Louise Shanahan: The Irish 800m record holder and Cambridge PhD student who used spreadsheets to qualify for the Olympics 

Louise Shanahan arrives for our video interview sporting a white lab coat and seated in a quiet corner of a science department at Cambridge University.

It’s a sign of the busy schedule the 25-year-old Irish 800m record holder keeps as she balances life as an international athlete with PhD studies at England’s famous Cambridge University.

“Quantum biophysics,” she replied when asked what degree she is studying towards. “I take really, really small diamonds and put them inside cells and use them to measure temperature in small spaces like quantum sensing inside biological cells.”

Shanahan’s studies seem at first glance to be a far cry from her career on the athletics track, where she dipped under the two-minute mark earlier this year to set the best 800m time in Ireland’s history.

However, it soon becomes clear that her brilliance in the academic field has helped her as a runner - even when it came to qualifying for the most important competition of her life.

“I can almost say without a doubt that I wouldn’t have qualified for Tokyo last year if it hadn’t been for my PhD,” she explained, recalling her last-minute attempts to reach the qualification standards for the Tokyo 2020 Games, which took place in 2021.

With three weeks left of the qualification window and knowing that she would need to not only run fast times but also run them in the right races, Shanahan turned her love for data to the task of qualifying for the Games.

“I had a giant spreadsheet with all the possible permutations for races I could run and so I definitely think I used the max in the data analysis,” she explained.

Armed with an excel sheet and a complex set of COVID restrictions to maneuver, Shanahan took a short break from her PhD and started travelling across Europe in search of the races and ranking points needed to make it to the Games.

“I had my excel sheet and I was looking up every result from all over the world and feeding it in. And you know every Tuesday or Wednesday the athletics world rankings came out and by the end of Sunday nights I had gathered enough data that I could predict what the rankings would say on the Wednesday,” she said.

“And then it was kind of very slowly saying, hey, you know, I think I’ve done it.”

A frustrating plateau in performance followed by a remarkable rise

Data wasn’t only at the centre of Shanahan’s qualification for the Olympics. It also played a key role in her understanding one of the most frustrating periods of her life as an athlete.

At age 16, she won the 800m race at the European Youth Olympic Festival in Utrecht in 2:08.75, a big breakthrough time for the young athlete.

But for the next six years, she failed to go under 2:08.

“Year after year I kept running 2:08, and it’s fast when you’re 16 or 17, it’s not so fast when you’re 22 years old,” she said. “Over time I became more frustrated with it, everyone else was going faster and faster and while [in the past] it was enough to win races, suddenly I wasn’t even making teams with those times.”

In her most challenging moments, Shanahan once again turned to data to help explain her inability to progress significantly for such a long period in her early career.

“The was a long jump coach at the time and he pulled out an article and it said that actually this happens to some people and when they come out of this plateau they improve so quickly that it’s as if the plateau never happened.

“I plateaued for six going on seven years and his [the article author’s] data only went back three to four years back but the second I broke 2:08 I ran 2:04… and within two years of breaking 2:08, I’d qualified for the Olympics.”

The past year and a half have seen Shanahan’s times lower dramatically as she qualified for and raced in the Olympic Games in Tokyo. And 2022 has seen her improve yet again to beat the two-minute mark and achieve an Irish record of 1:59.42 in the process.

“I look back on it and I just want to shake the 18, 19 year old and just be like, ‘it’s worth it, don’t worry, keep going!’” she said, looking back on how her younger self was left with so many doubts about whether the hard days of training would ever pay dividends.

However, having now become an Olympian and reached her first senior final at this year's European Athletics Championships in Munich, it’s difficult to predict the ceiling of an athlete that has enjoyed such a rapid progression in a short space of time.

Visibility key for young female athletes

One area of her athletics career that has never been in doubt for Shanahan is how vital it was for her to be able to see other female athletes achieving greatness as she was growing up.

“I think it’s so important because definitely when I was younger when I looked at Sonia [O’Sullivan] and Derval [O’Rourke], I really idolised them.

“I kind of said, these people are at the top of their sport, they're amazing, they’re incredible, they’re so special… but they’re still people.”

And having these visible female athletes isn’t only limited to those Shanahan watched racing on the television, they also include members of her own athletics club who had paved the way for her by showing her exactly what it would take to become an Olympian.

“When I was 16 or 17 and we had two Olympians in the club, Michelle Finn who does the steeplechase and Lizzie Lee who was the marathon runner. And I was at the age where I thought, ‘I’m making progress, I’m a decent athlete. We were doing sessions at the same time and, sure they were different events, but they were lovely people, they worked incredibly hard, but I think I saw with them they were normal people.”

Louise Shanahan: “Leave no stone unturned”

Speaking to Shanahan, you realise that she is an athlete who is happiest when she is able to take a logical approach to the challenges in front of her.

Such is the case with Paris 2024, the next Olympic Games that are now less than two years away.

“It’s nice to dream about finals and medals,” she said when asked about her hopes for the upcoming Games. “But I don’t think you need to be dreaming about it two years out for it to be a possibility. If you can focus on what you can control now, you can really work on that closer to the time.”

It is the same type of message she would send to the younger generation of athletes, who will now look at her considerable achievements and dream themselves of following in her footsteps.

“If you really want to do something work towards it step by step and leave no stone unturned,” she told us. “And there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t be just as good as me. In fact, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t be even better.”