IN a pre-coronavirus world, I would have been looking forward to driving out to the Sport Ireland Campus in Abbotstown, Co Dublin, to meet Natalya Coyle and Arthur Lanigan O’Keeffe in their natural habitat, given that it is where they normally spend six intense days a week training.
But instead, we connected for this interview through the new ‘normal’ medium of a Zoom video call, where the newly-engaged modern pentathlon couple spoke from the comfort of their home, with their very cute dachshund Hansel taking front and centre on the couch.
They give ‘power couple’ a new definition. Both two-time Olympians with Tokyo on the horizon (Natalya secured her qualification last August and Arthur was on the way to doing so), their training schedule sounds excruciating to a lay person, in what is a mentally and physically draining sport of five disciplines – fencing, swimming, show jumping, laser shooting and cross-country running.
“We haven’t swam in about eight weeks and the same goes for horse riding and fencing as well. All we are doing is running, some cycling and gym work and just trying to stay fit,” said Arthur when asked how life has changed since Ireland went into ‘lockdown’ over two months ago.
“We are basically just trying to stay fit enough and mobile enough that when we eventually go back to training that we don’t get injured,” added an upbeat Natalya. Not being able to go to the sport campus means a shift in training regime, but the pair are keeping the volume up with two or three sessions per day at home.
A normal week prior to Covid-19 looked like this: “We do four sessions a day, but each day can be different. In any given day, you might have the swim in the morning, then move on to a fencing lesson, then a gym session and then to your run and possibly go to fencing again in the evening,” Arthur explains.
“We train quite intensely until Wednesday and take a half day on Wednesday. We will still do three sessions but get it done quite early in the morning; take that evening off and then get back in to two hard days of training. Then on Saturday we would have quite an intense session, maybe a long run or something like that and an easy swim, and that’s another half day. And then Sunday’s is off.”
Not for the faint-hearted.
Trail blazer
The pair had similar backgrounds growing up, starting with their local pony clubs, progressing to tetrathlon (shooting, swimming, riding and running) and eventually moving into modern pentathlon, which was a relatively small sport in Ireland.
Natalya (29) grew up riding at the Meath Pony Club. “I did all the usual eventing, some dressage…and started tetrathlon when I was about 16. I was really bad when I first started but it was just so much fun! I got to spend some of the best summers with my friends travelling around to different competitions and then I slowly got better, trained really hard and then could make national and international teams,” she said.
Natalya Coyle at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil \ Ramsey Cardy Sportsfile
Educated at The King’s Hospital boarding school in Dublin, Natalya is a trail-blazer for female modern pentathlon athletes in Ireland. She became the first Irish female athlete to compete in the sport at an Olympic Games in London 2012, where she finished ninth, before finishing sixth four years later in Rio, inching ever closer to that podium place.
She became the first Irish athlete ever to win an individual medal at a World Cup when claiming silver in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2018. And a day later at the same venue, Arthur went one better to claim gold and win Ireland’s second ever medal. Natalya won a second silver medal at the World Cup in Cairo, Egypt, in March 2019.
Does she realise she is blazing a trial for youngsters in Ireland? “I don’t really feel that because I just kind of continue doing my job I suppose. All those things that I have done are just me getting better at sport and they naturally come.
“It’s great to see now that there is more athletes coming up in pentathlon and it is so lovely to hear that if I motivated someone to get into sport; or their daughter enjoys sport more or has tried some different ones because they see me, that is really really lovely.
So if that comes out of me doing well at different things, it’s great,” she said.
Similarly, Arthur (28) did tetrathlon with his local Warrington Pony Club in Kilkenny. “I was a swimmer when I was younger. Up until the age of 12 I swam quite competitively and always dreamt of going to the Olympics in that,” he said.
“I got roped in to tetrathlon because my family are very horsey and they found out I was able to swim! I did that all the way through, and it was really really enjoyable. As Tal said, they were some of the best years and kind of gave us a really good relationship with the sport.”
