HELEN WATTS by her own admission is very competitive. Already a Guernsey Island Games icon for her outstanding endeavours in the pool, the former Commonwealth Games swimmer is making a welcome return to Games action in Rhodes next week, this time in the guise of an athlete.
And she is as determined as ever to make her mark, especially as this opportunity has come somewhat out of the blue for her.
‘Not in my life. Never in my wildest dreams,’ was her exaggerated reaction to whether she believed she would be back competing in the Island Games eight years after her last appearance, which was in the Gotland pool.
‘There was always a tinge of envy every time I saw another Guernsey team head off to the Games but because I had made a conscious decision to go out of swimming, I did not regret that.’
It was the 2006 Healthspan Cross-Sport Athletics Challenge that unearthed her potential as a runner and she has come on in leaps and bounds since joining the GIAAC.
‘I always really enjoyed running at school and I always wanted to do it a little bit more. I considered things like the all-terrain challenge, but I knew that my strength lay in shorter distances.
‘That event [the cross-sport challenge] was the ideal chance to have a go at it and then Lee Merrien encouraged me to come down to a couple of training sessions.
‘I found it was really sociable and really fun and it is nice to be feeling fit after I had hardly done anything for six years except for the odd game of hockey.
‘I have always been active and I did a couple of seasons of playing hockey and I would go to the gym occasionally, but I never really found somethingthat took me like swimming did until now.’
Now 31 and still very much a novice at middle distance running, she finds herself going fully head-on into a new challenge, which poses different questions to her.
‘Obviously it is different to swimming, but getting yourself prepared mentally and physically remains the same.
‘Not going out there and running as fast as you can every time, as you try to do when swimming, is quite difficult. I have never really run a tactical race so that’s something new to me and will be a journey into the unknown.
‘Personally, I always go into a race with the intention of going in to win it. In swimming, you had a bit more control because you are in your own lane, doing your own thing.’
Watts is entered in the 800m, her preferred event, and 1,500m, which she has only run twice, and hopes to be part of Guernsey’s 4 x 400m relay team.
‘It’s nice to be able to come into an Island Games with no expectations or pressure. I am really enjoying it,’ she said.
‘There is an excellent spirit in the [athletics] team and it is nice to be able to catch up with some of the older swimmers as well.
‘It’s strange because this thing [the Island Games] has been going on for so long now and I had a long period out, but you still see the same old faces turning up and it is good to be a part of it again.’
Article posted on 30th June, 2007 - 12.00am
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