs that will give in first, not the heart. In that race, I didn't feel pain that much. I was feeling good. It was just one of those days".

But pain is the distance runner's stock-in-trade. At Providence College, a utopia for distance runners", says Treacy - the programme of about 100 miles a week would leave most suburban joggers crippled. At about 9.30, after a hearty breakfast, Treacy, Deegan and about 15 others, including

Americans, set off on the day's first sweat - a run of between five and seven miles, usually taken at a "slow" pace of about seven minutes a mile - a stiff clip for most averagely fit joggers.

Between 2.30 and 5 p.m., it's time for the long run, somewhere between 10-18 miles, depending on how the athletes feel. "We talk and crack jokes", says Deegan. At other times the scheedule requires 400-metre sprints, or timed bursts over a golf course's hilly and exhausting terrain. "We all train together", says Treacy. "If we're doing laps, I'll take one and then somebody else will take another. If we're all doing the same thing, my task is made a lot easier."

It's a relatively settled life that proovides an easy rhythm between training and study. At Providence most of the students on the small campus of about 2,500 know each other. There's time to relax, which for Treacy is restrained. About his only indulgence is a glass of beer.

Both Treacy and Deegan, especially the latter, claim the American exxperience is behind their current exxcellent form. For Deegan it means he doesn't have to get up at 7 a.m. to run a hard five miles, work eight hours, and then train again at night. Accordding to Treacy, one of the big spinnoffs, is the fact that they have grown accustomed to the big time, the major American indoor meets with all. the razzmatazz.

They compete on the boards inndoor at Madison Square Garden in front of big crowds and on equal terms with some of the world's top drawcards in international athletics, runners like Marty Liquori, Nick Rose and the African contingent. It was in America that Treacy' first learned to blow kisses.

But it was in Waterford that, like Deegan, he first learned to run. His brother, Ray, another international athlete with much potential, and John were introduced to the sport when the latter was 12. According to BLE veterans, John showed instant promise. "I first saw him when he was thirteen", said one official. "He was about half the size of the other lads, but he beat them by about 200 metres in a mile race." In the long years since he has put in a hard apprenticeship, strengthening his legs with thousands of road miles. The legacy of those miles is a strippedddown fame, strong legs, an economical style that (jokes Deegan) "floats two inches over the ground on a cushion of air", and a strong, perhaps freakkishly so, heart.

Distance runners like Treacy, with their punishing training schedules, have forced medical science to rethink its theories. Treacy's heart has over the years grown stronger and bigger, just like any other muscle that is exerrcised regularly.

Says Dr. Kevin O'Flanagan , who examines some of Ireland's top athhletes, "It's possible to increase stamina content (this way) to an enormous degree. We think now that it's immpossible to strain the heart, provided one exercises sensibly and builds up slowly. In the old days medical science thought differently".

What happens is that Treacy's heart, under pressure, pumps out more blood which carries energy-producing oxygen. Breathlessness ussually comes from a lack of oxygen but top athletes have tuned their oxygen-utilisation capacity to such a pitch that, often, their legs wilt under the strain long before they have run out of puff.

This happened to Deegan in the Glasgow championships. Deegan, who runs with a high knee action, prefers a hard ground to create bounce and, indeed, he had beaten Treacy twice in these conditions shortly before the big event. In the clinging ground after heavy rain, Deegan's legs ran out of steam although his heart felt strong.

In any case, Deegan says, Treacy has a "fantastic heart. The longer a race goes on, the more comfortable he gets". Is he something special? "I think so. I call him marathon man, and he hates that because he hates the marathon. 'Don't talk to me about marathons', he says. But I reckon it's his distance. One day he'll go under two hours six (about three minutes faster than the present fasttest-ever marathon)."

Asked for an opinion about his team-mate's future, Deegan adds: "He can do anything to win. Take fantastic reserves from his body. Yet he doesn't punish himself in training. He may run hard two out of seven days a week. John amazes me because I always thought one had to train hard."

Treacy's own plans for his future don't extent beyond the European Championships in September - "I'll aim for the 10,000 metres because that comes' first and we'll see after that." It's a tall order, although a lot of his supporters already expect him to win both the 5,000 metres and 10 ,000 metres! The dreadful conditions at Glasgow undoubtedly improved his chances and, although he's U.S. three miles indoor inter-collegiate champion, the going will be tough outdoors against Europe's best.

What he has going for him, however, at this stage is his youth. Treacy's stamina, at 20, augers well. He can only get better.