Are You Running With the Right Person?
Run club, friends, family, coach. Are you running with the right person? Eilish McColgan gives her insight.
Eilish McColgan was raised at her local club by a mum who happened to be a world champion. Years on, the lesson she draws from it is one any runner can use.
Eilish McColgan has spent most of her life around runners. Her mum, Liz, was a world champion and an Olympic medallist. Her local club, Dundee Hawkhill Harriers, is where she first fell for the sport. These days she trains under a coach called Michael, who's led her programme for the last six years.
But we asked Eilish what made her the runner she is today, and she doesn't talk about times, sessions or talent. She talks about the people who were around her when it mattered.
Being coached by your mum
When Eilish was young, the other kids at the club didn't know that the woman holding the stopwatch was her mum. Liz was just the coach. Eilish was just another athlete in the group.
"I got treated like everyone else. A lot of the kids at the club didn't even know my mum was my mum. I think that was the best way to do it, to be honest. My mum was very good at being able to just treat me like everyone else in the group, which I think really helped."
What Eilish only fully understood years later was the rarity of what she'd been given. Not a coach with a clipboard, but someone who had lived the highs and lows of the sport at the very top. Someone who knew the injuries, the illnesses, the long stretches of doubt.
"Having someone there who'd been there and done it was incredibly insightful. Someone who understands the highs and the lows and has been through everything you have to go through."
Today, Michael leads her day-to-day coaching. But Liz still helps oversee her programmes from the sidelines.
Does training with friends actually help?
Eilish's memories of Dundee Hawkhill Harriers are not what you might expect from a runner of her level.
She doesn't talk about her best sessions or her earliest wins. She talks who she runs with. Her friends. The gossip. The feeling of stepping into the clubhouse after a long day at school and being just another teenager who liked running.
"Going to the club was a bit of a release for me. I'd miss all the gossip of the week if I didn't go along. My best friends were there. It made me more consistent turning up week in, week out, no matter what was going on."
The line worth sitting with is the last one. Consistency, she says, is what eventually pays off in training. And consistency, for her, came from the people she trained alongside.
Advice from Eilish
Most of us will never have an Olympian in the family. But the friend on the corner, the local club that meets, the Sunday morning crew, is something nearly everyone can find.
Eilish's advice, for beginners and seasoned runners alike, is straightforward:
"Join a local club. It can make such a huge difference to your performance, to the accountability of keeping you going, and to motivation. You're joining other people who are all striving to do the same thing as you. Everyone's just trying to be a little bit faster than they were before."
A friend who'll meet you on a cold Sunday morning. A club that notices when you don't show up. A coach who pushes you the same way they push everyone else. The right people don't replace the work. They make it possible to keep doing it.
That's what carried Eilish through her early years. It's what carries her now.
Maybe it's worth asking yourself, before your next run; Are you running with the right person?
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