TEAM TRINITY Pedals and PhDs Meet Sean Husband: rising Irish Triathlete, Trinity PhD student and Paralympic guide G rowing up, Sean Husband was not much drawn to the ‘national games’, although hurling practice revealed a natural speed. His father would influence where that energy would go, often taking his only son from landlocked Co Monaghan to the Atlantic waves to surf. Duathlon training, to support the heavy demands of surfing, came into play, then running. On his first day at the athletics club, he found he was fastest ‘without really trying’, and racing mania took hold from that point onwards. The call of the triathlon also came swiftly. At 17 he found his way to an event organised by Eamonn Tilley of Triathlon Ireland, and it became clear that cycling, as well as running, was a natural fit. Tagged through the National Talent Identification programme, a future began to take shape. Ironically enough, despite his watersports excursions, swimming would prove to be the hardest part of the trio. ‘In cycling or running, if you push yourself harder, you go faster. Swimming is a more thought-out process of positioning your body to obtain the least resistance.’ Deep physiological analysis of the components of performance is, for Husband, nearly as compulsive as the competition itself. The need to seek more refinement in athletics fundamentals, together with memories of the London 2012 Olympics, led him to start studying at Bolton University. A Masters in Leeds Beckett followed the ‘home’ of British Triathlon. There he began to work more seriously on his complete set of skills: ‘In Ireland, I would run down guys, I would crack the podium, but the swimming wasn’t up to scratch.’ Triathlon success means accumulating a mountain of practice hours, something harder to achieve when very young. That clock started to tick more properly in Leeds. Appropriately enough his partner, whom he met in England, is a competitive swimmer, and their relationship would endure and carry over into Sean’s eventual return to Ireland and a scholarship in the School of Sports Science, at Trinity. Studying under doctoral supervisor Professor Ciaran Simms (Department of Mechanical, Manufacturing and Biomedical Engineering) and in
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