When it came to choosing a college degree, elite athlete and Olympic-hopeful Darragh McElhinney relied on strategy.
Despite knowing he wanted to devote himself to running from when he was 15, he knew he needed a route to making money. Choosing to study history and politics as much about making college life work for him as it was about loving the subject.
"I also wanted to take a course that wasn't too difficult because it was like, at least then I was going to have time to give athletics my all for those four years of college."
McElhinney went on to become one of UCD's 60 Ad Astra scholars, and over the course of his four years of university life, he has risen to become one of the most promising young athletes in Ireland. Now graduated, the West Cork native has his sights firmly set on this year's Olympic Games in Paris.
He's one of a number of students who feature in the new season of My Uni Life, which charts a year in the life of Ireland's universities. McElhinney got involved to show the reality of balancing studies with a demanding and disciplined sporting career.
"There's no one to tell you what your balance should really be like. You kind of just have to figure it out for yourself", he says.
McElhinney's college career has been unlike most: "By the time that the show rolled around, I was in my final year and I just had a better understanding overall of how to balance everything and how to prioritise my athletics while still not failing college or whatever", he says, but finding his feet at the beginning took a while.
"I would have allocated my time to training and then tried to fit in my study around that, as opposed to the other way around."
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A typical day in the life then included two training sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening, with a block of hours in between during which McElhinney would try and fit in as much study as possible. All of this, with the swirl of college life and its parties, social clubs and more going on around him.
"Because I'm from West Cork, there was kind of nobody", he says. "I didn't really know many people in Dublin when I came. So I was obviously trying to meet new people. That was kind of a bit of a barrier.
"There was just a lot of that type of stuff going on and you're trying to avoid it, but I suppose by the time you got to third or fourth year, you've made a few friends and you're content enough with your kind of circle, and you're just trying to focus on the athletics."
The stakes got higher when McElhinney signed his first professional contract at the end of 2020: "Then it kind of turns into your job and you're like, all right, I need to up the focus even more."
He recalls that by then he was "a bit incognito in college".
"There were people in my year in college that probably wouldn't know what I looked like because I was away so often", he says. "If there was a lecture that I knew that maybe I didn't have to go in, my time would be better spent using that hour to do an assignment or something like that."
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Exam season is hellish for the majority of students, but add in a grueling training routine, the need to get as much sleep as possible and preparing for European Championships or target races, and it becomes something else entirely. McElhinney remembers the weeks around exams being particularly stressful.
What helped, however, was having "the foresight as well to be honest with yourself and say, I'm not going to be able to reach my potential as a runner and then also try and get like a law degree", he says.
Now with the Olympic track firmly in his sights, McElhinney says there's a lot more room to focus on just athletics. Sharing an apartment with other athletes has been a major help, something he says is "key".
"The most effective thing that an athlete can do between training is nothing, you know what I mean? The less you do, the better. But that obviously raises few eyebrows from people who don't understand. It just looks like you're being lazy or whatever."
With the window for qualifications opening a year before the event itself, the athlete is "playing a little bit of catch up" after a period of bad performance on the track.
"I don't really have a lot of good performances within the winter so far. But thankfully, my first and only race this year went really well. So it's good to have some points on the board now in terms of qualification. Once I'm fully healthy and I'm in good form, it's definitely very doable."
"It's a crazy kind of situation to even be in thinking about qualifying", he says about the Olympics. "It's what you're always striving for. And it's always in the back of your head. You feel like you can't put a foot wrong between now and then."
My Uni Life airs Fridays at 8pm on RTÉ One.