Arthur’s mum, Carolyn, rode internationally for Britain in eventing and is the breeder of the Sam Watson-ridden CCI4* winner Imperial Sky, among others, while his father, Stephen, is also hugely into horses.
“Then we got pretty good at tetrathlon and the natural next step would be moving from the small pond of tetrathlon into pentathlon. “We kind of got hammered in pentathlon for a good few years before we started seeing results!” he added.
Arthur left boarding school at Glenstal Abbey when he got a scholarship with Millfield School in Somerset, England, at the age of 16. The school had an elite pentathlon unit and was the start of his full-time training.
He was the European Champion in 2015 and finished eighth in Rio in 2016. A World Cup final bronze medal in 2018 is another highlight.
The pair were mixed relay world champions in 2017 and spend every moment of the day together. “We do everything together,” said Natalya about their intertwined training regimes and lives. “We are training beside each other but we would have programmes to suit us individually,” Arthur adds.
Is there a competitive streak between the pair? “Yip!” Natalya quickly responds. “If I can beat him once in fencing, I will dine out on it for a long time because it’s really really irregular that I can beat him, but I don’t take it too well when he beats me all the time!”
They have both graduated from university. Natalya studied BESS in Trinity, finishing the final two years at night in the Dublin Business School, while Arthur has a Sports Management degree from UCD.
“Similar to Arthur, I took college very slowly, I split a lot of years. Both of us went to an Olympics in the middle of college and then both of us were coming up to a second Olympics towards the end of college. So I did take it very slowly and I definitely couldn’t have done it any faster,” said Natalya.
Show jumping
The pair train once a week with Brian Duff at Broadmeadows Equestrian Centre in Ashbourne. For competitions, John Ledingham travels with them. The show jumping element of pentathlon oply happens in the final, when the field is whittled down to 36.
A total of 18 horses are provided locally, and each horse goes around the 1.20m course with two different riders. The person who is winning the competition will draw a horse and they are allocated after that.
“You qualify in the semi-finals where there is no riding and in the final, you do the whole competition again, with riding. If you are doing really well (in the top 18), you have a chance to see the other rider ride the horse. That is either a really good thing, if the rider is okay, or an absolute catastrophe!” said Arthur.
Natalya agrees, adding: “There have been a few competitions I’ve been at where I’ve been doing really well and you just watch the horse go round and the person before you ruins it and you think ‘that’s my competition gone’. It is the hardest part of pentathlon just for the sheer luck factor.
“It’s the hardest part to accept. If you are having a very good day and things go wrong, it feels like it’s out of your hands.
"Whereas, everything else, if you mess up your event, you’re angry at yourself but not at the world,” Arthur added.
Arthur Lanigan O'Keeffe reacts after completing his round at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games \ Brendan Moran Sportsfile
Do they ever compete pure show jumping? “We just don’t have the time anymore. I used to love horse riding and I hope that when this is all over, I will get back to more of a love of it. Like other events, it kind of feels like job. Now, you just get on the horse, get off the horse, and go,” Natalya said.
Calorie counting
If show jumping is the most difficult aspect of the sport to control and accept, what is the most difficult discipline to train? “From a logistical standpoint, horse riding because it’s hard to find horses that are good standard. But the hardest one...it’s a combination.
“When you combine them altogether, it’s really tricky, because they demand very different physical traits. You could do a long fencing session, which has you in a squatting position for two hours, and that is hard. Then, the run you were about to do suddenly feels difficult now because you have been squatting for two hours,” Arthur explains.
Getting the balance right takes precision, said Natalya. “To be able to get the most out of yourself, without basically injuring yourself or getting overtired, is a really fine balancing act. You could feel awesome in the morning at your track set and you’ve run really hard and did it well; but suddenly you have half an hour to eat some food and refuel before you have your fencing lesson.
