After pounding the pavement around Raheny for a mere three hours, seven minutes, and three seconds, Kate Veale lifted her 14th National title this past weekend.
She has now claimed titles across indoor and outdoor events, and in so doing, has set her sights on the Olympic Games in Paris as the next milestone to cross.
This was the first outing over 35km for Veale, who holds a PB over 20km of 1:37:52 - which she set in December of 2019.
The West Waterford AC athlete boasts championship wins in the racewalks over 5000m at U18 world championships level, while claiming Irish titles at 5000m at senior as well as 20km outdoor and 3km indoor; and has now added the 35km title to that already impressive tally.
Speaking to WLR sport this week, Veale says that lifting another title in Dublin is always a special feeling.
"Yeah, a national title is always an honor. Sometimes you can take this kind of thing for granted, when I'm looking at the bigger picture, wanting to race internationally but, it's lovely to have competitions back and have a home crowd and, you know, juvenile races going on at the same time.
There's nothing like racing at home. It was exciting because 35k is a new distance brought into race walking this year. It's exciting to have something different and just to see where I was at. You can kind of gauge it from training and stuff, but it's very hard until you actually go out and race it."
While the accolades are taken on race day, the sheer volume of work that goes into preparing for races is eye-watering. Veale talks about knocking out 20k and 25k walks as if it was nothing.
"I was getting up to about 140 or 150 kilometers a week. A lot of it is more so the accumulation of the work in your legs. I wanted to do 35k in training, and my coach was saying, No, we're going to do some 30's, we don't need to go to 35 - and it was about pace. So we did a lot of 25's and then doing things like 20k's with progression. So you start at a certain distance and you finish fast, or 2k hard and 1k easy."
I think sometimes people can get a bit overwhelmed or scared of the distance whereas really I think people don't realize what they're capable of doing. I think you know, people can go out and do these distances and with a bit of training it is doable for everybody"
After spending some time out of action through injury, the post lockdown season for Veale has proved fruitful. She's got the chance to return to international competition while also competing across the island, but she does still have a clear target set for the future.
"I feel I'm really progressing properly now. So definitely, the Paris Olympics in 2024 is the end goal. But you know, along the way there's all little goals and enjoying the journey, the process and, you know, bit by bit improving. So hopefully this time, we'll have done enough for me to qualify.
We have the World Cup in a march in Oman, and then from that, there's also World Champs in Oregon this year and European Champs, so it's a busy enough year. I just want to get back to qualifying for those kinds of major international events"
