ELIZABETH CARR has learned that, if at first you do not succeed at sport as an adult, you should tri again.
Carr, 29, has blueblood sporting genes. Her dad Tommy was a Dublin footballer and manager, her maternal grandfather Seán Purcell a Galway legend.
Sister Vicky plays inter-county for Westmeath, one brother Gareth used to and is a decent golfer and another, Simon, was, until this week when he announced his retirement, the country’s top male tennis player.
Elizabeth’s early promise shone through in athletics but when standards did not translate from junior to senior level, sport took a back seat to life for a while.
It is firmly at the forefront again, though, as she bids to qualify for the Olympics, the next stage of which is the World Triathlon Cup in Uzbekistan next Saturday.
The on-leave army captain explained: “I was a sprinter/hurdler and then I moved into the middle distance/long distance events and I think that was a niche area.
“I won 11 national titles as a junior. I went through a bad patch in my late teens through college and that, along with two or three injuries, probably nudged me into a multi-disciplined sport to see where I could salvage something.
“I was so used to achieving victories as a youngster with minimal effort and I think I probably didn’t make that switch into increased training intensity, increased training load that has to come with moving from a junior into a senior.
“But, at the same time, you can only do so much physiologically as well when you’re growing at that age.
“I think everything just hit at one age at that time and I just didn’t develop as an athlete in the way I probably thought I should.”
At DCU, running became more of a social sideline and she said: “I definitely didn’t let sport stop me, I went on J1s and things like that but it was always something I wanted to come back to.
“And the fact I was so successful as a young athlete was always in my mind and it was always a thing of, ‘Why can’t I do that again?’ You want to do your younger self justice in that you think you can achieve at a high level.
“Where it matters I suppose is as a senior athlete, there’s no point in peaking when you’re 14 or 15 years of age.”
At her parents’ suggestion, she had given triathlon a try in secondary school but, at that stage, thought it was not for her.
She said: “It wasn’t for me and then I came back to it in college and it was a case of, ‘My parents don’t know what they’re talking about’ in Transition Year and then in college it was like, ‘Actually maybe they have a point’.
“While we have a GAA background I think our parents really wanted us to not be focused on just one sport, even outside of sport, just one thing in general.
“They were varied in their approach to life and they thought it was important that we developed as people as a whole rather than just sportspeople or academically or whatever.
“We were given the freedom to express ourselves and test everything out and then, when there was something we found that we wanted to pursue, they were very supportive. We were just very lucky in that way.”
Pursuing Olympic qualification as a triathlete involves the sort of travel which even her brother — who had a career-high ATP ranking of 507 in 2021 — would have baulked at.
After Uzbekistan, she moves to Kazakhstan, her qualification bid involving a sense of urgency after being sidelined for a year with a foot injury.
Carr said: “He has done some wild travel. There were two races I had to do at the start of the year. I had to go to Zimbabwe one week and then Cuba the week after and I remember he said ‘Elizabeth, what are you doing? You’re not going to survive’.
“Even after all his escapades, he thought that was crazy but I still went ahead and did it anyway.
“It’s great to have someone who understands and knows how great it can be but how hard it can be.”