Sarah Healy propelled herself into the big time by winning European indoors gold and, from her training camp in Dubai ahead of the World indoors, she outlined her reasons for breaking a pattern of disappointment and devastation to succeed

Learning to have fun again on the big stage was the key to Sarah Healy joining Ireland’s gold medal club. Healy delivered on the promise of her stellar underage career by striking gold in Sunday’s European indoors 3000m final.

She out-sprinted British race favourite Melissa Courtney-Bryant to claim her first senior medal – and Ireland’s first victory in the championships since 2007

Her triumph took centre stage during a magical 35 minutes in Apeldoorn as Mark English won 800m bronze and Kate O’Connor the Pentathlon bronze

The congratulatory messages that stood out afterwards came from Irish team colleagues and she was chuffed that Conor Niland, whose memoir ‘The Racquet’ won the William Hill Sports Book Of the Year in November, started following her on Instagram.

“I loved his book, my dad gave it to me over Christmas, it was just so interesting and really good,” said Healy. “When he followed me on Instagram I thought that was cool.”

Currently at a training camp in Dubai, she will compete in the World indoors final in the Chinese city Nanjing on Saturday week, fuelled by podium recognition at last after a hurtful series of disappointments in major championships.

It’s a sign of the leap forwards that she has made since moving from her Dublin home to her new full-time training group in Manchester. “It has to be a massive turning point, really,” Healy said. “That was a really hard decision to make and quite a big thing to do.

It also represented me becoming a full time athlete and really just going all in. That was so challenging. I took confidence from being able to get through that and make a home over there. Having a team and training group has physically pushed me on so much.”