Andrew from St Andrews, chasing the Steeplechase, had a debacle in Osaka.  That’s the condensed version of this story in one sentence.

But you want more details than that.  After all, Andrew Lemoncello is one of only two Scots who represented Great Britain in this year’s IAAF World Championships in Japan (the other being 400m runner Lee McConnell).

Unfortunately Andrew had a bit of a nightmare out there.  He fell ill, suffered side effects from his energy gel, and overall had a torrid time, finishing last in his heat of the 3000m steeplechase, his current specialist event, in which he was hoping to make the final.

He said after the race: “The first 800m was very easy, the pace was very easy, but already I was feeling that there was nothing in me.  It continued at that steady pace but I was shocked. I don't know what happened, there was nothing left in my body, I have never experienced anything like before in my life.  I just don't know what I did wrong. It was just a horrible, horrible experience.”

But Lemoncello is an athlete who has the presence of mind and strength of character to come back.  Yes, he made a mistake in gambling on an energy gel he had never tried before.  Yes, perhaps he could have avoided his illness with better preparation.  Maybe he just didn’t run the right kind of race. 

“Winners make mistakes, but they don’t repeat them” is a famous saying from famed winning expert, Yehuda Shinar, something that Andrew could take on board.  He has already proven himself as a great Scottish prospect, and he is professional enough not to let one race hang over him.

Indeed, when he met for lunch with In The Winning Zone near his home in St Andrews, it appeared that Andrew has a career plan which stretches way beyond this year, all the way to becoming a Scottish champion in the marathon and winning the same event at the London Olympics in 2012.  So by then a one-off disappointment in the steeplechase in ’07 should be the least of his worries.

“This year I have really got the belief back that I can be world class, and as far down as I am in the steeplechase, I know how my body has been responding with training this year. I know that if I translate that to marathon training I can get close to the Scottish record.

“For 2012 my aim is always going to be the marathon. I’ll probably move up to it by 2010, so that gives me another few years to concentrate on other events.”

Although still young, (he is  25 this month) Lemoncello has already packed a lot into his short career.  He has smashed running records on both sides of the Atlantic, ensuring his American Father and Scottish Mother can both brag proudly to their peers about their son. 

As a scholarship student at Florida State University in Tallahassee, he became two time Atlantic Coast Conference Individual Champion and set a new University record for the 8,000m, a record which had last been set before he was born.

In his previous years at Stirling University, he won the Scottish National Championship sixteen times, and was the British Universities Champion in the 5,000m and 10,000m.  However, having reached his plateau, he is now aiming higher, quite literally, in his ambitions as an athlete.

“I’m at the stage where I need to take another jump up, so I’m going to move to altitude and join a new training group set up by the coach Greg McMillan in Flagstaff, Arizona.” (www.mcmillanrunning.com)

“He’s quite well known in the States because he does a lot of on-line coaching. There is a lot of training groups like this in the States, but the difference with this one is that it’s not restricted to just Americans so that’s why I was able to go."

The benefit of training at altitude is that it allows an athlete to be able to cope and perform with less and less oxygen due to the thinner atmosphere.  In other words, it will increase his lung capacity, meaning he can run harder, faster, longer.

“I knew I wanted to up the altitude, so this is perfect for me.  Also the guys I will train with are a lot better than the guys in Florida.  The type of training we will be doing is based on 2012 marathon runners, so everyone has the same final goal. I get on well with the coach, so it’s just a perfect fit to make another step.”

It is the first step in a series of many that Andrew will have to take to be a true competitor on the world stage.  Though there is no doubting his talent and commitment, sometimes a little extra is needed to compete on a level playing field with the very best, who in the case of middle to long distance running, generally come from Kenya.  Like the All Blacks in rugby and Brazil in footy, the running world struggles to hold pace with the mighty Kenyans.  But why so?

“For them it’s more of a lifestyle,” Lemoncello explained.  “Everyone out there is training. You go out for a run and you see hundreds of others out there running because they have that mentality of “We’re a great nation of runners”.

“They just have that belief that they can do it and they work hard to achieve it.  A lot of them burn out doing it, but a lot come through as well; it’s something that a lot of people in Europe and other countries learn from and aspire to.”

Andrew himself must aspire to that mentality too because, if he didn’t have the will, he would struggle.  The only way to become a top level distance runner is to run the required distances regularly, almost every day.  And that takes a lot of time.

Having finished his scholarship in Florida, Andrew spent most of the summer waiting tables at the Old Course Hotel in St Andrews simply to make ends meet.  Add training to that equation and you have a pretty tough day.

“During the summer I’ve had to work to try and save up money for next year.  I’ve been working 6am to 12noon every morning which means I need to get up at 4am to train.  In the summer I do 5 or 6 miles in the morning and then in the evening it will be either a 10 mile run or a hard training session.

“If I was a full-time athlete I would be getting 9 or 10 hours sleep every night and be able to get up having all the time I needed to stretch before my run and rest.”

Of course to be able to maintain such a regime, day in, day out, the most important thing for Andrew is to enjoy his running.  He has to, there is no other way he can justify pushing his body harder and harder for hours every day, to the extent that on occasion he can just shut down. It will just say ‘no more today please’.  But he persists, such is his passion for the sport.

“If I didn’t enjoy it I wouldn’t do it.  It’s not what keeps me going, but it’s what makes me tick, because I love getting up in the morning and running. If I don’t do a run in the morning, it’s not that I can’t function, but my body just feels different. I feel so much better knowing that I have gone out there and done something. You will find that with a lot of runners.”

And what gives him a rush when it comes to a full blown race?

“Doing the best you can. If I finish a race and come 10th knowing I’ve run really well and have nothing left in my body, I’ll be happy. Sometimes there is more satisfaction in that than and winning a race. When you do well, that’s what helps to motivate yourself.”

Winning isn’t everything to Lemoncello.  He doesn’t classify winning by the number of medals he wins.  He has his own way of defining his success.

“Knowing that I did absolutely everything I could to be the best I can. Going into every race and having no regrets. Looking back at the titles of winning is good but it feels a lot better knowing everything I had done was to the best I could do.”

RO

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