Food, fitness and family with Derval O’Rourke

Derval O’Rourke has many accolades to her name: 60m world hurdles champion, three-time Olympian, current national record holder in the 60m and 100m hurdles and two-time author, to name just a few of the feathers in her cap.

But perhaps one of Derval’s greatest achievements is having always stayed true to her own values. “When I wrote my first cookbook I remember my publisher saying: ‘What kind of diet is it?’ They wanted to call it a diet book and I refused. I was like: ‘I’d rather not publish a book than call it a diet book’.”

An absolute opponent to faddy diets and an advocate for a balanced healthy lifestyle, Derval’s Food for the Fast Lane and Fit Foodie are most defiantly cookbooks and not diet books. Albeit, cookbooks with some sound dietary information.

In recent weeks, Derval started taking subscribers on her new website derval.ie, which offers plans and guidance in three different areas; food, fitness and mindset. Like her books, you’ll find no juice cleanses or magic teas, it’s all about long-term sustainable lifestyle changes.

“The big thing I say to people is: ‘What you are doing now, if you have to do it in five years time, do you think you’re going to be happy doing it then?’

“Most of the time when it’s really extreme people say: ‘Oh I’m just going to do it for five weeks and then I’m going to achieve everything I want to achieve’. You’re actually not, like that’s not sustainable.”

Growing up, it was another Cork athlete Derval admired most – Sonia O’Sullivan. It was advice from Sonia that proved to have a profound influence on what is now Derval’s foodie prowess.

In college, Derval was out of shape and getting sick often. She wrote an email to Sonia asking what she could do to combat this. The reply was that Derval should improve her culinary skills and take hold of her own cooking. With the esteem she held Sonia in, this instruction was adhered to strictly.

“I remember Michael Jackson played Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Sonia O’Sullivan running in Cork felt the same to me. I was a basket girl at the track and I remember looking at her, I was 11 or 12, thinking this girl is the best in the world, she is unbelievable. That had a really big influence on me. The event she did didn’t matter to me, it just mattered that she was from Cork and she was the best in the world.”

Cork girl

From her youngest years, Derval was faster than everyone else and also very competitive. “I grew up in an estate with 50 houses, the boys were always racing. I was one of the youngest and I used to race them too. I would be out in the green right in front of my parents’ house literally racing them from one end to the other and I could always beat them,” she reflects.

“A teacher rang my parents when I was just six-years-old and said: ‘I think you should put her into a running club, she can beat everybody by loads, she loves to race and she’s bored racing everyone here.’ They might have come to it anyway, but the teacher in my school definitely had a really big influence.”

She was then enrolled in Leevale Athletics Club and Derval’s father very much fostered her sporty side. She says that he was very progressive at the time in the ’80s; having two daughters, he never saw gender, just that he had a child who would come to matches and shout with him.

How she came to hurdling, well, that was all down to her love of animals. “When I was 13 or 14, Leevale had a coach called Seamus Power. He volunteered coaching, his actual job was as a vet and I loved animals. I knew that this guy who was the hurdles coach dealt with animals, like big animals from the zoo in Fota. This blew my mind when I was 13 or 14 years old. Mainly I started doing hurdles because I wanted to talk to him about animals. Insane,” laughs Derval. “I loved long jump as well, but the long jump coach wasn’t a vet. Seamus was just a really lovely, calm, gentle person. I used to say to him: ‘What would happen now if a giraffe did this?’ He’d tell me and then say: ‘Sure have a run over the hurdles there.’ He’d be telling me about what was going on in the world of being a vet.”

Fast forward

Derval and her husband, former Olympic sailor Peter O’Leary, are based in Cork city and have a three-year-old daughter, Dafne. Derval is currently six-months pregnant with their second child and doing very well.

Despite having two Olympians as parents, Derval says she won’t push Dafne into any sport and may start her with something like gymnastics so people don’t compare them.

Still, like mother like daughter, Dafne exhibits many of the same traits her mother did at that age. “I was saying to my husband: ‘I don’t know is it just in her, but she is really competitive.’ She tries to race her friends at everything.

“I don’t think we are competitive in the house, but all the times she asks: ‘Do you want to race?’ Anyone who comes into the house, she tries to race them around the kitchen. They are looking at us going: ‘What do ye do?’ And I’m like: ‘We don’t race each other around the kitchen all day.’ She is not in a sporting school aged three,” chuckles Derval.

Very honestly, Derval admits that feeding a small child is not easy and that her daughter can be finicky with food. “I have a couple of basic things I try and stick to personally when she doesn’t eat what I cook, which is regularly,” explains Derval. “I don’t react, so I think half the time she is trying to see if I will react when she won’t eat dinner, and I don’t give her an alternative really. Whatever I cook for our family dinner – it’s there and if she eats it, she eats it and if she doesn’t, she doesn’t.

“It’s probably been my biggest challenge in the food space, having a child. She was really good for a while. She’s three and a half now and sometimes she won’t even taste something and she’s like: ‘I don’t like that.’ I’m there, I’ve spent so long. I think as a mother your automatic thing is to feel guilty about everything, but I try not to.”

In a world of hype and quick fixes, Derval is true to herself and refreshingly honest. From small kids to grown adults, we can all take something from her approach to life and food.

Read more

Derval O'Rourke's life in the fast lane

Find your motivational mojo in 2018