“It’s that fine combination of not going too hard in one so that you can’t do the next and that is really tricky. I’ve been doing this a long time and I still some weeks don’t balance it that well and you do pay for it later on in the week.”
Nutrition and getting enough calories to fuel your body goes hand-in-hand with the gruelling training schedule, and eating the large quantities needed is sometimes difficult.
“If you don’t eat enough in a training day, you get half way through your run and realise you are completely empty and then that session is a write off really,” said Arthur.
“Over the years, we have learned that there is basically no limit to the amount we can eat during a heavy training week, and that sometimes is challenging in itself.
“Sometimes, we have to take calorie drinks, with each drink having over 1,000 calories, just to get it in, which is the equivalent of six Mars bars. It’s kind of sickening when you think about it.”
Natalya struggles with the quantities, adding: “It’s something I definitely won’t miss when I am finished anyway, for sure. That has been one of the nice things with the fact that we are not doing as much at the moment. We are still doing two or three sessions a day now, but you don’t have to eat the quantity that you do when you are doing it all.”
Another year waiting
Most of the focus following the postponement of the Tokyo Olympic Games in this paper has been on the horses and whether they will miss the boat, given that riders can compete into their 50s and 60s. A rider’s body doesn’t take as much hardship as a modern pentathlon athlete.
Natalya competing in Rio \ Ramsey Cardy Sportsfile
What does the postponement mean for Natalya and Arthur? “Well I have already qualified so next year I just have to gear up for August,” said Natalya, “But it is a very long way away and that is what people forget – the year before the Olympic Games you really ramp up the training really really hard, to a level you can’t maintain.
“And we had ramped up the training really really hard and then suddenly you are given this. It’s difficult to get your head around the fact that the winter will be very long again.”
Arthur battled with an achilles injury at the end of 2019, but began 2020 with a month of intense training in Kenya and finished third in a World Cup just before lockdown. He was in a good place, and the postponement is hard to take mentally.
“I went to Kenya for a month and I was four kilos lighter than I’ve ever been; just finished a World Cup and came third, was shaping into having a really really good season and it all stopped. Again, we totally understand that it needed to happen. It’s just a case of getting around the mental side of things and ramping up again next year,” he said.
How is the injury now? “Tendons don’t like big changes or very different training regimes. When all this happened, my training regime changed a lot, so my achilles has come up a little bit. I am still training fine. I am just looking forward to when I can get back into my usual routine and it will be fine.”
10,000 challenge
Arthur hit the headlines last week for – instead of eating the calories – burning 10,000 calories in 24 hours while raising vital funds for Cystic Fibrosis Ireland on the back of it.
Starting at 12 midnight, he did a three-hour cycle, before sleeping for a few hours and continuing with another two-hour cycle, 45-minute run, 90-minute cycle, a Joe Wicks HIIT session, gym work, monkey crawl session, 100 times climbing the stars, fencing footwork, before finishing with a two-hour, 30-minute cycle.
Why did he decide to put his body through the torture of the challenge? “I was in great shape and suddenly everything was cancelled. I was feeling I needed a challenge.
“While I was training in Kenya, I brought a physical therapist with me, a guy called Evan Scully, and he actually has cystic fibrosis. We were living together for a month in an incredibly small room and I became really good friends with him.
“When I got back from training there, I got on to Gemma from Navy Blue Sports [the sport management company who look after the pair] and asked her if we could get involved with CF Ireland. They asked if I could make a video for them and so it all kind of came together…obviously their 65 Roses Day couldn’t go ahead so they are in need of support.
“I didn’t fundraise beforehand because of the achilles injury, just in case I couldn’t finish it. I got a great response and hopefully raise a little bit of money which is cool.
“It was horrific to be honest. The night before, it felt like a competition and it was what I needed mentally at the time. I won’t be trying it again, that is a one-time only show for me, but it was okay, what I needed to do.”
Perhaps this current ‘down time’ time will give the ultra-fit duo some time to enjoy their recent personal good news.